A song show organized by the European Broadcasting Union instead of the Eurovision Song Contest, cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Participants will present their songs during the broadcast on YouTube. The show Europe Shine a Light will be held without a competitive component – all participants will present their songs. Watch the spectacular concert on the site.
Eurovision 2020, cancelled due to the coronavirus, will take place in the form of online concerts. They will be shown on the semifinals on May 12 and 14. A special show is being prepared on the day of the finale.
Hold online concerts “Eurovision Song Celebration” (“Eurovision Song” instead of the semi-finals on May 12 and 14 and the show “Europe Shine A Light” on Saturday, May 16, the day when the final of the largest television music competition in the world was to take place. This decision was made by the organizers of Eurovision 2020 – the European Broadcasting Union and a pool of three TV companies in the Netherlands – at the end of April. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 was cancelled, and a hospital was placed in the arena building in Rotterdam to treat COVID-19 patients.
Honoring the participants of Eurovision 2020
On Tuesday, May 12, when the first semi-final of the competition was scheduled to take place, the first such concert can be seen on the official Eurovision channel on YouTube. It will start at 22 hours Moscow time. Videos of the songs of the participating countries will be shown in the order in which the performers would take to the stage of the Ahoy concert-sports complex. This means that the clips of the Russian band Little Big and the Belarusian duo Val on Tuesday will be shown in the first part of the two-hour concert, and the Ukrainian band Go_A – in the second.
Organizers promise not just to broadcast video songs of participants, but also surprises: it is possible that it will be an acoustic version of the dance “Uno” ravers from Little Big or the composition “On fire” of the group The Roop from Lithuania, as if it was performed by Elvis Presley (in the original “On fire” – it’s electro-pop). In addition, in the run-up to the online concerts, the European Broadcasting Union urged fans to record their version of the songs of this year’s participants. Fragments from the videos sent by fans will be shown instead of the traditional for the contest replay of excerpts of performances of performers.
Top 10 Eurovision 2020, according to Germans’ estimates
However, there will be no voting during the online broadcast. Video clips cannot be a substitute for competitive performance directly on stage and live. Nevertheless, numerous associations of Eurovision fans hold their own unofficial contests. In Germany, such a vote was aired by one of the daughters of the public-legal TV channel ARD, which broadcasts “Eurovision” in Germany. On the evening of May 9, at the end of the show, during which there were screenings of clips of all 41 participants, viewers and a jury of 100 people chose the best songs of the current competition. Performers from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Russia, Switzerland and Sweden were in the top 10 in alphabetical order.
Some of them have agreed to participate in the German final of Eurovision 2020. It will be held at the Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg on Saturday, May 16. The show will be broadcast live by ARD TV channel. At its end, out of the top ten viewers will have to choose their favorite of the canceled contest. For the purity of the experiment, they won’t be able to vote for Ben Dolich. It was he who was to represent Germany in the competition.
Show instead of Eurovision final
The German final of Eurovision will be preceded by the concert “Europe Shine A Light” (“Europe lights up the light”). It will be held on May 16 in the Dutch Hilversum when the real final of the competition was to take place. The concert will be broadcast by all the participating countries of Eurovision 2020. “”We want not only to show the show and present the 41 participants we were waiting for in Rotterdam, but also to inspire and unite people in Europe and beyond in these difficult times,” explained the idea of the concert by its executive producer Sitse Bakker. He called for the show to be made “an unforgettable moment in the history of Eurovision.”
It will help not only the winners of past contests Swede Mons Selmerlov, Israeli Netta Barzilai, Maria Sherifovich from Serbia and last year’s winner, Dutchman Duncan Lawrence. The participants of the current “Eurovision” on the telepost will perform the song-winner of 1997 “Love Shine A Light” and the fans – in a single virtual chorus “What’s another year”. With her, two-time Irishman Johnny Logan won Eurovision for the first time in 1980.
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