The first show of Malta’s national selection process aired yesterday week to select the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest entry has caused a minor uproar after it transpired that the wrong voting numbers were given during the show.
The mistake was the result of an “administrative error” by the telecommunications company, and a new voting window will be added at the beginning of this Saturday’s show.
As a result of last weekend’s problems, the show started at 8:50pm and had a 20 minute voting window at the beginning to allow viewers to vote for their favourite entry from week one. Thirty-second clips from each performance were shown to remind the audience of the songs.
Grace Borg, Head of AKAM (Association for Maltese singers, composers and authors) and ousted Head of Delegation at the Eurovision Song Contest, immediately confirmed her outrage by telling escmalta.com that what happened last Saturday was “ blatant incompetence and the artists should not have to suffer the consequence”. For that reason, she proposed that the show should be repeated or each artist added to the remaining shows. Others immediately pointed out that this would give last week’s entries an unfair advantage.
Ms Borg had also publicly criticised the preceding stage of the selection process, accused one of the international jury of having conflicting interests, and has in the past threatened legal action over song selection and results of former contests.
A spokesman for AKAM, while not satisfied with these shortcomings, has stated they are happy with the good will of Acelina and PBS, the production team and broadcaster responsible for the show. Both have been cleared of any blame in the voting problems and are seen to be doing their very best to solve the problems fairly and amicably.
Euro Show Box’s producer, Steve Aquilina contacted echmalta.com and explained in detail how the wrong SMS numbers were screened. He said that when the production house (Aceline Entertainment) and a particular telephony operator signed the contract prior to the start of the show, the operator gave the wrong SMS number. Of course the production team screened the number referred to in the contract, which afterwards proved to be wrong.
Steve said that in order to safeguard the public vote and keep it fair for all, the numbers for the entries will be changed every week in the weekly TV shows. This means that if a particular song is the first to be performed, the voting number corresponding to the song can end (last two digits) from 01 till 14. He said that this same procedure was also used in past Aceline productions such as the Opportunity 2 Challenge.
Meanwhile, quite scathing comments were made on another website (oikotimes.com) by Fotis Konstantopoulos from Greece on each of last week’s songs. One singer was called a very bad replica of Frank Sinatra. Another came straight from Ralph Siegel. Another singer was told she needed a hairstylist and fashion designer immediately.