France is the winner of the 2020 Junior Eurovision Song Contest!

“J’imagine” by Valentina took a clear victory in the 18th running of the EBU’s song competition for under-16s, as its narrow lead after the jury phase was amplified by a huge win in the public online vote. Just like in the 2019 edition, the podium was completed by Kazakhstan in second place and Spain in third place.

JESC 2020 was something of a dry run for how the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam might look: Most (though not all) of the performances were recorded in the performers’ home countries on a predefined stage setup, and the “green room” was also virtual. While it obviously wasn’t a perfect situation and there remain some concerns about ensuring a level playing field in terms of vocals being performed live, it’s to the credit of the EBU and the broadcasters involved that the show had a remarkably seamless feel to it. Although the recent vaccine news gives rise to hopes that ESC 2021 can take place as close to “normal” as possible, at least we now have evidence that the various backup options outlined by the EBU – read about them here and here – can still result in a decent show, and that’s good news for all of us.

JESC 2020 also served as a warm-up for the new season for our #esc chat, and of course we voted along with the show. Not for the first time, our taste was a little out of touch with everyone else’s: Our chat favourite was Russia with an average score of 7.91 out of 10, followed by Belarus with 7.44 and the Netherlands with 7.22 (although the French winner was our fourth favourite, at least!).

The next major chat event will, of course, be the Albanian national final in the second half of December, so make sure to join us for the multiple night extravaganza that is Festivali i Këngës 59 – this year apparently taking place in the open air!

In the meantime, here’s the French JESC winner for you one more time. Félicitations!

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It’s not every day a movie about the Eurovision Song Contest gets released – so we took the opportunity to simultaneously have our first viewing of Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga live in our #esc chat and share our thoughts with each other as we watched. And now we’re sharing some of those thoughts with you!

Even before we started, reality was biting hard.

haha my boyfriend just moaned “two HOURS” and i said look bitch actual eurovision lasts 4 these days

Being nerds, we naturally didn’t hesitate to pick holes in the accuracy.

iceland didn’t enter in 74. WRONGNESS AT THE FIRST SECOND
English commentary too, muy autentico

so ESC is meant to be in UK? that’s a whole new level of unlikely…
it means independent Scotland won. that I could believe

We appreciated some of the styling choices early on.

is anyone else seeing Ilse and Waylon here

Lars rocking the early 90s outfits honestly

I’m liking Rasmussen’s change of direction

And then we realised we were… actually starting to enjoy some of the wackier plot points?

i like the idea that if everyone died in a disaster they’d just send the ones that didn’t die, rather than just pull out
surely according to the real rules they’d be sending Katiana’s Friends

i love the idea that the performers dont know the routine before they get there
feels like something the UK might do

i do love the idea that if the performance went badly, an act would just fuck off home

We kept on nitpicking too – in the best possible spirit, of course…

“we love club dancing”
said no one ever
and i’d love to know where a club in edinburgh looks like that too 😀

Sometimes Edinburgh is in Glasgow
edinburgh is in Chisinau apprently with these “hosts” 😀

Greece is totally unrealistic… she’d never be this much clothed… plus no male dancers

I like the idea that the commentator wouldn’t mention “oh, and their national final exploded”

But we were also won over by some of the more well-observed moments.

this is an accurate reflection of modern ESC in that most of the songs have the same beat

British commentator talking in the middle of the songs – most authentic thing yet

Iceland read out last is very realistic, nice touch

And the script gave us some proper laughs, too!

that Icelandic watching party looks like a social distance party

HAHAHA BEST LINE “Are you gay?” “of course not i am from Russia”

haha, unhelpful ghost

everything involving Katiana has been 10/10

In the end, we all broadly agreed with this assessment:

i’m mostly quite enjoying the Eurovision-related stuff
the rest of it is a bit… average
kinda the other way round to how i expected

But all in all, it was a fun night in the chat and a diverting enough two hours of light entertainment. In that spirit, we’ll leave the last word to an Icelandic chatter:

I can not believe our only chance of winning eurovision and they mess it up

Be sure to check out Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga on Netflix and make up your own mind!

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The 2021 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Rotterdam on 18, 20 and 22 May.

Following the cancellation of ESC 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was widely expected that Rotterdam would remain the host city for the next contest. However, the Dutch government’s current policy is that no events on the scale of ESC with its usual audience can take place until a vaccine for the virus is found. Accordingly, as nu.nl reports, the plans for 2021 will take into account various scenarios and allow for “adjustments” to be made as the circumstances require – presumably up to and including a contest entirely behind closed doors if necessary.

As previously announced, tickets for ESC 2020 will be valid for 2021 assuming the event goes ahead with the planned audience. Ticket holders who are unable or unwilling to use their tickets in 2021 have until Friday 26 June to claim a refund.

The 2021 national final season looks set to be quieter than usual, as at least 18 broadcasters have confirmed that they will be sending the artists who would have been representing them in 2020. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of some single-artist finals – but even allowing for that, the Super Saturday stream-juggling should be a bit more manageable than usual!

The visual design for the 2020 contest is also expected to be adapted and reused for 2021, and we’ll presumably be encountering the same three hosts who guided us through the Europe, Shine A Light show and who would have been in charge of the 2020 contest had it taken place – namely Chantal Janzen, Edsilia Rombley and Jan Smit.

While it’s strange to be thinking about major European events at a time when the virus is still prevalent and travel restrictions are only just beginning to be lifted, it’s good to look to the future with a bit of hope – not least since the message today is that, with enough planning time to provide for the necessary contingencies, there will be a Eurovision Song Contest 2021 regardless of what form that takes. Cheers to that!

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It’s Eurovision Day!

Except, of course, it’s not. And it’s still weird.

I should have been in Tenerife with the usual gang right now, sunning myself at our poolside “press centre” and putting on some last, ill-advised bets after overanalysing the final running order. Many of you would have been at the actual press centre in Rotterdam, or enjoying the fresh air in the host city and taking in some performances by national final failures at the EuroVillage. Or perhaps you’d have been at home, sticking little flags into canapés ahead of your party guests arriving in the evening.

But as we all know, the C-word put an end to all that (and we don’t mean Carola, though it would probably be within her powers too).

Ever since ESC 2020 was cancelled and the lockdown kicked in around Europe and the world, the Eurovision fan community has been excelling itself, as it so often does. Most publicly with the Eurovision Again movement on Twitter, which has established itself as a weekly highlight and even gained the endorsement of the official Eurovision channel – though if we’re talking rewatches, we have to give a special shout-out to the nightly rewatches of old contests on the messageboard of our partner site ESCNation, which we’ve been joining in with in our #esc chat. Knowing there’s always something to watch with friends after a particularly shitty lockdown day has been a real blessing at this strange time.

A whole bunch of fan sites also collaborated on the Eurostream project, while on the official front, the BBC Newsbeat documentary was almost unbearably poignant and the Eurovision Home Concerts have thrown up some brilliantly improbable highlights (as well as showcasing some fascinating home furnishing choices). All of that culminates tonight, with the Europe Shine A Light show that’s being broadcast across the participating countries in the slot that should have been occupied by the grand final of ESC 2020, flanked in many cases by local content. And, of course, we’ll be gathering virtually to watch it together and celebrate those unfortunate 2020 entries one last time.

It can’t replace ESC, of course. Nothing could. But it might help us to finally internalise the fact that we’re not getting “our” contest this year. To quote a conversation from our chatroom, tonight feels like a funeral you really need to go well. In the best case, it’ll give us some degree of catharsis, ideally accompanied by a decent buffet.

That might not be setting our sights especially high, but what else can we do? There are bigger and more important things happening in the world right now – so let’s just hope this goes down as a unique blip, an asterisk in the long and storied history of Europe’s greatest television spectacular, and appreciate the way in which the contest brings us all together even when it’s not actually happening.

Raise a glass tonight to the 2020 contestants. But above all, raise a glass to yourselves, the amazing community of fans who keep this contest going year after year. Even in adversity – perhaps, as it turns out, especially in adversity – you’re a pretty awesome bunch.

Stay safe and stay well. Cheers from all of us at escgo!, and here’s to better times ahead.

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The week-long, fan-led initiative to honour and vote on the entries of the cancelled 2020 Eurovision Song Contest, Eurostream 2020, has concluded – and the winner is Iceland! Congratulations are due to “Think About Things” by Daði & Gagnamagnið for a convincing victory.

Following the cancellation of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest due to the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak, several major Eurovision websites joined forces to organise the first ever 100% online edition of the Contest – and escgo! and the #esc chat were delighted to play our own little part in proceedings by banging the drum for the event and, of course, live-watching and voting along with the shows in our chat community.

This we did over two nights of semi-finals followed by tonight’s grand final. After some technical gremlins along the way – and it wouldn’t be a Eurovision(-style) event without them! – the votes of national juries consisting of music professionals (50%) and online public voting (50%) decided that the clear winner was Daði Freyr from Iceland with the much-hyped “Think About Things”. The Roop from Lithuania ended up in a fairly distant second place, with Little Big from Russia completing the podium in third place.

This was in stark contrast to our own ChatVote 2020 event, which saw Iceland languishing down in 18th place (and Lithuania and Russia also outside the top ten, for that matter), while Italy ran away with the victory. But we’ve always had our own special taste in the #esc chat!

A big thank you to the Eurostream 2020 team for all their hard work during these last weeks in making the event happen, and for coping with all the nerve-jangling technical issues they encountered along the way tonight! We had three super fun nights in our chat watching and commenting and joining in, and it really helped to conjure up a bit of the ESC spirit in this unusual year for fans of the contest. Cheers, and congratulations once again to Iceland!

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