Four weeks today the participants will be in Stockholm and will have begun the rehearsals for the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest! But what can we expect from this year’s event?
This extravaganza will be hosted by the well-known and well-loved Petra Mede (host of the 2013 contest and Eurovision’s Greatest Hits) and the 2015 Eurovision winner, Måns Zelmerlöw.
There will be 43 countries taking part in the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest, this is the joint highest amount of participants ever to take part in a single contest. There will be two semi-finals and a final. The countries with a direct pass to the final are: United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and host country Sweden. The semi-finals are as follows:
The running order for the semi-finals will be revealed on Friday (08/04/2016), and the running order for the final will be revealed on Friday the 13th of May, once all finalists are announced.
There are a number of artists who will return to the Eurovision Song Contest this year;
Ira Losco (Malta)
Kaliopi (Macedonia)
Donny Montell (Lithuania)
Deen (Bosnia & Herzegovina)
Poli Genova (Bulgaria)
Bojan Jovović (Montenegro)
Greta Salome (Iceland)
The voting for this year’s contest has been changed, no longer will the spokesperson reveal the 8, 10 and 12 points, the spokesperson will be introduced and they will only announce the 12 points, the 1-8 and 10 will be automatically uploaded to the scoreboard. These will only be the results of the jury vote. Once all countries’ jury results have been announced the hosts will announce the combined televoting scores (example. If the televotes combined give 200 points to Iceland then the 200 points will be added to the jury score for Iceland etc.) This is in hope of undoing the decision previously made to announce the winner as soon as mathematically clear, and will keep the suspense of knowing the winner until the final seconds of the results.
The 2016 contest will be held in the Globe Arena in Stockholm, the same venue as the 2000 contest, where Denmark won the contest, the next time Sweden hosted the contest, Denmark won. Could history repeat itself? Will Denmark take the trophy again? The odds certainly seem to disagree but in 2000 the Olsen Brothers were around 125/1 which is the same as Lighthouse X are in 2016, or would the odds be more realistic in 2016 as they were in 2015? Only time will tell, there are exactly four weeks until the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest officially begins when the first acts will take to the stage for the first rehearsals.
