The Spanish selection for Eurovision 2011 will feature a total of four shows. The 24 selected artists will be divided in the first two shows. Five will qualify from each of the preliminary rounds to the semifinal. Only three will make it to the grand finale, to be broadcast on a yet unknown date.
As already announced, the first show will take place on Friday at 22:15 CET. Twelve of the 24 participants will sing hits from the Eurovision history. The same will happen in the second show: the other 12 candidates will cover both Eurovision winning songs and past Spanish entries in order to showcase their vocal skills. At a first stage, the 5-member jury (Reyes del Amor, Albert Hammond, Boris Izaguirre, Merche and another member yet to be presented) will knock out four acts, thus only 8 will be eligible to go through the semifinal. Five of them will qualify from each show – three voted by the audience and two by the jury.
As a result of this, the semifinal will feature 10 acts. They will once again have to perform Eurovision classics. Only three of them will win a ticket to the final, voted by both the public and the jury.
In the grand finale of the Spanish selection, there will be a double decision to make: who will represent Spain in Düsseldorf and what song will they sing? The three finalists will perform a mix of three different candidate songs, which means that only 9 of the 20 selected songs will make it to the final. Only those 9 will be pusblished on the RTVE website. The combination gaining the most votes from both the audience and the jury will become the Spanish representative in Eurovision 2011. How the participating entries will be narrowed down remains unknown.
Spanish broadcaster TVE has closed the door to a song in English representing the country. If a song in that language makes it to the final in Spain, it will be translated into Spanish.
Regarding the participation of established artists, esctoday.com reported yesterday that they have until Thursday at 12:00 to apply. They will be granted a spot in the final automatically. TVE's head of Contents, Lola Molina, stated this morning "the surprise" of the broadcaster of the fact that no famous acts have shown interestto date.
In the press conference held today in Madrid, no information as to the dates of the remaining shows has been disclosed. For the moment, we only know that the first heat will take place this Friday at 22:15 CET, to be hosted by Anne Igartiburu and 2010 Spanish representative Daniel Diges, who will be reporting from the backstage.
Below you can see the video RTVE sent to the media todayexplaining their 2011 Eurovision selection process:
