The eighth esctoday.com TOP TEN list starts today with the places no. 1 being announced. As announced on Saturday, this week's topic are the TOP TEN most crazy national final formats.

National final formats that met one or more of the following criteria were considered:

• strange/complicated/unsual voting system
• overly lengthy process/unusual selection of finalists
• high effort turns out to be needless

This list is about formats, so strange/unexpected results and bizarre entries, performances and presentations are not considered.

So we continue…

No. 1 – Be a Star

The Bulgarian national selection in 2009 was probably the most complicated one ever, even outdoing their already complicated 2008 format…

The first of nine heats was held on 2nd October 2008, one day after songs for the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 would have been allowed to be performed in public. Three heats were held in Ocotber, three in November and three in December. Five songs competed in each heat and televoting chose the top three to move forward to the next round. In the fourth week of every month, a quarter final was held with the qualifiers of the previous three heats. The top three of each quarter final were chosen to move forward to the semi final. These nine acts there met another nine acts that were chosen as wildcards. Two of these wildcards had already taken part in the heats and the other seven were entirely new to the competition. Nien songs were chosen to move forward to the final. Only two of the songs that had to go through the Be a Star heats made it to the final. The nine finalists were chosen were joined by another three new wildcards. Krassimir Avramov was the runaway winner in the final getting 55.5% of the votes. The two acts that qualified through the Be a Star process, which lasted three months, only finished seventh and eighth among the twelve participants getting less than 6% of the votes together.

Although it lasted almost five months in total, this national selection was no success for the Bulgarian broadcaster. Not only turned it out that the lengthy heats were rather useless, the chosen song Illusion did not even make it past the semi final as it finished 16th with seven points. This is by far the lowest score of a Bulgarian entry ever.

The highest placed Be a Star qualifier, Stefan Ilchev with Get Up (seventh place):

Tomorrow, we will show you some national final formats that would have deseverved to reach the list but did not make the top ten. Furthermore, next week's topic will be introduced.