Welcome to your window on this year’s Eurovision Song Contest
In summary, if you are one of the few people who cannot stand Eurovision, then please remember normal service will resume at the end of May.
For everyone else, it’s almost May, and that means it’s time to gear up for coverage of the Eurovision Song Contest for 2010. Just like last year, I’ll be flying out to the stadium to provide live coverage from the heart of Eurovision. This year it’s in Oslo, Norway, which is thankfully a lot easier to get to than Moscow. The flight out (ash willing) is on May 21st, and I’ll be in the Eurovision world till May 30th.
This year, I’ve created a landing page that will guide you through all my Eurovision coverage – you can find it at bit.ly/ewanesc – although if you regularly follow the blog then it will all be appearing in the regular RSS feed and pages.
I’ll be doing four main strands of coverage, all of which will be linked from here.
Let’s be honest, for the few hours that the live show is on, I turn into a whirling dervish of texts as i provide a full running commentary from the stadium floor. If you’ve never experienced Eurovision this way, then you should follow me (@ewan) and keep the page open on the night with F5 at the ready. Lots of trivia and information on the acts, the show, and anything else that crops up.
Podcasts and Commentary Tracks
Last year I debuted my audio commentary track for those of you watching on the internet stream (www.eurovision.tv) or who just wanted something a little different to the regular TV commentators. I’ll be doing the same again this year, but building up the audio a little bit more with a series of podcasts in the run up to the competition.
This week you’ll have a number of short podcasts introducing Eurovision, the rules, songs, scoring and other quirks in these Short Guides to Eurovision. After that, the second wave of podcasts will look at each Eurovision Song entered this year over eight episodes of Eurovision Juke Box Jury.
I’ll then hop on a plane to get to Oslo to be there for Eurovision Week with a mix of the Commentary Tracks and a series of Q&A’s from Eurovision with whatever pundits and guest I can find.
Formspring
I’m going to keep this new web service in my mind, where people can ask questions and I get to give full answers. As well as giving you a route to ask me about Eurovision issues, it’s probably going to contribute to the Q&A podcasts.
Writing a lot
Should be obvious, but I’ll be doing a fair amount of blogging and analysis from Oslo – some of it will be here on this blog, some articles will be for other publications. I’ll link to anything that gets published.
Russia’s warm-up for the 2009 show
And for those of you who have a secret love of Eurovision and aren’t quite ready to come out, I won’t tell anyone if you do get in touch or secretly follow the coverage online – the internet’s good for that sort of thing.
