First of all, “internet”, you do not withdraw from a contest you haven’t officially entered yet – for the avoidance of doubt you only enter the Eurovision Song Contest when you put forward your song at the heads of delegation meeting, you register your interest and pay your non-refundable fee, before the first deadline which is sometime in October.
<breath>
So, it seems that “the internet” has decided that the Eurovision Song Contest is dying on its arse because three bottom feeders have decided not to enter. Let’s just take a look at that shall we?
Montenegro are withdrawing because they are skint, officially. This is the country, lest we forget, that has not entered before because they were buying cars for people – any wonder they are skint? They also took part in a conspiracy to fix the jury scores in their semi final. They cheated! – In the contest you love.. Now granted they cheated badly and clearly obviously but nevertheless they tried to fix the result. I have no sympathy for them. (and I think the other five should face some sort of sanction, if they haven’t already)
Bulgaria are, nominally, the most interesting. Their statement claims that BNT are moving away from the contest and will not be coming back. This is no great loss to the contest. Results wise they have only qualified for the final five times in their fifteen contests and the best thing we can say is that they “got it right for a couple of years in a row” but is that enough to have the gnashing of teeth that has been prevalent on Eurovision Twitter? – No, is it hell as like.
We also need to remember that, if reports are to be believed, there has been some sort of internal coup against the Eurovision friendly elements of BNT which ultimately led to IMP’s implosion and the funny sight of seeing a broadcaster remove their twitter because they couldn’t cope with the fact that people said their song was shit. ( Spoiler, it is).
Finally North Macedonia. The internet seems to be wearing black armbands for this lot as well but again, we should remember that North Macedonia has qualified to the final twice in the last fourteen contests. Yes, Proud won (in so far as they finished first) the jury in 2019. They also screamed blue murder over Andrea “throwing” the Macedonian Flag to the floor which, of course, she didn’t do this deliberately, she was having her picture taken and tossed it to the floor, but MRT made such noise about this and said publicly that they might not enter in 2023 that people really should have seen this coming.
The contest is not dead, there I said it. If, as we expect, thirty-seven countries go to Liverpool (and it’s still weird saying that) that’s still going to be the same as the contest had in 2014. Was the contest dying then? Nope. A sixteen and a fifteen song semi final are managable and should come in under two hours which should be perfect. It puts less strain on the host broadcaster and for the viewer, well they won’t care one way or another – they’ll still see three television shows. The contest survived a mass walk out in 1970, it survived nearly not continuing after 1980, it survived the world being Celtic in 92-96 when the juries nearly killed the whole thing, it survived the expansion of the contest and, lets put this bluntly, it (if it is an entity) doesn’t care what the internet thinks!
There have been loads of people shouting very loudly to try and make themselves heard above the noise, everyone having an opinion and if that’s how social media works – good luck to them. We’ll still be here putting the sensible side of arguments, even if you don’t like them! – I’m sure other sites might be to your taste if you don’t like what we’re cooking!