This year the initial Eurovision rehearsals are a closed shop – yesterday the press were locked out of ALL press conferences too – go figure. It leaves the internet very little to pick apart and after yesterday’s brief flirtation with (non) censorship, it was all hands on deck to claim the sky is falling – though not so much the sky as the sun.
Despite the only evidence being fuzzy TikTok clips – keyboard warriors of the world remain furious with the EBU/Rai/their lives in general. Admittedly, there’s a fair point to be made about a somewhat late in the day discovery of staging constraints, but the level of online entitlement and self-righteous anger reached whole new levels with little else shiny and new to distract.
They made them do it
It’s something of a miracle that it’s taken three full days of rehearsals for a conspiracy theory to surface. And as tradition insists, the online rumble claims the Big Five are behind this farrago.
You see … the ‘sun’ was to host LED screens – and was due to be heavily used by at least six delegations. The agreed compromise is to rotate the LED side away and allow the (majority) of songs to use lighting effects instead – basically it’s a lot easier and quicker for six delegations to write and programme lighting cues than to make thirty more create, edit, agree and put in place video content.
Fair enough, you may think, but consider for one minute that most of the countries not planning on using LEDs are part of ‘the big five’ broadcasting nations – ipso facto, this malfunction has been part of an evil plan to weasel a competitive advantage.
It’s a lovely day outside, boys. Go get fresh air. Watch clouds. Make better life choices.
Taxpayers up in arms
Elsewhere, certain fan sites were doing their best to pitch a world where the EBU has gone head-to-head with the tax-paying people of the free world by refusing to allow access to the initial rehearsals. They claim knowledge of (unattributed) complaints from state broadcasters irate at not being able to tell their loyal viewers about the progress of their (state-funded) Eurovision acts. This despite the fact that the few broadcasters who care to produce news items at this early stage have no problem finding footage.
Let’s rejoice that from tomorrow, we get into the world of second rehearsals when the online and on-site press centres open up fully and YouTube becomes home of the clips.
We’re here all week – check back in later for press conference reports