Czech Republic

Aven Romale Gipsy.cz

"If you really wanna understand, just sing it with me..."

For a competition that is more or less reliant on the input of the voting public for an outcome, Eurovision is remarkably short on audience participation. The restraints of the production - in particular the sheer pace at which it gets through the songs and the fact that each song has only 3 minutes to make its mark - leave the performers oddly detached from the audience in the arena: the best they can hope for in terms of interaction is a spontaneous burst of applause mid-song that the microphones pick up and project to the viewers at home.

This may prove problematic for the Czech entry in Moscow, Aven Romale, which perhaps more than any other in the history of Eurovision needs to appeal directly to the audience for it to resonate. There has been a curious lack of songs in the contest - especially in the televoting era where appealing to the massed viewers of the continent was your only hope of making any impact on the scoreboard - of the 'I sing this bit then you all repeat it' variety. Shorn of this kind of support, the Czech Republic could easily find themselves propping up the rest of the semi once again at the end of the night, since Aven Romale's hook (and pretty much its whole point) requires the audience to sing along and go a bit mental for it to work.

And that's in spite of the colourful and at times surprisingly subtle and complex composition, which could see them doing very well indeed in the final if they run the gauntlet of the semi-final's cut-throat televote and come out the other end unscathed. If the boys from Gipsy.cz pitch it just right, getting the audience wanting to be involved, I can see Aven Romale's inoffensive comedy appeal serving it just as well, if not better, than the similar feel to the Turkish entry in 2004, For Real, and Moldova's debut in 2005, Boonika Bate Doba. While lumbered with an unenviable draw, it has the added benefit of standing out from everything else in the 1st semi, and that - in combination with a fun performance - could be enough to see it through. It all depends on whether we, as the audience, really do wanna understand and sing along.