Questions and answers about the Benidorm Fest. What has been the eurodrama?

“The festival you want. The one you want." insisting. This is how the new Benidorm Song Festival was presented, renamed in a pop key as Benidorm Fest, with the mission of restoring illusion, dignity and victory to the Spanish candidacy in Eurovision. Last September, the delegation and the selection committee, both recently renewed, repeated the mantra that “Spain wants to win Eurovision”. The first step was to emotionally involve an audience that, for a few years now, has been disenchanted with the Spanish participation in Eurovision. Then came Chanel's victory on Saturday, the consequent controversy and subsequent explanations by the public body about the voting system. However, a number of questions remain to be answered.

Saturday's final was followed by three million viewers, 21% of the share, which doubled the second most watched program of the night and makes it the most successful broadcast on TVE so far this year.

In Galicia the audience was close to 50% thanks to the participation of the folk trio Tanxugueiras, whose song,

, had become a socio-cultural movement and the undisputed favorite of the public.

Spain was once again excited about Eurovision.

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Chanel won the Benidorm Fest with less than 4% of the popular vote compared to 71% obtained by Tanxugueiras

A week later, Comisions Obreras is asking for transparency around the selection process and that Chanel's victory with

be annulled if the explanations of the RTVE organizers are not satisfactory.

In addition, two parliamentary groups have requested the appearance of the RTVE commission in Congress and social networks have been filled with political discussions, rumors and insults that have led Chanel to close her social networks.

Meanwhile, the silence of RTVE, which took four days to publish the votes of the professional jury that sank Tanxugueiras facilitating Chanel's victory, generated all kinds of questions.

Was there manipulation of the votes?

Is there a conflict of interest in the delegation?

And above all, what does RTVE gain by sending Chanel?

The director of Communication and Participation of the RTVE Corporation, María Eizaguirre, during the press conference this Wednesday in Madrid.Javier Lopez (EFE)

How was the vote that gave Chanel victory?

The final score of the Benidorm Fest depended 50% on the jury, made up of five people, 25% on the public and 25% on a “demographic jury” that consisted of, as Alaska repeated during the gala, “350 people carefully selected”.

In the professional jury, Felix Bergsson (head of the Icelandic delegation at Eurovision), Marvin Dietmann (set designer), Natalia Calderón (singer), Estefanía García (coordinator of the RTVE Orchestra and Choir) and Miryam Benedited (choreographer) considered that the Galicians had been the fifth best performance, tied in points with the sixth, out of a total of seven artists.

Even so, thanks to the maximum score they received from both the public and the opinion poll jury, Tanxugueiras were third, just six points from victory.

The maximum score that each jury could give was 12 points and the minimum, 2. The Eurofans theorized that Tanxugueiras' 30 points were the result of 12 + 12 from the two international juries and 2 + 2 + 2 from the three Spanish ones, Calderón , García and Benedited, all three professionally linked to RTVE.

Before the first semifinal, the favorite proposals were those of Rigoberta Bandini (

), Tanxugueiras (

) and Rayden (

). Chanel's performance drew attention for its impeccable staging, but it wasn't until the jury's enthusiastic vote that social media started talking about

being the organization's favourite. That alone explained why they scored so low on

their main competition and the crowd's favorite.

Paloma Del Río, a long-standing TVE journalist, summed up the audience's sense of disappointment in the face of a questionable selection process: “Demoscopic jury: 350 people.

Popular jury: the number of calls is not known.

Technical jury: five people.

And these five people condition what the other two juries have decided.

The festival that 'they' want”.

Demoscopic Jury: 350 people

Popular Jury: the number of calls is unknown

Technical Jury: 5 people

And these 5 people condition what the other two juries have decided.

The festival that "they" want#BenidormFest

– PalomadelrioTVE (@PalomadelrioTVE) January 29, 2022

These doubts led Galicia in Common (GEC), BNG and the CCOO union in RTVE to request that the minutes of the jury be published, something that, in principle, RTVE had not planned to do. “The public entity must guarantee a contest with total transparency”, summed up the GEC deputy Antón Gómez Reino. On the other hand, if RTVE had a clear winner and the 192,000 public votes were irrelevant, the cost of those votes (two euros per SMS and 1.45 per call) and the destination of the half million euros they generated would be questionable.

Part of the public is stunned by what they consider to be a show of the power of the upper echelons operating with total brazenness.

A festival of the people, but without the people.

The linguist Josu Gómez published a thread on Twitter on Sunday in which he compared the disappointment of the Benidorm Fest audience with the progressive loss of trust of citizens in institutions.

“The result again undermines confidence for commercial interests.

And it leads a lot of people to think: 'If they do this with a nonsense like Eurovision, what won't they do with the really important decisions?

My last tweet on the subject.

This Eurovision thing is more than "Jo, the song I wanted hasn't come out": it's the last nail in the coffin of the confidence of the Spanish in the institutions.

(I follow)

– Josu Gómez 🇪🇺 (@Eleder_) January 30, 2022

Finally, on Wednesday RTVE called a press conference in which María Eizaguirre made the votes public.

Without revealing the name of each jury given the death threats that, according to the communication director, some of them have received, the graph showed that

received a 10, two 7s, a 4 and a 2, while three of the jurors voted 12 to

.

The demographic vote was amazingly even: the eight candidates were between 10% and 15%.

The most striking revelation was the disproportionate victory of Tanxugueiras in the public vote: 70.75%.

They were followed by Bandini with 18.08% and Chanel with 3.97%.

01-26-2022 Tanxugueiras at the Benidorm Fest.Chanel, Tanxugueiras, Blanca Paloma and Varry Brava have qualified for the final of the Benidorm Fest from the first semifinal, while Azúcar Moreno and Unique do not continue in the Alicante festival and drop of the race to represent Spain in Eurovision 2022. EUROPA PRESSPOLITICA RTVERTVE (Europa Press)

This distance led many Eurofans to request that, in successive editions of BenidormFest, the popular votes be distributed as occurs in Melodifestivalen.

This contest, from which the representative of Sweden comes out, is the mirror in which all the other selection processes are seen.

The jury there is made up of at least 12 members and none of them are Swedish to guarantee objectivity.

In addition, the public vote is distributed proportionally.

In Spain, it was no use for Tanxugueiras to sweep the popular votes: they had 17 times more than Chanel, a difference that translated into 12 points for the Galicians and 8 for the Cuban.

In other countries, such as Sweden, this distribution is given as a percentage: there are 300 televoting points and if a candidate receives half of the votes they are given 150 points, if the third party receives 10% they are given 30.

What interest can RTVE have in sending Chanel?

This year, for the first time, the economic returns of the song representing Spain in Eurovision will go entirely to its authors.

Between 1992 and 2021, copyrights were shared 50/50 with RTVE.

The goal of this change was to help national talent, but the

money is going to be spread across three continents.

The president of the Valencian Generalitat, Ximo Puig, congratulates the winner of the Benidorm Fest and representative of Spain in Eurovision 2022, Chanel.GVA (Europa Press)

While Bandini or Tanxugueiras were the composers and performers of their songs and presented a complete and closed candidacy to the committee,

is a laboratory product. Its original author is Leroy Sánchez, who also composed the Spanish representative of 2021,

. The song was presented to record company BMG, which agreed to invest 20,000 euros, according to

to produce it by polishing arrangements, reinforcing the formula and hiring a choreographer with experience with Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez or Ariana Grande to present a powerful staging ready to go to Turin.

For this, the Brazilian Ibere ​​Fortes, the Canadian Maggie Szabo, the British Keith Harris and the Dutchman Arjen Thonen were used.

They are all credited as

songwriters alongside Leroy Sánchez.

Now all that was missing was a singer who knew how to sell it.

Chanel Terrero was born in Cuba in 1991, but has lived in Barcelona since she was little.

She has focused her career on acting and dancing (she worked for eight years on

with Miryam Benedited), but

is her first song.

"The process was very fast," said the singer.

“Tony Sánchez-Ohlsson called me, he liked my stuff because he had seen me in musicals and he told me that the song hit me a lot”.

Sánchez-Olson is an old Eurovision acquaintance.

In 2007 he composed the Spanish representative song,

de D'Nash;

she repeated in 2012 with

by Pastora Soler and in 2015 with

by Edurne, and was left at the gates in 2014 with

by Brequette and in 2017 with

by Mirela.

This year he has served as advisor to the selection committee together with Zahara and J Cruz.

With their diverse musical criteria (an expert in Eurovision, a singer-songwriter, an urban composer), the three of them were in charge of helping the committee to filter, among the 800 songs that were presented, the most worthy candidates.

Until staying in 14 semifinalists.

More information

Chanel: “I have dreamed that a tomato was thrown at me, but I am strong in the face of hate on networks”

Among those 14, there were two by Leroy Sánchez,

and

by Sara Deop.

Tony Sánchez-Ohlsson was the only one of the three advisors who attended the Benidorm Fest.

Neither Zahara nor J Cruz have been as involved as him in the pre-selection.

One of his regular collaborators, the Swedish Thomas G: Son, managed to get a song among the 14 semifinalists,

of Xeinn.

In an interview with

, Chanel even referred to Sánchez-Ohlsson as one of the

songwriters (something that breaks the rules).

This may be due to a lapse on the part of the singer or because she is not even aware of the formula that has been applied for her candidacy.

A general impression among Eurofans is that a packaged product is easier to manage than an independent artist.

"Chanel is included in the project," says the journalist and eurofan

Quique de la Serna.

“They have given him the song, they have told him how to dance and what stage it will take.

She is not a warrior, she will not try to have the upper hand like Barei, who was a producer and composer and had trouble with Federico Llano and Toñi Prieto [the previous delegation]”.

In the past, representatives such as Pastora Soler, Ruth Lorenzo or Soraya Arnelas also had discrepancies with the delegation regarding its staging.

Rigoberta Bandini performs during the final of the Benidorm Fest. Manuel Lorenzo (EFE)

Were Rigoberta Bandini and Tanxugueiras better proposals?

Although consensus is impossible, the general impression seems to agree that

is a solid, ambitious and professional proposal, but also generic, impersonal and not very representative of Spanish culture.

In that sense, both

and

provide more substance.

The latter would also have marked the milestone of being the first representative song of Spain in a language other than Spanish.

The proposals of Bandini and Tanxugueiras were acquiring the texture of a social phenomenon throughout the past week.

They received support from artists (Mónica Naranjo), politicians (Yolanda Díaz) or journalists (Jose Antonio Zarzalejos).

Right now

is the second most listened to song in the country on Spotify and

the sixth.

rises to number 14. But internationally,

has climbed to number 3 of the most viral songs worldwide while

is at 10 and

at 12.

The music critic Fernando Neira describes Chanel's proposal as "a dance laboratory artifact that can represent Spain or Bosnia well, because it does not represent anything or anyone, it does not have identity values ​​in the musical or plot in the lyrical, it is a coarse

.

It's great for dancing in nightclubs in summer, because it's built with square and bevel.

This country is very rich musically and in

there is not a milligram of its own identity”.

Is it possible that there will be a year without Eurodrama?

In recent years there have been two constants in the Spanish candidacy for Eurovision: its selection process disappoints the public and the song is in the last places.

From the defeat of

of La Casa Azul against Rodolfo Chikilicuatre, the result of a trolling organized by the Forocoches website to laugh at the festival, to the "black hand" that according to Melody led the Vivancos to abandon it at the last minute facilitating Soraya's choice, it seems impossible to have a quiet preselection.

That is why on several occasions TVE has preferred to choose its representative by hand and save itself worries.

But does that happen in all countries or is it just our thing? Nordic televisions tend to be more transparent in their mechanisms while RTVE's strategy is more similar to that of the Eastern bloc: Russia, Serbia or Albania have often sent songs that were not favorites of the public but of the jury and the delegation.

The general impression among the public is that Spain has been going to Eurovision for decades with a certain inferiority complex: that if they have a mania for us, that if everything is politicking, that if we send mediocre songs on purpose.

However, every year the public gets excited again because deep down most Spaniards would like to see Spain win Eurovision at least once in their lives.

“Eurovision is like a bottle of champagne that you only open once a year”, compares De la Serna, “sometimes you open it and toast and other times you open it and the stopper hits you in the face.

It awakens a fanaticism comparable to football, because it mixes joy with adrenaline, passion and politics.

And that leads to extremist attitudes.

Keep in mind that most Eurofans

they have not felt that lolololo

with a soccer team.

Eurovision is the Champions for many people”.

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