Liverpool calling

Liverpool City Council staged the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Ukraine. Here, event professionals discuss their roles in the massive musical event that took over the city and comprised more than one big arena show

On October 7, the BBC revealed that Liverpool had been successful in its bid to host the 67th Eurovision Song Contest. The city had beaten interest from 20 other cities to host the international singing competition on behalf of Ukraine. It’s a date that Susan Gibson, Culture Liverpool’s city events manager, will never forget.

“The bidding process was intense,” explains Gibson. “Site visits started at the end of August. Twenty cities showed interest in hosting the event, which were then shortlisted to seven and then it was between us and Glasgow. Questions were coming in all the time, there was scrutiny, and rightly so, but it was constant, and the questions kept coming until an hour before the announcement. Claire McColgan, director of Culture Liverpool, thought we hadn’t got it.”

How wrong she was. The BBC announced that Liverpool, with its rich music heritage, had won. Gibson was now head of city delivery; the woman in charge of coordinating a complex stakeholder map. “I was delighted when we found out we had won but being honest, I had no idea of the scale,” she continues. “It’s enormous.”

As the host city, Liverpool City Council is responsible for delivering everything outside of ACC Liverpool’s M&S Bank Arena, including a 16,000-cap Eurovision Village at Pier Head, EuroClub at Camp and Furnace, and the Turquoise Carpet opening ceremony event at St George’s Hall, which will welcome all 37 delegations taking part in the competition.

MEETINGS AND MORE MEETINGS

“Eurovision is phenomenal,” Gibson adds. She is wearing blue and yellow branded clothing to symbolise the colours of the Ukrainian flag. “It is 100 per cent the biggest thing I have ever worked on, bigger than Giants. But what have I learned working on this event? That the city can pull anything together. We can do anything.

“Usually, you have 12 months to plan Eurovision; we’ve pulled it off in just shy of seven months and you’ll notice the bags under my eyes as I say that.”

Gibson laughs, as she takes a rare moment to sit down and survey the St George’s Hall site as the final throes of the build come together. She has racked up thousands of steps as she walks between the Pier Head and St George’s Hall sites. It’s the quickest way for her to get around the city, she says, taking a sip of her soy latte.

“My core team – Sue McAdam, Bethany Sproston, Kate Gilston, Riannah Brown, and Emma Barton – has been brilliant,” Gibson continues. “I have two event managers running the Eurovision Village with its Discover Ukraine area and two event managers at St George’s Hall and we have producers, project managers, and a huge team of freelancers. Plus, we have a visitor experience team welcoming the delegations, our volunteer manager Mathilde Bellec, and a full accessibility programme developed by Tom Lechthaler.”

Gibson is also working alongside Culture Liverpool’s senior events manager Jason Dolman, who is head of travel and transport. Together, they have coordinated the city’s event management plans and delivery strategies, as well as numerous safety advisory groups (SAG), and joint agency groups (JAG).

Gibson explains: “When you win the bid to host Eurovision, you are contracted to deliver the Turquoise Carpet event, the EuroClub, and the Eurovision Village but because we’re Liverpool, we do more. We chose to deliver EuroFestival [arts and culture programme], EuroLearn [education programme], and EuroStreet [community programme] on top, and then the Lotto came on board with its big welcome party, Big Eurovision Welcome.

“The scale has meant that as well as SAGs and JAGs, every two weeks we have had a host city delivery group meeting with 55 people on Zoom and every other week, Jason has led a transport delivery group with 90 people. Plus, we’ve had visitor experience group meetings, volunteer meetings, a chair’s group, and security meetings with Merseyside Police, and the sustainability arm is huge. There’s been enough meetings, but it’s worked.”

Security Planning

When we chat, there is still one week to go before the final of the 67th Eurovision Song Contest takes place. There is excitement in the air, which Gibson describes as pure joy. But a huge security operation has also been at the heart of the city’s event management plan. Symphotech has run “excellent” tabletop sessions and two different accreditation systems have been required to “talk” to each other so that people like Martin Green, who is leading the Eurovision Song Contest’s production team, can move seamlessly from the M&S Bank Arena to the Eurovision Village, for example.

On the night of the final, Gibson will be safely tucked away in Silver Control in Bootle, with one eye on the TV as the glamorous proceedings get underway. Gibson adds: “My team has been absolutely brilliant… and I know that sounds cheesy, but they really have been incredible.”

Supply Chain

Gibson describes the events supply chain as “amazing” too, particularly as the juggernaut that is Eurovision has grown and developed.

Verve, GAP Group, FGH Security, Arena Event Services, and ESG have been appointed by the council to provide infrastructure and services to the Eurovision Village at Pier Head. Liverpool City Council contracted some of its preferred suppliers to work on various elements of Eurovision but has also had to go out to the open market to fulfil other contractor requirements.

FGH Security is also providing event security to the St George’s Hall site, which is hosting the 25,000-capacity Big Eurovision Welcome. The large site is buzzing with experienced event contractors and suppliers – Event Design Company, IPS, MaxWiFi, Roadphone NRB, Buffalo Power, PRG, Prism Lighting, Wernick, 4Wall, Production Box, and Ashbrook – which are all putting the important finishing touches to the reimagined city-centre urban landscape.

Appetite For A Party

Produced by TBI Media on behalf of Lotto, the Big Eurovision Welcome is comprised of world-class music, aerial performances, projection mapping, drones, fireworks and more. After chatting with Gibson, StandOut meets Andrew Wyke, director of events at TBI Media, and Sarah Greene, senior project director at TBI Media, at the St George’s Hall site too. Wyke takes up the story: “Lotto is an official sponsor of Eurovision. They approached us and asked us if there was anything around Eurovision that it could do or be part of. Lotto is a client of ours, so we talked to the BBC, talked to Liverpool and what became clear – for all the right reasons –was that there was a significant commitment to the song contest but there wasn’t a plan or a budget for a big official Eurovision welcome party. That was where we saw an opportunity.”

Liverpool City Council loved the idea of a big welcome party. There was clearly an appetite for an opening event.

“We said to Lotto, there’s something to be done here but for this to be done, and to get the funding that would be needed to put on this scale of event, there has to be equity and equity can only come through broadcast,” Wyke continues. “We had a conversation with the BBC but because of the Coronation

Concert, there was no space in the schedule. In the end, the hour-long programme they had available has been split into two and packaged as a 30-minute spotlight on the Turquoise Carpet and 30 minutes on the show. So, Big Eurovision Welcome is a 90-minute show, but the last 30 are designed for TV.”

Ticking Clock

The planning for the Big Eurovision Welcome took place pre- and post-Christmas. Wyke adds: “It was a difficult period. Everyone wanted to do it, and everyone wanted to just go, but there are processes you have to go through. It was very much an accelerator/ breaks scenario with a very real ticking clock.”

Wyke describes the Liverpool City Council team as “amazing”, highlighting their super cooperative nature that enabled him and his team – Greene, Phil Critchlow, and Production Box’s Mike Oates – to crack on with planning.

Critchlow is responsible for the broadcast requirements, Wyke has looked after the “show”, Oates is in charge of technical production, and Green has led on TBI’s relationship with the Liverpool City Council and site infrastructure

So, what is the show? Wyke explains: “We had to make the space the star. This event is for Liverpool. The brief has always been Liverpool, Ukraine, and Eurovision. And I guess the biggest question we had to answer was how does that balance, and what does that show look like?

“It hasn’t been about putting on a Eurovision concert. It’s been about celebrating Liverpool. When you think about the creative, all these things start to inform you. Liverpool is a place that has welcomed the world because of its history. The show is very narrative. Everything in the show has a touchpoint with Liverpool, Eurovision, and Ukraine. It’s all about layers.”

Amazing Skills

Big Eurovision Welcome is a “fast-paced, content-heavy 90 minutes” that “just moves”. It’s a giant jigsaw puzzle, a massive game of Tetris, and whilst it’s not the biggest show that Wyke has personally produced, it is the biggest event of its kind that TBI Media has.

Greene is keen to mention the great contractors, great creative people, and extra resources and experience that TBI has brought in to execute the show. Wyke concurs. He calls Oates the “hero” of technical production and he believes it is shows like Big Eurovision Welcome – produced on tricky sites – that make you realise and appreciate the amazing skills present within the events industry. He says: “You can’t control every element of an event, but you can put the right people in control to do the right things. You have oversight but you are still amazed in a nice way by how good people are.”

Greene comments: “We’ve put our heart and soul into this for four months. The big learning for me is that I would have liked to have spent more time face-to-face. When there is such a huge stakeholder map, being on-site and around people solves 90 per cent of your challenges.”

For example, it was only ten weeks ago – on a second site visit – that the decision was taken to move the Big Eurovision Welcome stage from the steps of St George’s Hall to a more central location. The answer was right in front of TBI all the time, but when you don’t have the time, you can’t always see the obvious, explains Wyke.

He concludes: “It will be interesting to see wherever Eurovision goes next year if they’ll have an opening party. I hope we have set a precedent, but we’ll have to wait and see. Before that happens, I want to sleep, but before that happens, I have to get the train home, spend some time with the kids and pretend I am not tired!”