MaltaMedia.com

Toni Sant, MaltaMedia founder and creative director will once again be reporting live from the Eurovision venue for the fourth consecutive year, this time from Moscow. However, this year EurovisionMalta.com is also collaborating with SBS radio in Australia and Favourite TV to create multimedia elements to the regular online reports. Further details about this coverage will be revealed in the coming days.

Considering Chiara’s record in her participation in this festival, placing third, then second, when asked “Is it time to win now?” Toni Sant replied that “Unfortunately things aren’t that simple. Most Maltese Eurovision fans seem to think that Chiara has a good chance to win this year’s song contest in Moscow. While Chiara is well loved among Eurovision die-hard fans across Europe, she is barely known to a whole generation of Eurovision fans that have emerged since her stellar appearance in 2005. More than this, there are a number of other strong entries”.

The ESC has changed in two significant ways in recent years, he added. The first is that most of the marketing is now done almost entirely through Internet campaigns, sometimes with incredible results, such as Lordi’s win in 2006. The second is that more attention is now being given to the mise-en-scene on the songs, leaving a greater impact on the voting public. The most notable case of this is clearly in the winning songs from the last two years, where personal identity politics played a large part staging decisions for both songs. It seems that it’s no longer enough for a singer with a great voice to just belt out a good song. Nor is it a case of just another bunch of well-trained dancers moving around a singer just to fill up the stage. After all, this is a television song contest rather than a radio song contest.

Toni Sant is optimistic about Chiara making it to the final saying he seriously doubt that Chiara will be left out of this year’s ESC final adding that “stranger things have happened in previous years. Nothing is certain about such things, but if Chiara doesn’t manage to make it to the final I imagine that Malta will have no other choice but to do what I have been suggesting for some years now. The only way forward at that point would be to seriously revise the whole reason why and how Malta takes part in the Eurovision Song Contest”.

As a final comment Toni Sant remarked that it’s good to see that the management of Malta’s entry to the ESC is now being handled by the national broadcasting organization saying that this is an excellent first step in the right direction. “My personal hope is that eventually this will also develop into a group of people who really understand how the ESC works now handling decisions at the top”, he concluded.

For more details on Malta’s entry in this years Euovision Song Contest go on www.eurovisionmalta.com