In 2017 he delivered a year of transformative culture for Hull, showing it off as a “can-do” city.
Martin Green was the man behind Hull City of Culture 2017, arriving after overseeing the London 2012 Olympic ceremonies and the Tour de France’s opening ceremony in Leeds. He bowed out of Hull a year later and not long after being awarded the CBE in the New Year’s Honours.
Now, Martin is the director of the best-known song contest, Eurovision, and has been moved to write an open letter to the “treasured Eurovision Song Contest community”, addressing alleged voting irregularities but also congratulating this year’s winner, Austria, whose success was overshadowed by concerns over voting patterns. He said: “The EBU [European Broadcasting Union] has listened to and engaged closely in the conversations among members, our fans and in the media following this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).
“I want to again congratulate the winner JJ and the team from ORF [Austrian broadcaster]. His performance and song rightly, clearly and validly won the Contest and we want to make sure any ancillary conversations do not overshadow this epic achievement. The ESC voting system includes multiple security layers and a comprehensive set of rules to ensure that a valid result is generated.”
Martin said specially designed systems were used to monitor and prevent fraud and all results were verified by a collective with over 40 years of voting experience. “All audience voting, be it SMS, call or online shows evidence of the motivation of communities or diasporas around certain contestants,” he said.
(Image: Getty Images)
“This can be for many reasons including personal attributes, back stories, geographic affiliations and current affairs. Historically the ESC has been as open to this as other singing and music competitions and reality television.
“Every year the Reference Group for the Contest, which contains representatives from and acts on behalf of our Members, studies the data provided by our voting partner Once to make recommendations of any actions available to us to ensure our rules and systems remain fail-safe and take into account contemporary external factors such as advances in technology and external influences. This process will happen as it always does in June this year.
“Alongside the discussions of the Reference Group, one aspect the EBU will be looking at is the promotion of our acts by their delegations and associated parties. Such promotion is allowed under our rules and acts to celebrate the artists, increase their profile and launch future careers – it’s very much part of the music industry – but we want to ensure that such promotion is not disproportionally affecting the natural mobilisation of communities and diasporas we see in all entertainment audience voting.
“Another example is the number of votes we allow per person – 20 per payment method. This is designed to ensure that audiences of all ages can vote for more than one of their favourite songs and there is no current evidence that it disproportionally effects the final result – but the question has been asked and so we will look at it.
“The EBU and I will be, as we always do, engaging our Members for their views on this and other matters.”
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