Eurovision Babylon – Scalping, scams and suspect behaviour

Gossip

Luca HänniDirty dancing

Confidence in your song is essential at Eurovision. Over-confidence tends to go down like a cup of cold sick. Swiss singer Luca Hänni might like to think up a few excuses about how ‘someone else made him do it’ when he runs into the reigning queen of Cypriot Eurovision Tamta in Tel Aviv. Luca let himself be talked into reviewing other songs and happened to note how ‘Replay’ sounds more than a little like ‘Feugo’. Explaining it away as ‘of course it does, it’s the same producer’.

Scalping

The last thing you need when you’ve got the EBU and Eurovision fandom breathing down your neck is a ticket scandal. But KAN landed themselves right in the middle of one when the police were called in to investigate attempts to profiteer by bagging prime tickets to the Grand Final and selling them on at inflated prices. Things get worse. Preferential treatment appears to have been given to a list of famous names in Israel. Ynet claims the list includes Eurovision hosts Erez Takl and Assi Azar. 220 tickets were cancelled and go back on sale in April.

scamRoom for one more?

One delegation head faced a dusting down from broadcaster bosses after falling prey to con artists masquerading as Tel Aviv travel agents. When contacted with a too-good-to-be-true rate for hotel rooms, the company credit card came out. 17,600 euros later, faces turned red. And no, we don’t know who either. Suggestions on a postcard.

Slow down

Remember life of the party Dutch boy Douwe Bob? In November, somewhat the worse for wear, he had a run in with hospital security after his girlfriend fainted. Turning up the next day with apology flowers didn’t stop a judge from fining the ‘Slow Down’ singer for verbal and physical aggression.

If I had a little money …

These days, the official Eurovision site makes a lot of noise about how many streams songs pick up through its official YouTube channel. So they had only themselves to blame when one 2019 entry walked out into the lead with 1.5 million streams within a single hour. What might be more of a worry for the singer concerned is that from 3.3 million viewers, only 33,000 gave it a thumbs up.

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