The judging begins.

You take 16 people from around the world. You put them in a room. And then you plug them all silently into ‘ipaqs.’ Radio judging is different. The machine however is quite impressive. It plays the track. And then if you’re really keen – and the agency’s done it – you can hear the English version too. You can’t register a vote until you’ve heard it all the way through. Fair enough. Until you get to a campaign of 6 more or less identical spots. And you didn’t much like the first one.

Brazilian, German and, er, Belgian entries are among the most prolific. And the way it works is you listen to the spot in the original language while reading the English translation. So you can understand most of what’s going on without losing the performance of the original. I caught myself reading the English script on the Australian entries. Suddenly they all made sense.