1969 Dutch winner, Lenny Kuhr, has been edited out of the broadcast of the concert registration of Het Grote Songfestivalfeest 2022 (trans. “The Grand Song Contest Party 2022”) that was held in the middle of November 2022, and was televised yesterday (January 4th 2022) on Dutch national television. The BBC also broadcasted this concert registration on New year’s Day.
A minor Dutch riot
Dutch Eurovision Song Contest 1969 winner, Lenny Kuhr, has started a minor Dutch riot online, when she posted on her Twitter account today that she was edited out of the concert registration of last year’s “Het Grote Song Songfestivalfeest”, one of the biggest Eurovision concerts ever held, and that she was not informed about this matter before actually seeing it for herself on TV. In the introduction at the beginning of the show the Dutch presenters, Cornald Maas and Edsilia Rombley, mention that there are 15 winners in the show, but eventually not all of them made the final editing cut, much to the dislike of Lenny Kuhr who got everybody singing her winning song “De Troubadour” in the grand Dutch music temple, Ziggo Dome, in Amsterdam.
AVROTROS reacts
In a statement the Dutch national broadcaster, AVROTROS, reacted that all of the many acts of Het Grote Songfestivalfeest 2022 were never told that they would all be in the broadcast of the concert registration simply because the concert had a running time of 2.5 hours, and the broadcast was only 1.5 hour, which meant that drastic decisions needed to be made. Next to this, AVROTROS also mentioned that the editing has nothing to do with favouritism, but also with whether the Eurovision artists present have been featured in previous televised concert registrations of Het Grote Songfestivalfeest, which was many times the case for Lenny Kuhr.