Encore: What Makes a Good Eurovision Host?

Hello, London, we are ready for your vote.

Hi there, I'm Stephen Perkins and this is Douz Bois, the Eurovision loving podcast from the team behind Binge Watch. I'm here currently every other Monday, filling in the long and painful gap between Eurovision contests with some chat, some facts and more than a few meandering digressions to my personal life that you probably don't really need or want to know.

Before we get into today's main subject, here is my obligatory quick reminder that you can follow us on TwitteringWatchPart for podcast news and notifications whenever we have a new episode available. But an easier way to do that might also be to just hit that subscribe button on your podcast platform and ensure that every new episode appears in your feed straight away. So, on with today's show.

Now that we've had confirmation that Host City for 2024 will be Malmo, surely the next big decision is finding the hosts themselves for those three unforgettable nights in May.

With that in mind, I thought we should take a look through the long history of Eurovision presenters and see if we can find out what makes a perfect team of Eurovision hosts. Now, the first thing to think about is the overall number of presenters. For the first 22 years of the contest, the standard was to have one single presenter for the whole evening. Now, that's an awfully big responsibility to lay on the shoulders of one individual.

But of course, the contest was a slightly more manageable size back then. The 1978 contest in Paris made history as the first Eurovision to be hosted by two people. But it was also noteworthy for another reason. It was the first one to feature a male presenter since the inaugural edition of the contest. The very First Eurovision in 1956 was hosted by Swiss presenter Loren Greenfalopello, and to this day he remains the only man to have ever hosted Eurovision on his own.

So that means a lot of women hosted Eurovision on their own from 1957 to 1977, and some of them got to do it more than once. The United Kingdom's own Katie Boyle holds the record for hosting the contest four times in 1960, 1963, 1968 and 1974. And France's Jacqueline Joubert hosted it on her own twice in 1959 and 1961. So it took until 1978 for the contest to expand to having two presenters, Denise Frappe and Leon Citron, in that year.

But it wasn't a case of the number of hosts trending ever upwards from there. In fact, the two hosts experiment was repeated in Jerusalem in 1979, but then in 1980, the contest went back to having one host again, and remained that way until the 1988 contest in Dublin. From that point onwards, it was very much the convention for the contest to have multiple presenters on the ignite, and only three editions since then have been hosted by a single person.

Venulla Sweeney in mill street in 1993, Mary Kennedy in Dublin in 1995 and most recently Petra Mirda in, coincidentally, Malmo in 2013. And given the ever expanding nature of the contest, I'd say it's a fairly safe bet that Petra will go down in history as the last ever solo host of Eurovision. The 1999 contest in Israel was the first to have three presenters, although that didn't become a regular thing until Oslo in 2010.

But when it comes to the expansion to having four hosts, now, that depends on what criteria you're going to use. The first Eurovision to have four people hosting on the same night was Vienna in 2015. But technically Russia got there first in 2009 by trying something a little bit different. They actually had two distinct hosting teams of two. Natalia Vodyanova and Andrei Malihov hosted the semi finals and then Alzu and Ivan Urgant took over for the final.

2009 is seen as a bit of an outlier in Eurovision presenting history, because since then no one else has tried bringing in a completely new set of presenters for the final. And I think generally people like that continuity of having the same team throughout the whole week.

From 2014 onwards, it's been pretty standard to have either three or four hosts at Eurovision, with only one contest since then. Bucking the trend. That's Sweden again in Stockholm in 2016, who only needed petromeda again and monsellmuller. One other point of interest in that window, the 2017 contest in Kyiv was the first Eurovision since 1956 not to have any female presenters, as the Ukrainian hosting trio was all male. This did not go unnoticed.

It wasn't necessarily received brilliantly, and the hosting lineup has been a majority of women ever since, except for Chirin in 2022. So, having gone through all those stats, what have we learned in terms of numbers and gender? Well, the. The implication is that for a successful Eurovision in this day and age, you need three to four presenters, although the one country that repeatedly manages to do more with fewer is Sweden. So they may decide to keep their team small again in 2024.

And it's generally advisable to have a mixture of men and women on the team. And if there's an imbalance, numbers wise, history suggests that it's generally advisable to have women as your majority. But that's just one side of the coin. Obviously, at Eurovision, it's handy as well to have at least one presenter who's multilingual, since the tradition is for the contest to be delivered in a mixture of English and fren.

But in the interest of international relations, it never hurts to have a presenter who speaks as many languages as possible. Desiree Nosbush, who hosted for Luxembourg in 1984, could speak Luxembourgish, German, French, Italian, English and Spanish. And as we established in the previous podcast, she was also the youngest presenter of the main Eurovision contest at just 19 years old, and has made me feel like an incredible underachiever ever since.

And when the UK hired Ulrika Johnson for the job in 1998, we did so in the comfort of the knowledge that she spoke fluent Swedish, English, French, French and German.

Now, it's not uncommon for the host to be a former Eurovision contender themselves. So far, 17 of the hosts in the history of Eurovision have previously represented their country. Corrie Brocken was the first former winner to host the contest when she presented the show in the Hague in 1976, although her victory had come nearly 20 years earlier. Since then, five winners have gone on to be part of the hosting team the following year.

Toto Couttuno for Italy in 1991 after his victory in 1990, Marie N for Latvia in 2003, Eldar Gazimov for Azerbaijan in 2012, Conchita Wurst for Austria in 2015 and Monzel Muller for Sweden in 2016. Now, if you aren't bringing in a former winner, of course, it never hurts to use someone who's an international celebrity, generally just to drum up a little bit of extra attention, to pick just a few. Norway in 1996 used AHA frontman Morten Harkett.

The following year, Ireland rolled out Boysin's Ronan Keating. Then in 2006, Greece employed the services of showbiz journalist Maria menounos. Denmark in 2014 brought in Pilou Azbik from Borgn. And Game of thrones Portugal in 2018 summoned NCIS Los Angeles star Daniela Rua. Israel in 2019 had the services of supermodel Bar Refeili. And then Italy went for the double in 2022 with singers Lara Powzini and Mika.

But the thing that matters above all else, I think, is the professional background of the hosts. It's not uncommon for Eurovision presenters to be singers or actors in their day jobs rather than professional presenters. But.

But as a general rule, you do want at least one person on the team with experience of hosting a major live entertainment show, because Eurovision is a hugely complicated beast with a lot of ongoing factors, and you need hosts who can think on their feet without giving any sense of any panic going on behind the scenes.

So I took a little look at the hosting teams for the last 10 contests, and out of a total of 31 people in the various presenting teams, I could only find five of them who didn't have what I would have considered to be previous live presenting experience. So that tends to back up the idea that you want someone with a lot of live experience. But then again, there are always exceptions to this rule. One of those five was Hannah Waddingham, who was undoubtedly the star of the show in Liverpool 2023.

But then again, Hannah came from a live theatre background where she was no doubt used to keeping the show going, whatever might be going wrong backstage. So there you have it.

You want a team of three to four people with a lot of women, with plenty of experience of hosting a live broadcast, with the ability to speak multiple languages and the adeptness to land a joke that won't leave several seconds of conspicuous dead air. That's not a lot to ask for, is it? Of course, Sweden essentially hosts its own internal Eurovision every year in Melody Festival, so they should have no shortage of talent to draw from.

And based on the last two occasions that Sweden hosted the contest, I'm sure that whoever they pick will do an incredible job. That's it for this episode. Thank you for joining me once again. I'll be back in two weeks with another brand new episode going into the heart of the contest history and speculating what we might have in store next year. So until next time, good night, Europe, and good morning, Australia.