The executive producer of Eurovision for the BBC, Guy Freeman, gave an interview to BBC Radio Nottingham yesterday, and whilst he is remaining tight-lipped about exactly who will be the UK representative, he did talk about the selection process and lessons that have been learnt from last year.
First of all, it was confirmed that the British entry for Eurovision 2015 came from last autumn’s public submission process, which received just under 300 applications.
It really surprised me actually, because I thought the bar was quite high in terms of what we were asking people to do, and it was a very impressive list of entries that came through. A good variety of stuff, and obviously some weird and wonderful, some fantastic, and lots of generally really good things in between. It wasn’t easy to get to a final shortlist because there was such a lot of good stuff there.
Eventually, however, the entries were narrowed down thanks to a core team of staff working through the selections, before the shortlisted picks were sent to a larger team for judgement:
We put [the songs] out to a wider group of about a dozen people or so…it’s worth always sense-checking these things, because you can have an idea that something is amazing or not and it’s always good to get different perspectives.
As for who or what will actually be representing the United Kingdom this year, Guy Freeman was giving nothing specific away, although he did have this to say:
I think we learnt a lot last year and have tried to apply some of those lessons. All I will say is that it is probably quite a contrast to last year – read into that what you will – and the reason that we picked this song is because of all the ones we looked at, it’s the one that a) had the most instant interesting factor about it and b) when we listened to loads of others, it stuck in the mind.
We are sure that this will kick the fan speculation up another notch, but whether you’re confident you have an idea of who it will be, or completely clueless, all will be revealed on Saturday night at 21:30 GMT / 22:30 CET on the BBC red button service and on eurovision.tv.
