###

ED. NOTE: Today the Outpost is delighted to kick off its first maybe-annual “San Marino Week” of programming, in which we seek to strengthen the bonds between Humboldt County and the tiny European country.

All this week, if everything goes according to plan, our John Kennedy O’Connor will be filing dispatches — or “despatches,” as he might call them — from San Marino’s rocky slopes, in between his duties as the country’s official vote-reader for this week’s Eurovision Song Contest, of which he is a world-renowned expert. 

Speaking of which: Tuning in for the Contest this year? O’Connor has prepared the following precis of this year’s festivities, aimed at the novice American viewer. Please enjoy.

###

‘This Saturday, the global TV audience will have all eyes on the former industrial port city of Liverpool on England’s Western coast as the UK hosts the 67th Eurovision Song Contest — an annual competition inaugurated in 1956 to find Europe’s best new popular song by the national TV broadcasters across the continent. Two hundred million viewers across the globe are expected to tune in.

For most Americans, if they’ve heard of it all, they certainly will have little interest in sitting down for what is now a four-hour-plus live broadcast that encompasses nations from well beyond Europe’s borders and is regarded with much disdain and loathing by the millions who’ll tune in. Many freely admit they will be watching just to see how bad it’s going to be this year, and despite the winner being chosen mainly by the viewers watching, almost nobody will agree with the result.

However, yet again, NBC will be carrying the live broadcast on their Peacock platform, and for the very first time American viewers will be able to vote by phone for the songs. This year, a “rest of the world” vote will be added to those of the competing 37 nations.

NBC’s involvement in the contest began in 2006, when one of their star presenters, Maria Menounous, was parachuted into the show as the co-hostess of the edition staged at the Olympic stadium in Athens.

Despite purchasing the rights to the format for American viewers, Maria’s star turn did nothing to get the concept of an interstate American version of the show off the ground and NBC shelved plans to get it going.

All that changed in the last decade, when NBC started airing the contest on the fledgling Peacock platform, complete with an American commentator explaining for the small number of viewers exactly what was going on.

The attempts to get an American version of the show at long last came to fruition in the spring of 2022, when The American Song Contest finally made a much heralded appearance in the NBC schedules.

In fact, what NBC imported was not so much the Eurovision Contest itself, but the Swedish domestic competition that is used annually to select Sweden’s entry. The multi-week interstate contest hosted by Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg turned out to be of little interest to American viewers … and the show is widely reported to be the worst-performing entertainment show NBC have ever broadcast and indeed, the most expensive. The second season was postponed until 2024, although most industry insiders doubt it will return even then.

Whether the American viewers will take any interest in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is yet to be seen, despite the added allure of viewers getting a say in the result. It is hard to imagine folks tuning in for an international contest with no American involvement at all if they weren’t interested at all in watching an interstate U.S. competition. Doubtless, the network is encouraged by the success of recent winners Duncan Laurence and Måneskin in the US charts, scoring considerable hits despite the lack of viewers or interest in the competition.

The scoring of the contest is notoriously complex and may leave US viewers baffled. The European Broadcasting Union, which is in charge of the competition, has provided a video guide to how it all works… but even that may still leave those familiar with the contest hopelessly confused.

Normally, the broadcaster that wins the contest hosts the next edition, but with the war in Ukraine still raging, the idea that Ukraine would host this year’s show following their victory in Turin last spring was a non-starter.

As the UK had earned their record 16th second-place in the show’s history, the BBC stepped in as the runners-up to bring the show back to the UK for the first time since 1998. It is in fact the first time since 1980 that the winning nation was unable to host the following contest.

A bidding war between multiple British cities took place to decide which venue would end up with the multi-million pound poisoned chalice, and in the final reckoning, Liverpool beat out Glasgow for the dubious honor.

Liverpool city council were beside themselves with joy to get the gig and estimate that fifty million pounds will be flowing into cash registers across the city this week as the world’s media and those lucky enough to have scored tickets for the shows descend. A week-long festival of events is taking place outside of the competition itself for all those visitors to enjoy.

The tap to the American audience is also clear in the BBC’ choice of presenters for the show, as Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham is one of the four celebrities selected to compère the finals.

The contest kicks off on Tuesday at noon on the West Coast with the first of two semifinals, when ten songs will be chosen to appear in Saturday’s final. A second semifinal selects the next ten on Thursday. These qualifiers then join the six nations that automatically qualify for the final (the previous year’s winner and the big five nations of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). All three shows will be live on Peacock, with live tele-voting for the US viewers to have their say.

For who that would like to see the shows but don’t have a Peacock subscription, some of the European nations participating provide international live feeds, but their commentaries provided in their own language may be too much for US viewers.

San Marino RTV will be providing a free telecast, with commentators Lia Fioro and Gigi Restivo whipping their domestic audience into an excited frenzy in Italian.

For any potential viewers who’d like to know what they’ll be in for, the BBC have put together a guide for the uninitiated, which can be found here. If you’d like to see and hear all 37 entries, a full guide is available at this link.

If you’d just like a quick skim through all 37 songs… there’s a compilation of about 20 seconds of each song here:

There will be a brief moment in the contest on Saturday that Lost Coast readers may be marginally interested in catching. Each of the participating nations contributes a jury vote to the proceedings and a local celebrity gets to read out that score for the millions of viewers. The tiny enclave of San Marino is light on celebrity, so they have imported one for the purpose, although the term “celebrity” is stretching credibility thin, for sure. The 30-second appearance may be worth tuning in for, but if you blink… you may be disappointed.

Regardless, Humboldt Today will be presenting the newscasts from the tiny Republic in the run-up to the contest, and the Outpost will be having Humboldt Conversations with local dignitaries illuminating life in the microstate for the Lost Coast audience, including the former San Marino ambassador to the USA.

The TV competition that gave the world ABBA, Céline Dion and Måneskin — and made embarrassed losers out of Julio Iglesias, Engelbert Humperdinck, Bonnie Tyler, Olivia Newton John and t.A.T.u., seriously impairing their credibility and previous hit making status in the USA — is upon us. You have been warned.