The Swedish national broadcaster SVT has published the second part of the interview with the Executive Producer of Malmö 2013, Martin Österdahl. He tells us today how Sweden will move away from the nation branding element that has been part of the contest in the past.

Yesterday we were able to tell about the visions of the organising committee wanting the event to bridge gaps between European nations, where they existed. Today we hear about how the focus will be on the artists and the countries they come from, without losing the Swedish element. Mr. Österdahl uses a postcard from 2012, “Azerbaijan: Land of abundance” as the kind of nation branding that will not happen in Sweden. Sweden will not bang its own drum during the show, even if will still be obvious where the contest is taking place. Instead for example the postcards preceding the songs will bring the focus on the wealth of cultures and nationalities.

As an example he mentions the flash mob from that was performed during the final in Oslo in 2010. This created, according to SVT, an expectation as the dance was rehearsed in the different countries in advance. The dance was also the basis of the postcards. Mr Österdahl says however that the Norwegians took the removal of the local element too far. We shall not be losing the Swedish perspective, he promises.

Mr. Österdahl uses a fictional Bulgarian artist as an example, how it might work in practice: There should be an instant connection with the singer and the audience. She must not remain anonymous to us. We have to get a feeling of what it means for her to stand there and what it means to people in her country, watching the show in a square in Sofia. We want to create a genuine curiosity to the fantastic narrative within this contest, a potential that has not been utilised fully before.

For Martin Österdahl the storytelling principle “Show don’t tell” is sacred.  He is also saying that the postcards have recently moved away from telling stories to advertising. We want that people will get a good feeling of our country, but we shall not boast about how brilliant we are. We want to come across as self confident, not smug. To just show “look here we are, we can build skyscrapers, we have a lot of oil” is not the sort of way that we feel we want to promote Sweden. For us that feels like an old-fashioned and uninteresting approach, says Österdahl. We will respect that the situation may be different in other countries, but we will not take that route.

Martin Österdahl concludes by saying that he knows the expectation with the postcards are high and there is very little time for them in the shows. But we will use the time available the best we can, he says. There are literally thousands of plans in the air and we don’t know how much we will be able to do. What we will be doing won’t become clear until a few months. The guidelines we have produced now will be helping us in the process, but nothing is final yet at this stage.

The third part of the interview will be about how to save Eurovision from becoming boring.

Source: svt.se