90 days until another Armenian Junior Eurovision arrives in Yerevan – preliminary summary for 2022

In exactly three months to the day, the Junior Eurovision Song Contest will be back in Yerevan, Armenia – a preliminary summary for 2022 with announcements from the last six months and the risks involved in hosting.

Armenia and its capital Yerevan could host the 20th anniversary Junior Eurovision Song Contest in 2022. On Sunday afternoon 11 December, the 20th edition of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest will take place, after the 2021 contest in Paris was won by Malena of Armenia, who skipped the previous year’s contest due to local armed conflicts, with her song Qami qami. Although the organisation of this year’s contest is underway, according to information received earlier, many details are still to be revealed. In this summary, we briefly summarise what we know about the competition, which is due to take place in exactly a quarter of a year, and the risks that the organisation of the competition is again facing.

Record ratings after Armenian retake

The Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2021 closed with record audience figures: the 19th edition of the Song Contest, which was broadcast live on 19 December and involved 19 countries, attracted 33 million viewers, which after a decade once again helped the showcase of young talent to generate an outstanding average audience. Poland stands out in terms of audience figures, where the show achieved the highest audience share of all broadcasters for the third year running. The other record-breaking country is Iceland, the only country to broadcast the contest, where the Junior Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast live for the first time with an audience share of 96%.

Following the victory in December 2021, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the Armenian public broadcaster AMPTV announced on 6 April 2022, unusually, one month earlier and contrary to the usual practice, that Yerevan and the Karen Demirchyan Sports and Concert Complex would once again be the venue for the 20th Junior Eurovision Song Contest.

The list of participating countries is not yet finalised

At the time of publication of this summary, the competition returns to Yerevan with a total of 17 confirmed participating countries, but despite the September expected deadline, the final list of participating countries has not been announced (for comparison, in the last 5 years, the EBU and the broadcaster of the organising country have announced the number of participants by the second week of September at the latest).

Georgia/Georgia (Mariam Bigvava), Kazakhstan (David Charlin), Northern Macedonia (Lara & Irina) and Portugal (Nicolas Alves) have already selected and named their contestants for the 2022 edition of the competition in Armenia, while the selection process for the host country Armenia and the adult Eurovision winner Ukraine is currently underway. In addition to the above countries, Albania, Bulgaria, last year’s host France, Ireland and Italy, this year’s Eurovision host, have already announced their entries, while Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Serbia and Spain will also be competing in 2022.

At the end of August, the BBC, which will host the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest, announced that the UK will return to the youth Eurovision competition after a 17-year hiatus following three previous participations, which will be available on all platforms including CBBC and BBC One, as well as on the UK public broadcaster’s online platform, BBC iPlayer. Interestingly, while the country’s Junior Eurovision entry was previously organised by ITV, this is the first time that the BBC has worked on the production and song selection for the British Junior Eurovision entry.

So far in 2022, we have information on two countries withdrawing from the Junior Eurovision Song Contest: Germany, which has competed for the past two years, and Russia, which was suspended by the European Broadcasting Union in the spring, will definitely not be competing. Although in the latter case the Russian side opened its bidding platform for the Yerevan contest on 15 February 2022, the suspension of the country’s EBU membership and the withdrawal of the existing member broadcasters means that there will be no Russian contestants in Yerevan, and their capacities will be used to develop their own format, the “Our Generation – Junior Song Contest” (OGSC), according to Russian press reports.

Renewed conflicts in Armenia – settlement risks on the horizon?

Along with Russia, Germany is the other withdrawing country, which will not send a competitor to Yerevan after its debut in 2020 and its start in Paris in 2021. The NDR and the public children’s channel are on a “creative break” and have decided to withdraw for security reasons.

The withdrawal and the details of the German representation were explained to ESC Kompakt by NDR; continued on next page…

Illustration: JuniorEurovision.tv
Source: JuniorEurovision.tv, ESCXtra, ESC Kompakt / OurVision International