Encore: What Makes a Good Eurovision Host?
As Basel 2025 draws nearer, we wanted to reshare a classic episode, where Steven looks at Eurovision presenters of past to figure out what makes a great host.
Enjoy!
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Highlights from the episode:
Takeaways:
- The history of Eurovision presenters reveals a significant evolution in hosting dynamics over the years, particularly in terms of gender representation.
- To ensure a successful Eurovision, it is advisable to have a team of three to four presenters with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
- Multilingualism among hosts is crucial, as it enhances the international appeal and accessibility of the contest to a broader audience.
- The importance of having hosts with live entertainment experience cannot be overstated, given the complexity of the Eurovision production.
- Sweden's consistent success in hosting Eurovision suggests that they have an abundance of talent to draw from for future contests.
- The trend of having a majority of female presenters has emerged as a standard practice in recent Eurovision history, reflecting societal changes.
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Transcript
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.
nfirmation that Host City for: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.
anageable size back then. The:It was the first one to feature a male presenter since the inaugural edition of the contest.
The very First Eurovision in: ing the contest four times in: So it took until: was repeated in Jerusalem in: lla Sweeney in mill street in: solo host of Eurovision. The: the same night was Vienna in: lly Russia got there first in: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: interest in that window, the: r since, except for Chirin in: eep their team small again in: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.
who hosted for Luxembourg in: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.
Ulrika Johnson for the job in:So far, 17 of the hosts in the history of Eurovision have previously represented their country.
nted the show in the Hague in: Toto Couttuno for Italy in: to pick just a few. Norway in: Then in: Israel in: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.
star of the show in Liverpool: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.
