It had been a long, hot and sun-kissed day on the Downs as Bristol’s LGBT community and its allies gathered to celebrate the first Bristol Pride since 2019.
And as the minutes ticked down to headliner Carly Rae Jepsen’s appearance, the big screen flickered to life and the city’s Mayor Marvin Rees appeared, standing by the docks.
There were a few jeers but they turned to cheers when he said the word ‘Eurovision’ and ‘Bristol’ in the same sentence. Many missed exactly what he said and thought he was announcing Bristol would actually be hosting next year’s song contest.
Read more: Eurovision Song Contest 2023: Eight reasons why Bristol should host contest
But Bristol has a long way to go before hundreds of millions of viewers from across the continent tune in to cutaways of the Suspension Bridge and the coloured houses, in between whatever crazy-but-brilliant song Moldova brings to the party. But that's not to say it's a terrible idea. Indeed, even before the Mayor announced the bid, Bristol Live had suggested the idea days before.
On Monday, the official confirmation came that Eurovision would, indeed, be held in the UK. There had been a bit of a row about this, with many in Ukraine wanting to keep the hosting duties. But the possibility that Vladimir Putin might start firing hypersonic missiles at Graham Norton and Scott Mills, and the rest of the Eurovision party, meant the organisers stuck to their original thoughts and called up the UK as reserve hosts.
Monday’s announcement triggered the official starting gun on the race to be the city chosen to host the Eurovision Song Contest 2023, and Bristol is in the running. But what, exactly, are the chances Bristol will be chosen? The reality is, it will be seen as an outside choice if Bristol is picked. All five leading bookies taking bets on this contest have Glasgow as the clear favourite. William Hill and Betfair rank the Scottish city as less than two-to-one to be chosen.
Manchester, London and Birmingham are all under 10/1, and Liverpool are fifth favourites but even they are outsiders. Bristol, according to the bookmakers is down in 16th place - with odds of 26/1. To give context, there are cities ranked as more likely than Bristol to host Eurovision by the bookmakers that haven’t even declared they want to host it, or even said they couldn’t, like Brighton.
Bristol isn’t that popular a choice either, sadly. A poll being run by the online bible of Eurovision, a website called EurovisionWorld, has Liverpool as the most popular - with 31 per cent of the vote, while Leeds (24 per cent) and Glasgow (11 per cent) trailing behind. Bristol is alongside Birmingham and Newcastle, with just two per cent of the vote.
Of course, the decision won’t be taken by bookmakers or punters, or people who vote in online polls. All the above tells us so far, is that people in Liverpool are voting in their droves, while people in Glasgow are placing bets.
So what are the real chances it will be Bristol?
Hosting Eurovision is a huge challenge. The event has expanded massively since the days of 1974 when it was hosted in Brighton at the huge conference centre there, over one night, with an audience of 5,000 of so watching Abba win.
Now, the Eurovision Song Contest is a week-long affair, with semi-finals ahead of the Saturday final. In fact, preparations at the host venue typically begin around six weeks before the final. Delegations from each country will typically arrive in the host city two or three weeks before the live shows, and TV studios and booths for every nation’s broadcasters have to be created.
The sheer size of the event means it needs a venue capable of hosting at least 10,000 people, with 12,000-15,000 more appropriate.
As well as the event venue itself, a welcome reception is typically held at a venue in the host city on the Sunday before Eurovision week, accredited delegates, press and fans have access to an official nightclub - renamed the ‘EuroClub’, and some delegations will host their own party.
A big part of the Eurovision experience for the host city is the Eurovision Village, an official fan zone open to the public free of charge, with live performances by the contest’s artists and screenings of the live shows on big screens.
In the bible of Eurovision - the website EurovisionWorld - reporter Pedro Santos said that, typically, the organisers of Eurovision and the national broadcaster - the BBC - will pick the host city, and they look for four specific things.
The city has a venue able to accommodate at least 10,000 spectators, a press centre for 1,500 journalists, a city served by an international airport, and hotel accommodation for at least 2,000 people, who will descend on the city for those weeks.
In the article, Pedro Santos compiled a list of cities which, as he put it, ‘have what it takes’ to host Eurovision. Bristol wasn’t on that list, although 12 other cities - including Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Glasgow - were.
When HuffPost compiled an article looking at potential UK venues for Eurovision, it discounted Bristol, as did the BBC themselves when writing an article last month, before it was officially announced and, to be fair, before Bristol announced it was bidding for it.
So what’s going against Bristol?
Bristol has the hotel rooms - there are 4,000 rooms in the 40 hotels that are members of the Bristol Hoteliers Association.
Bristol has an airport - albeit it is in North Somerset. And the city is well versed in staging large-scale outdoor things like the fan village - one could well imagine that being set up in the Lloyds Amphitheatre, on the Downs or in Castle Park.
But it is the lack of an arena that many in the city have pointed to as Bristol’s potential downfall. When he announced the bid, the Mayor of Bristol said it would be at the YTL Arena currently being created in the Brabazon Hangar at the former Filton Airfield.
The airfield is in South Gloucestershire, but the giant hangar is in the City of Bristol - just - with the local authority border running right along the front of the iconic building.
YTL Arena is scheduled to open in 2024, but the Mayor’s idea is to create a bespoke venue for Eurovision a full year early. The Mayor announced Eurovision would be there, but for two weeks, YTL, the Malaysian company who own Wessex Water and are developing the Filton site for housing as well as the arena, remained publicly silent on the Mayor’s idea. That prompted some speculation they weren’t completely on board with the prospect of disrupting their work to create a 17,000-seat arena in 2024, to turn it into a venue to host the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023.
But that speculation appears to have ended on Monday. Hours after Eurovision confirmed the UK would be hosting, YTL tweeted that they were backing the bid.
“We are in support of Bristol’s bid to be the caretaker home of Eurovision 2023,” the official YTL Arena Twitter account tweeted. “The Brabazon Hangars - YTL Arena’s future home - offer the space and availability to custom build Eurovision, with Ukraine at the heart.”
And that message that Bristol would put Ukraine at the heart of its hosting of the song contest was echoed by the Mayor of Bristol, who spoke to BBC Points West on Monday evening.
“Even if Eurovision is not in Ukraine, Ukrainians will be at the heart of Bristol’s Eurovision, so we’re really doing this with the city, to make sure that the values of Eurovision are central to what we do, that Ukrainians are at the heart of it, to make sure there’s true legacy from what comes,” Marvin Rees said.
It will be a challenge
The Eurovision Song Contest normally takes place in May, which gives YTL and Bristol just nine or ten months to create a venue to host it. And that could be exactly where Bristol’s bid becomes unstuck.
The Mayor may well tell the TV executives that the blank canvas to create a huge venue specifically for Eurovision - meeting everything that the event needs - is a positive because it would mean the organisers and broadcasters could work with Bristol to get a venue that meets all their needs.
But for some of those organisers, it could be a bit of a risk: giving such a huge event to a city that would then be in a race against time to create a venue, when there are many other cities with perfectly good venues already up and running.
The other downside is the venue’s location, and it is no surprise that the bid to host Eurovision in Filton reignited all the social media fury that the original 2010s plan for an arena next to Temple Meads Station was so controversially ditched by the Mayor.
While Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow, for example, all have arenas capable of hosting Eurovision in the heart of their city centres, Bristol’s as-yet-unfinished arena is so far on the edge of the city that anyone travelling there would park their car in South Gloucestershire.
What’s more, while pretty much every British city’s airport is on that city’s edge, Bristol’s is eight miles to the south west of Bristol, while the Brabazon Hangars are six miles to the north of the city centre in completely the opposite direction.
At the moment, at quiet times, Google Maps describes the journey from Bristol Airport to the Brabazon Hangar as 14.6 miles and taking a minimum of half an hour - with a journey that goes nowhere near the city centre. Fans arriving at the airport and trying to access public transport to the Brabazon Hangar would - unless special buses were laid on - face an hour and a half journey via two buses.
While these are issues that could be overcome with a major expense on specific public transport to connect with the YTL Arena, the people making the decision on where in the UK should host the 2023 Eurovision will look at this kind of infrastructure challenge and compare it with the other cities that are currently leading the bookies’ odds and the fan polls.
What do you think? Would you love to see Eurovision here on our doorstep for what we're sure would be a moment in history for us all? Let us know in the comments below.
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