How It Works

The contest looks simple: each country sends a song and the best one wins. Behind that lies a set of rules about who may perform, what they may sing, how a country chooses its entry, who qualifies automatically and who pays. This chapter sets out the format as it has stood in recent years, the main rules, the national selection shows, the semi-finals and the "Big Five". The rules have changed many times, and the dates given for changes are from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

The Basic Format

1. Each participating country sends one song, performed live on stage by an act chosen by that country's broadcaster.
2. Countries are divided: some go through a semi-final, and a group of countries goes directly to the final.
3. The final features a fixed number of songs (typically in the mid-twenties), performed in an order decided by the organisers.
4. Points are awarded by juries and by the public, and the totals decide the winner (Chapter 4).
5. The winning country normally hosts the next contest.

The Main Rules

National Selection

Each country decides how to choose its entry, and the methods vary widely. Some run a televised competition with a public vote, such as the long-running Swedish Melodifestivalen or the British "A Song for Europe", the name that became the title of a well-known sitcom episode (Chapter 9). Others select an artist internally. The method matters because it shapes who is chosen, and it is one of the places where a country's attitude to the contest shows. A country that treats the national final as a serious event often does better than one that treats it as an afterthought, though that is a pattern and not a rule.

The Host-Country System

The country that wins normally hosts the next contest, and its broadcaster is responsible for staging it. This has produced the contest's geography: the host cities change from year to year, and some countries have hosted several times. In practice this is a heavy commitment, which Chapter 6 discusses. On a few occasions another country has hosted on behalf of a winner, when the winning broadcaster could not or would not stage the show (the best-known recent example is covered in Chapters 6 and 7).

The Semi-Finals

For the first decades every participating country appeared in a single show. As the number of countries grew, especially after the end of the Cold War, there were too many to fit in one evening. Various methods were tried to limit the number, including relegating the lowest-scoring countries from the following year's contest. In the early 2000s a semi-final was introduced, followed by a second one, so that most countries must qualify for the final. The dates are generally given as 2004 for the first semi-final and 2008 for the move to two, but check the exact years before quoting them.

The Big Five

A group of countries is exempt from the semi-finals and goes straight to the final every year. This is the Big Five: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Together with the host country, they are guaranteed a place in the final. The reason usually given is financial: these countries' broadcasters contribute the largest share of the contest's funding, partly because they have the largest television audiences. In return for that funding, they receive automatic qualification.

The group began as the "Big Four" (the UK, France, Germany and Spain) around the year 2000, and Italy rejoined the contest in 2011 and became the fifth, so the "Big Five" label dates from then. These dates are from general knowledge and should be checked. Automatic qualification also meant that these countries were protected from the relegation rule that applied to others in the 1990s, though how that rule worked in detail is a matter for a dedicated source.

Exercises

Next chapter: The Voting Story, which follows how the points have been awarded and why a zero used to be announced aloud.