Today, the rehearsals for the first semi-final of the sixty-second Eurovision Song Contest take place in Kyiv, Ukraine, the host city of this year’s edition. Forty-two countries will compete in this year’s song contest and tomorrow eighteen of them will fight for a place in the grand final. As usual, five countries (dubbed the ‘big five’) have automatically qualified to the final, as the five countries that have contributed the most to the show financially – these five countries are joined by the host, Ukraine.
Each broadcast show has three dress rehearsals. For semi-final one, the first rehearsal begins at 16:00 local time, Ukraine, lasting 2h25m. The second matches the time of the actual broadcast, running from 22:00 until 00:10 local time. The second of the two rehearsals is the jury rehearsal; this is where each entry will receive half of its votes. The juries from all of the eighteen countries competing in the first semi-final as well as in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom will be watching the performances tonight and ranking the performances from 1-17 or in the case of the three big five nations 1-18. This will be combined with the public vote on Tuesday night to form the final results, allowing ten of the eighteen competing countries to qualify to Saturday’s grand final.
