Nobody can deny the road to the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest has been rocky. What with mass resignations, problems with tickets, entry bans and a political storm, the last thing you need is to be months behind schedule.
The latest video update from the official contest site paints a picture of everything running to plan. Jon Ola Sand strolls around in his hard hat, inspecting progress and looking satisfied. The blog maintained by the team who have to build the installation tells a different story.
Head of Production Ola Melzig, who has worked on twelve contests to date, is posting regular updates from Kiev. In his first report, he notes that his team have a huge hill to climb.
“This is normally a job that you start with a couple of weeks after you’ve won Eurovision,” he says. “But due to circumstances that I don’t necessarily want to describe here, I didn’t hit the ground running until mid January 2017, so, seven months behind schedule on the first day at work.
“I’m gonna be quite honest with you, with the creative ambition of this show, and the time frame given to me and my team, this is nothing but mission impossible and a suicidal task.”
But before everyone starts to fret and suggest the EBU is secretly planning to relocate the contest to Berlin (alternative facts spread by a Russian site), Melzig asks “Will we make it? HELL YES!”
