This morning, the EBU announced one of the major changes for the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest. Unlike in previous years, each delegation's first rehearsal will take place behind closed doors, with fan press being able to watch on screens in the Euroclub.
Importantly, this means that there will likely be no video clips of initial rehearsals - except perhaps for those on official Eurovision YouTube channel.
As someone who doesn't like to watch rehearsal videos, I fully approve of this. In recent years, the rush to be the first to have a rehearsal video uploaded has meant that a lot of false impressions are given, with the first run-through often only a dry run with no-one putting in much effort. This means that acts often look and sound a lot worse than they really are - not an impression many are happy with, I imagine!
More importantly though, the advent of the video clips has meant a drop in the quality of actual writing about rehearsals. Five years ago, a Eurovision blogger had the quite difficult job of succintly summing up the appearance of the performance and the vocals, describing backdrops and costumes, as well as how the song was coming across on stage.
Now it's more or less deemed sufficient to embed a video and say 'Lithuania's coming across much better than we expected' and leave it at that.
That latter approach is boring, quite frankly, and does nothing to differentiate the content of various sites, or make them interesting. It means that the experience of reading the rehearsal blogs is far less enjoyable than it could be.
So, I hope that there are no videos at all of the initial rehearsals. I look forward to reading some strong, vivid material produced by some really good writers - and I hope to be doing the same thing myself.
I'll remember that if I see you using the words "…better than we expected" at any point! :-)
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And I expect to be pulled up on it too!
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