Well as you would already know, the winner was/is Denmark!!
We had an excellent view of the stage from our seats, which was surprising considering how late in the ticket sales we managed to secure seats. We were up the back of the arena directly in front of the stage at the back of the first tier of seating, seated behind supporters from Ireland and UK and in between supporters from Russia and Sweden (I think). The arena itself is about the size of the Sydney Entertainment Centre so most seats had a good view of the stage (except for those in the rafters behind the stage)
Seeing the show live was awesome and you got to see lots of little things that don’t get shown on the TV, for example when the host is getting the votes at the end, I assumed she/they would normally have stood there the entire time, but what you didn’t see was the man run onto stage whilst the 4th country was announcing it’s votes and shove a stool under her dress. You also didn’t see him run back onto stage later on and remove the stool from under her dress, or frequently appearing with a bottle of water for the host to drink from whilst countries were announcing their first 7 points.
You also didn’t see the stage crew guy slide across the stage and sweep the mic stage off during the performance of Norway whilst the singer was facing a camera at the back of the stage –
Also for those interested in how they do the complete 360* shots around the performers, this is done by a guy with a stedi-cam attached to his waist running in from one side of the stage, sweeping around the performers and then running back off the stage, the entire time out of view of the next camera coming in for the next shot, whether it be a fixed camera in the middle of the audience, a boom camera sweeping in from the side or the ceiling camera sweeping down from the roof.
Grandma as promised here’s a video of Ireland’s performance Live –
The only downside of seeing the show live, is that I missed the commentary from Julia and Sam. Also sometimes I couldn’t hear the words or the songs or what the host was saying as the audience was too loud/music too loud.
Otherwise a great time was had by all and I’m looking forward to next year’s show in Denmark, watched from our lounge room in Australia (it’s very expensive to see it live 🙂 )
Farvel
P.S. No issues with trains home from the show this time 🙂
