Junior Eurovision - Fab or Fail?

Junior Eurovision - Fab Or Fail?

It has been 2 weeks since Valletta played host to Europe's favourite singing contest, but the fans are split as to whether it was a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

The show was opened by the classic flag parade, in which each country participating is announced, and the representatives commerce on stage, typically to the theme of the contest, which for this year was "Embrace", by Destiny Chukunyere. The organisation for the flag parade was not good, with 3 or 4 of the contestants walking up with their flags, and awkwardly dancing in the middle of the stage, as the camera pans out, putting more focus onto the stage design rather than the contestants. The flag parade also seemed a lot longer than normal, and I ended up loosing focus.

Next up were the postcards, where, from what I understood, each representative sang a few lines of a song, and was then shown to be doing something they enjoy doing. What was questionable in my opinion were the songs used for each postcard. Typically, the song used for each postcard is pretty much the same, although at times either slowed down,  or re-pitched, depending on the activity in the postcard.

 Each postcard song this year was completely different, and i think was based on what was written after embrace before each postcard EG: Embrace health, Embrace equality or whatever it was.

The theme of the event is "Embrace" on the whole, so I don't think every postcard needed a different kind of "embrace". As well as this, the lip syncing of the embrace song at the beginning of the postcard was misleading and confusing, and left me thinking Zena Donnelly, the first preformer had had a last minute song change.

Some of my favourites of the night included Ireland, Armenia, Belarus, and Cyprus, although the biggest surprise for me of the night was Georgia. If you read my "Top 17 List Of JESC Songs", you would know that Georgia was my least favourite, however after such a stunning performance moved to at least 10th place in my ranking. Despite this, I 100% did not expect a Georgian win, and it seems i wasn't the only one.

It really is tasteless and downright rude to boo a participant or country you do not like at any event, let alone a kids contest. Luckily, Mariam did not take the crowd's hostility to heart, jokingly telling the crowd to "come on!"

Unfortunately we can not ignore the downright abysmal hosting that left a bad taste in the mouths of many fans, who see Ben Camille and Valerie Vella as the Eurovision 2015 (but worse), compared to the Eurovision 2016 Måns and Petra

Let's just start with the hosting itself. A lot of the links and "jokes" were repetitive and unoriginal. They also seemed to forget the were hosting a KIDS programme, not a documentary on the natural history channel, as they were very stiff and appeared to have no energy whatsoever, unlike Polo last year.

A huge facepalm moment occurred when when there were only one set of points left to be revealed, Armenia's, a set of points that would ultimately reveal the winner of the contest. It's a century old trick to delay the reveal of the winner of any contest for as long as possible, in order to build up suspense, and get the biggest possible reaction when the winner is revealed.

Now Valerie must have thought that she and Ben had already majorly messed up pretty much every aspect of hosting, with the constant mistakes and apologies, awful jokes, and robotic style, so why not tick off one more box, and completely ruin the results reveal?

Valerie accidentally revealed that Armenia had gained 110 points from the kids jury far earlier than she was meant to, creating a complete anti climax, as both Ben and Valerie tried to ignore Valerie's career crushing mistake.

Aced it guys..

One thing that saved Junior Eurovision was the winners reprise. Throughout the week, each of the contestants embraced different cultures, different lifestyles, and different friendships all over Europe and Australia, shown in the winners reprise. This is what Eurovision is all about.