(thing) by CatherineB Fri Jan 31 2003 at 10:30:16
The annual competition to choose the Croatian representative for the Eurovision Song Contest. Few entrants go to as much trouble as the Croatians, whose national final is an event on the Croatian pop calendar in its own right and one of the most elaborate staging-posts in the run-up to Eurovision.

With no official singles chart, music promotion in Croatia depends on airplay, backed up by a year-round array of festivals of which the Dora - always on a Sunday in early March - is among the earliest. The largest of these events feature up to 50 songs over two or three nights; Dora line-ups are anywhere between 20 and 26 strong, but have still been known to be larger than the Eurovisions they select for.

The first Dora took place in 1993, the first year Croatia was eligible to take part in Eurovision. The country has competed every year thereafter, avoiding the relegation introduced for low-scoring countries since the former Eastern bloc countries began to participate. Unlike them, Croatia's Eurovision experience dates back to 1963 when Vice Vukov supplied the republic's first entry for Yugoslavia, winning the Jugovizija competition to which the Dora is a successor.

The Dora has traditionally been held in the old Austro-Hungarian resort of Opatija, on the Adriatic coast, taking over the Hotel Kvarner's elegant Crystal Ballroom for the weekend. More recently, it has moved to a television studio in the capital Zagreb, but returns to Opatija for 2003, when it will stretch over three nights and be intermingled with Croatia's national music awards and the Miss Croatia pageant.

Throughout the 1990s, the Dora was organised by HRT's Head of Light Entertainment, Ksenija Urličić, notoriously implicated in the Miss Croatia scandal of 1998. Just as synonymous with the festival was the impresario and manager Tonči Huljić, who has provided the classical girlband Bond with a number of songs.

Huljić's own band Magazin, veterans of the Yugoslavian and Croatian pop scenes since 1983, have six Dora appearances under their belt, and were joined by at least a couple of their labelmates from his record company Tonika every year. Huljić and his lyricist wife Vjekoslava, who used to write children's books instead, supplied four of Croatia's ten Eurovision entries, more than any other songwriting team.

However, he appears to have abandoned the Dora after refusing to prune Magazin's four-and-a-half-minute 2002 entry to the three-minute maximum imposed by the European Broadcasting Union, responsible for Eurovision, to avoid the thing going on for five hours. And we can't be having that.

Indeed, hardly a Dora goes past without a whiff of scandal. In 1999 Ivana Banfić alleged that her entry had been thrown out of consideration because it would interfere with pop legend Doris Dragović's chances of winning; she made it through two years later, only to pull out at the last minute because she was not allowed to perform in English. The eventual winner, Vanna, duly burst into English after the middle eight.

For several years, Dora entries also had to be submitted under (occasionally transparent) pseudonyms, a rule which saw 1996 winner Maja Blagdan disqualified in 2001 when she revealed to the press too early that she would be singing her song. The requirement was abolished for 2003, as has the prohibition on so-called debutants, restricting the Dora to artists who had already released at least one CD.

The debutants ban was intended to attract a higher class of star to the Dora after the 2000 final ended up composed mostly of unknown singers, but instead threatened to turn the festival into the Grand Central Station of Croatia's comeback trail.

2003 also saw the Dora spread over a whole weekend with two preliminary semi-finals, as HRT attempted to cut the cost of one of their flagship events by running it together with the annual Porin music awards and Croatia's choice of a contestant for Miss Universe. In common with a number of other national preselections, the winner was to be decided entirely by a public televote.

In the hope of provoking some press coverage for what was coming to be seen as a rather tired old festival, the line-up of 24 included a ska-punk band, Kawasaki 3P, who recouped the desired headlines but didn't particularly trouble the scoreboard.

Dora winners to date:

I like it! 3 C!s