I may have had a little bit of wine last night, so I'm happy Yair covered Germany.
Onwards and upwards for the last three finalists from a fishy view - you know the drill with rolling and updating etc!
🇪🇸 | Spain
Hey BBC, watch and learn, this is how you stage a hopeless entry!
Apart from one pretty itchy big note towards the end, I have very little to criticise here. The acapella start works very well, pulls you in and makes it feel more intimate, and creates more development in the song too, which I've always felt it has been lacking. For the first verse and chorus everything is dark and blue and there's a solar eclipse on the backdrop, but then suddenly the moon is rising! Or falling...? I'd seen the photos from the first rehearsal, but I assumed the moon was just on the backdrop, not a massive ball being lowered right there behind him!
I don't think I've ever seen Blas's hair as flat as this, has he been on the wine too? Or is there a hairspray shortage?
The awful note was either improved or avoided (he does seem to improvise a bit each time for the howls towards the end), so for the last ever technical rehearsal of Eurovision 2021, I officially have nothing to criticise, what's that all about?! The song will obviously do next to nothing in a week, but Blas and Spain have every reason to be pleased with that.
🇬🇧 | United Kingdom
How looks his trumpet, you ask? Big, I say.
Not sure what more to say about this, to be honest... The massive trumpets pointing at him on his plinth feel a bit threatening, it stresses me out a little as I feel like something loud is about to happen any time. And then in the end I'm kinda disappointed it doesn't.
For the instrumental bits the cameras focus on the "musicians" "playing" on their instruments, and I think that part works decently well, certainly better than the usual UK Eurovision "here's some backing singers in a row doing slight knee-dancing along with the beat". James sings well enough and seems nice enough (and as we know he makes a kickass bacon sandwich), but I honestly can't see this getting a single televote point from anywhere else than a greenish isle with confusing seasons.
There's a third run, but instead of hearing James singing, we now got a baby crying and lots of people chitchatting over the backing track, big improvement!
🇫🇷 | France
Some connection issues meant I only saw the last minute of the first run-through, when she's all happy and the song is faster, and I sure hope the two minutes before sets the mood a bit better than that... This bit almost felt ridiculous and awkward, with the camera swaying (?) or shaking (?), her waving hands casting massive shadows all over her face and generally just sounding like a Yoplait advert.
A full run indeed makes far more sense (shocker!), and also makes the last part of the performance fit in, with the song slowly building to that combination of happiness and desperation. Personally I find the song quite uninteresting and repetitive, and Barbara seems a bit like that girl on the first row at school that never forgot to do her homework, but they're doing everything right with it here, and the whole solitariness and simple and dark staging makes it stand out a mile.
There's some really striking shots in it, so look out for those - one from above where her shadow suddenly explodes into lots of birds, then with the floor being made out of little stars and she's basically floating on it, like in the French final. And my favourite one, for some reason, is a little close-up on her hand.
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