There hasn't been a Greenroom article for about two weeks because of the Eurovision Song Contest period, so we apologise for our absence! Here we go again, with a brand new article written by… Sietse bakker!
One big circus…
25th May, 2003. Turkey won the Eurovision Song Contest yesterday and who knows what it will bring! Already during the voting of the contest people were talking about whether Turkey would be able to host the contest. During the winners' press conference, it was already announced that the upcoming contest would take place in Istanbul. With all my childhood memories to the horrible sound and image quality of TRT – I live in Amsterdam, where we have TRT on cable – I was really looking forward to the upcoming contest…
Traditionally, I contacted TRT in the week after their victory to introduce esctoday.com and to explain what we're doing and what the importance is of a good relationship with the host broadcaster. I got an email back from Berna Batmaz, who later became first assistant of this year's executive producer Bulent Osma, saying that she was very busy and that she would come back later to me. Maybe 'later' means something like 'within seven months', because I haven't got an email back yet.
Somewhere in February I emailed her again, and of course she was very busy again. Somehow, it gave me a comfortable feeling, because that would mean that TRT was working on the preparations for the 49th Eurovision Song Contest. Thanks to Svante Stockselius I got the answers to my questions, and that's how esctoday.com celebrates its first Eurovision Song Contest without prior contact with the host broadcaster. Now, what does this mean? In fact, it means that a good relationship with the host broadcaster is unneccesary. But you never know how it could've been with some prior communication. Esctoday.com was not the only medium longing for some communication with the host broadcaster and we were not the only one thinking that the ICT department at TRT disabled the reply function of their employee's email software.
