NEXT Saturday, beady-eyed parents and children around the island will be gathering round the television to tune in to this year’s Junior Eurovision, which is to be held in Hasselt in Belgium.
But there is a sting in the tail for Cypriots this year. Despite the island’s participation in the voting, Cyprus will not be participating because the island’s winning song was deemed, by the CyBC, as being plagiarised.
In September, Rena Kyriakides won the Cypriot contest with the song ‘Tsirko’ (Circus) but her celebrations were cut short when parents of the other participants objected, saying the song had been plagiarised from a Tolis Voskopoulos song. Other parents complained that the song resembled a 1978 Greek Eurovision Song Contest by Tania Tsanaklidou and others stated that the song was a lift of a 1988 Greek Eurovision song called ‘Klooun’ (Clown).
This in turn prompted CyBC, who organised the competition, to appoint a committee to decide on the future of the song. The committee issued an announcement stating that there were some problems with the song and it could not represent Cyprus in the Junior Eurovision.
Panicos Panayiotou is the father of Louis, the 12-year-old boy who sang the song ‘Fantasia’, which came second in Cyprus contest. He questioned why the CyBC decided to send no participant at all.
“When the contestants enter the competition, the parents sign a form in which we agree to allow CyBC the discretion to decide if they want to send the selected song or not to the Junior Eurovision. If they have a reason for not sending the second best song, which they should have done, then why haven’t they informed us of the reason?”
Panayiotou added the other children in the competition were being made to suffer simply because CyBC were annoyed that problems had arisen and the first selected song couldn’t go. “My son was obviously very upset, especially in the first few days after CyBC announced they wouldn’t be sending a participant to the competition. A fail to see how all the other children should suffer as well simply because there was a problem with the winning song.”
“What the people at CyBC must understand is that the people paid money to vote for the ten best songs. All the songs received votes and the people had spoken as to which song they preferred. Now if the first song cannot take part, it is only logical that the second placed song with the second highest votes would take its place.”
But a CyBC official told the Cyprus Mail that the saga surrounding Junior Eurovision had turned into something resembling a ‘presidential election campaign’.
“First of all, the parents know, and they sign a document confirming this, that CyBC has the option not to send a song if they decide the song is not good enough or, for example, the song cannot go for financial reasons. During the voting of the songs, we experienced so many problems with parents accusing each other and other arguments that we decided to send no song at all. The whole thing resembled a presidential election campaign and that cannot be good, not only for the competition but also for the children.”
Referring to the comments of Panayiotou, the same CyBC official also said that the contestant that came second had no right to be complaining. “I cannot understand why we are hearing such a fuss from the parents of the contestant that came second. The simple fact is that the contestant that came second didn’t win. And let us not forget that we are dealing with children here. We are hardly going to approach the contestant that came first and tell her that her song sounds like another song and that the second placed song would go instead.
“Therefore, for the sake of keeping the peace and not upsetting any more children, we decided that we would not be sending any song to take part. This is a delicate issue and we have to be careful when dealing with matters concerning children. But even if we had decided to send a participant now, it still doesn’t mean that we would be accepted.”
But it isn’t all bad news for CyBC. Sources from the station said that the island has been unofficially selected by the EBU (Eurovision organisers) to host the 2007 Junior Eurovision song contest.
“This is a great honour for us. We showed an interest in hosting the event, and it is not like the Eurovision when the winners host the competition, so we applied and the response so far has been positive.”
