"Eurovision 2009:
Could this be our year?".
"Will the reintroduction of a jury increase our chances of success at tonight's Eurovision Song Contest, asks Neil Midgley".
"16.05.2009."To be judged, after due and fair consideration, by a jury of your peers: that is the cornerstone of British justice. As long ago as the time of King Ethelred the Unready, a sort of jury trial was in use in the English legal system. This year, following the intervention of a man seasoned enough to have known the young Ethelred, Sir Terry Wogan, our European neighbours have rediscovered the value of a jury in ensuring fair play".
"After almost a decade of mob rule by phone-voting, tonight's Eurovision Song Contest will again be decided "at least in part" by national juries. With those juries supposedly voting on merit, and the UK's song penned by Lord Lloyd Webber, we have finally regained a chance of winning. Haven't we?".
"British punters will be watching the results carefully, but they aren't the only people hoping for a fairer outcome tonight. The European Broadcasting Union, which organises the contest, is collectively crossing its bureaucratic fingers that this fix transforms the event from the bloc-voting farce it has become in recent years".
"The last time the UK won was in 1997. From 1998 onwards, the outcome of the contest has been decided almost entirely by X-factor-style phone votes from viewers in participating countries. Nobody can vote for their home country – but Balkans can vote for the Balkan country next door, and Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany can vote for Turkey. And the votes of tiny countries such as Albania carry the same weight in the overall result as those of the UK or Germany".
"In those last 11 contests since 1998, not a single one of the "old European" countries that founded Eurovision in 1956 has triumphed. Winners have included Bosnia & Hercegovina, Estonia, Latvia, Russia and Ukraine. Last year, in fact, the "big four" countries that bankroll the contest – the UK, France, Germany and Spain – all ranked in the bottom 10 out of 25 participants".
"Sir Terry was in an uproar. "Western European participants have to decide whether they want to take part from here on in because their prospects are poor," he said after the 2008 results were announced. "I don't want to be presiding over yet another debacle." And, sure enough, he quit the competition in December after 35 years, leaving Graham Norton with a daunting job when he takes Sir Terry's place at the commentary microphone tonight".
"For the BBC, Sir Terry's departure was a blow. But with new controllers running both BBC One "Jay Hunt" and BBC Entertainment "Mark Linsey", it has also presented an opportunity to rejuvenate Eurovision for British viewers. Despite null-points performances from the Royaume-Uni, viewing figures have been reasonably robust, with last year's contest pulling in more than nine million viewers. But with the BBC contributing nearly £300,000 to the EBU for each year's event, it cannot afford to see Eurovision become an unwatched laughing stock in the UK".
"So this year, the BBC has pulled out a few of the stops to try to ensure that we have a fighting chance. It roped in Lord Lloyd Webber to write the song and, in January, staged an X-factor-style talent contest that eventually cast Jade Ewen as our Eurovision entrant. "That talent show, Eurovision: Your Country Needs You, was, however, such a low-budget mess that it might have seemed like the BBC didn't really want to rescue the contest after all".
"Auntie says it had no influence on the EBU decision to reintroduce juries. And Eurovision bosses will not publicly admit that Sir Terry's outburst caused their change of view. "I honestly don't know if what Wogan said had an effect," said Julian Vignoles, from Irish broadcaster RTE, who sits on the Eurovision Reference Group that made the decision. "But the voting in recent years has affected the credibility of the contest."
"There is evidence that the result will be different with juries involved again this year. Even during the era when phone votes alone dictated the scores, each country still convened a jury as a backup, to apportion its points in the event that there is a technical problem with the phones. Another senior Eurovision suit, Svante Stockselius, admitted that in 2008 "we saw a difference in judgment of the public and the backup juries".
"Tonight's scores will come 50 per cent from each country's phone vote and 50 per cent from its jury. The juries – each consisting of five music industry professionals from that country – will, according to Stockselius, "take the opportunity to listen to the songs several times before they make up their minds". And that, of course, is where the UK's chances start to come unstuck again".
"Our entry, It's My Time, is certainly the best song we have submitted since Katrina and the Waves' Love Shine a Light in 1997. "Mind you, that's not saying much: remember Jemini? Scooch? Daz Sampson?". Lord Lloyd Webber, who will be on stage tonight playing the piano, has teamed up with American songwriter Diane Warren to write it. It's a big, tuneful ballad, and Ewen has a big, tuneful voice that can pull it off. Best of all, it powers up halfway through with the sort of key change that would have an ITV studio audience on its feet busting a mass hernia".
"But, sadly, it's not an ITV studio audience that will decide the UK's fate. Our European compatriots do not share our taste in pop music – and the further east you go, the truer that becomes. Remember the acts that have won in recent years: Finland's comedy rockers Lordi, Serbia's tuneless butch songstrel Marija Serifovic, Russia's pretty boy Dima Bilan. None of them exactly West End show-tune gold, and all of them put together by the very music professionals who will sit on the juries of the East".
"And even way back when national juries made the whole decision, great British songs were still overlooked. According to PRS for Music "formerly the Performing Rights Society", the Eurovision songs that have been the most popular in this country "ranked by radio airplay" include Gina G's Ooh Ah… Just a Little BitCongratulations "second in 1968" and Power to All Our Friends "third in 1973", and Love Games by Belle and the Devotions "seventh in 1984". "which only managed to come eighth in the contest in 1996", Cliff Richard's
"All of which are travesties, but they mask the inconvenient fact that political voting has sometimes suited the UK. Think of those happy years when the top score of douze points came from Ireland to us "and went from us back to them". And would Katrina and the Waves really have won on May 3, 1997 if Tony Blair – apparently much more Euro-friendly than his Tory predecessors – hadn't been elected to Downing Street two days previously?".
"Ewen reckons she'll finish in the top five tonight. It wouldn't be sensible to wager your licence fee on that, but if you want the UK to win, do your bit to ensure that our votes go in the right direction "that is, not behind the old Iron Curtain". Vote early, vote often: in a very continental arrangement, your phone line can be used to vote no fewer than 20 times. Perhaps our European brothers and sisters haven't quite cottoned on to British fair play after".
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