{"id":2178,"date":"2009-05-06T07:35:09","date_gmt":"2009-05-06T07:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/06\/a-beginners-guide-to-eurovision-part-3\/"},"modified":"2023-02-24T11:45:11","modified_gmt":"2023-02-24T11:45:11","slug":"a-beginners-guide-to-eurovision-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/05\/a-beginners-guide-to-eurovision-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"A Beginners Guide to Eurovision, Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the last few years, the number of countries entering the Eurovision Song Contest has increased from around 20 to around 40. That\u2019s too many for one live show on a Saturday night, so the Semi-Finals were introduced.<\/p>\n<p>The host country automatically qualifies for the final, as do the \u2018Big 4\u2019 of the UK, France, Spain and Germany (who put up the lions share of money to finance Eurovision). How are the other twenty finalists selected?<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s what today\u2019s Beginners Guide to Eurovision is about.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><object width=\"425\" height=\"344\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/eKQbG-o4zOs&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1\"\/><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"\/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"\/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>Part four <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/05\/07\/the-beginners-guide-to-eurovision-part-4\/\">can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last few years, the number of countries entering the Eurovision Song Contest has increased from around 20 to around 40. That\u2019s too many for one live show on a Saturday night, so the Semi-Finals were introduced. The host country automatically qualifies for the final, as do the \u2018Big 4\u2019 of the UK, France, Spain and Germany (who put up the lions share of money to finance Eurovision). How are the other twenty finalists selected? That\u2019s what today\u2019s Beginners Guide to Eurovision is about. Part four can be found here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[595,22,392],"tags":[1074,287,371,1071,1076,1075],"class_list":["post-2178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-595","category-conferences","category-eurovision-multimedia","tag-beginners-guide","tag-eurovision","tag-eurovision-song-contest","tag-guide","tag-qualification","tag-semi-final"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Gl0-z8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62324,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2178\/revisions\/62324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}