James O'Hagan

That's going to be halved down to 10 votes to encourage manipulation or to discourage manipulation.

And they're going to be also kind of trying to push people to spread those votes out more across many entries.

Because what you have seen in the last couple of years with this system of the 20 votes is that there will be two or three acts that will get

all the points and then it won't be too spread out down the rest of the entries.

Juries are returning to semi-finals to try and encourage more of a diversity going through.

So it's not just based around popularity and to allow kind of a diversity of acts.

And they are, as I said, banning that government linked promotion and third party campaigns.

They're also expanding the jury panels

to make sure that they include at least two jurors between the age of 18 and 25.

So it's going to be the, yes, exactly.

So it's going to be the typical like music journalists, teachers, creative directors, but at least two young people in it to make sure that there sort of is a relevance to that younger audience.

And, you know, Eurovision has been relentless in the last couple of years at pursuing that like youth audience, like even the way they started using their,

using their TikTok and using their online presence to try and really bring in that younger audience.

So that's something that's obviously really, really important to them.

The director of Eurovision, Martin Green, has said that they were seeing that undue promotion, particularly by governments, didn't call out who those governments were or that was anyone in particular, and said that Eurovision needs to be an impartial and neutral space and not be instrumentalised.

But I sort of feel that

They're not allowing this conversation really to happen in like an honest way because of the way in which it feels as if they are shielding any direct criticism from the sort of the one participant who has been really kind of pushing for this.

There was due to be a vote on Israel's participation in the Eurovision Song Contest in early December.

But...

that vote was cancelled as a result of the ceasefire which you know it's not really a ceasefire if people keep bombing each other but anyway well not each other yeah each other was the wrong choice if one keeps bombing the other it's not really a ceasefire yeah um