Summary:

In detail:

Eurovision stages once were used to give the entries an individual setup. Especially after colour television was invented. This stage doesn’t, because obviously, SVT wants to play the gods of fairness and forces every country to have a blue backdrop on an already confusing, cold and uninspiring stage, making the show about as colourful as back in 1967, when black was black and white was white for the last time.

I planned this series of stage colour analysis (see the one for semi 1 here) before I knew that literally every song will have blue on its stage. So how can I turn this into a meaningful and interesting post, if at all?

Let’s look at the little differences!

Now that we have worked out that every stage has blue, more or less (also read Shi’s rehearsal reviews on day 1, day 2, day 3 and day 4!), we can focus on other colours.

Red (ask the Slovenians) is the second dominant colour on this year’s Eurovision stage, in this semi-final most prominently featured in Latvia, Poland, Serbia, Ireland, Slovenia, Ukraine and Albania.

So which staging manages to stand out for its colours?

Israel – despite blue – has a huge firework display going on, giving the staging a very golden touch. Also Macedonia has a rather different set of colours in its backdrop (violet, gold, yellow). Even Slovenia (despite the song title) surprises with lots of yellow.

However, the two countries who win today’s colour analysis are clearly Georgia and Belgium.

Georgia comes with lots of violet, yellow and pink, giving their stage and their fog clouds a lot of urgently needed colour. Outstanding visuals on an already outstanding song (you can’t deny the latter whatever you think of it), which is surely going to help them. Whether it’s enough help to make it qualify, we will see, but they made the very best out of it.

Georgia © Anna Velikova (EBU)

And finally Belgium doesn’t only have a catchy song that goes down well in non-fan circles, it doesn’t only have a perfect spot in the running order, it also has the most outstanding colour set in the whole semi-final. The stage here is apparently as bright as it can get in 2016, with the backdrop displaying shades of yellow, orange and gold. The spotlights shine a white light on the stage, and there’s only a little amount of blue.

Belgium © Andres Putting (EBU)

My verdict: The biggest disappointments for me are Norway (which should have been a lot brighter / turquoise to make it stand out) and Albania – in other years very keen on red – blue doesn’t suit their 2016 entry at all.

Despite blue – Latvia, Switzerland, Israel, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Ukraine are making the best out of their songs.

And Georgia and Belgium are getting things as right as possible with their colours.