EPISODE 40 - " Commentators Dissapeard " Scandal

I want to ask every fan who has a blog here at eurovision.tv, to write down the comentator scandal of tonight. I had the chance to watch eurovision from 2 different broadcasters .. Firstly " één " is the Flemish State Television in Belgium. Everthing went smoothly. In another room I had another television and watch the Turkish Broadcast .. But I noticed that from the Swiss Entry .. maybe 2 songs earlier that there wasn't any commentating. Thought for a while that there were technical problems in Turkey ..

Afterwards, after few songs .. I recaped commenting from the Portuguese Entry. The Turkish Terry Wogan, namely "Bülend Özveren" is an established icon at the TRT and he is commenting at eurovision for more than 30 years now. He said that he was feeling himself not in the 56th contest in D'dorf, but more in 1956. He was commentating via the telephone and he that he switched the cell-phone with his collegue to finish his job. The noise of the cell-phone was horrible and scratched the ears .. Istanbul did everything to deliver service to the Turkish speaking people worldwide for more than 300 million people (central asia included)

He told also that other commentators had the same problem and that his collegue went to the corridor behind the commentators boxes and saw other commentators of other county broadcasters. After a few minutes he said also that the commentators did receive an e-mail from the technical department of staff or whatever that everything is beeing done to fixe/solve the problem, but that they couldn't give and good news about this technical error.

Meanwhile I went back to my working room in front of my house and watched the Flemish Television about the same problems .. the fact was that there wasn't any problem at " één " .. The Flemish commentator " André Vermeulen " was in Brussels to comment the show .. in fact the Flemish Television decided about a year ago not to support anymore commenting in the city where the festival is been held. But in this case a broadcaster can spare about 12.000€ for the 9 hours of live coverage as you keep your commentator at home.

What we can learn here is that every country has to assure a Back-up commentator in the country to solve the problem in case of a huge technical fall out. What was the case in the rest of Europe and beyond .. please write it down folx !!

As a mentioned in EPISODE 38 .. " D'Day in D'Dorf " .. it began with a technical scandal .. in the heart of Europe !!