by Tim Moore
By the time Swiss TV director Marcel Bezençon rose to address his fellow delegates in Monaco five years later, the EBU and its realm had conspicuously evolved. The Union now found itself at the helm of a pioneering network of pan-continental communication channels, capable of transmitting simultaneous footage right across Europe for the first time; though only 5 per cent of European households had access to a television in 1955, the projections accurately predicted a rapid surge in ownership.
And if the EBU had at last fashioned the infrastructural means to join hands, eyes and ears across its borders, it would now be doing so in pursuit of a sombrely urgent end. The continent that had, a short decade earlier, been the crucible of history’s bloodiest war now found itself in the no man’s land of a stand-off that threatened to end in unthinkable apocalypse. The Warsaw Pact had just been signed and, as the looming Suez Crisis would emphasise, the US now considered the old European powers a tiresome irrelevance. The Cold War battle lines were being drawn, and Europeans watched in ratcheting terror as they were drawn right across their front gardens.
As the Soviets crowded Europe’s eastern borders with mid-range thermonuclear missiles, by 1955 the forces encroaching from the west carried a rather more subtle threat. That year saw the British release of Blackboard Jungle, a transatlantic depiction of teenage discontent whose screenings incited audiences to trash the local Odeon before nipping down the shops for a copy of the theme tune; Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock topped the year-end UK charts. American Forces Radio was becoming the station of choice for millions across the continent, and with the first transatlantic phone cable nearing completion there were loudly voiced fears of a cultural takeover.
Perhaps raising his voice above disgruntled reminiscences of sodding Torquay in bloody February, Marcel explained that the EBU was not in Monaco for a publicly funded piss-up down the casino. The vision that haunted him was of a newly united Europe destroyed in tender infancy, if not through annihilation in the nuclear crossfire, then by stealthy annexation into the American empire. There wasn’t much he could do about the first, perhaps, but in the EBU’s new pan-European broadcast network he saw a powerful weapon in the fight to bolster the continent’s cultural identity.
The technology had already been successfully trialled: on 6 June 1954, three million viewers across Europe had been triumphantly welcomed to a yodel-float drive-by, live from the Montreux Narcissus Festival. The summer season of transmissions that ensued – a party for refugee children in Holland, an athletics meet in Glasgow, Pope Pius XII’s thoughts on the mixed blessings of television, in Latin – had been bracketed together by the EBU as ‘the Lille Experiment’, in recognition of the control centre’s location. It took Evening Standard journalist George Campey to come up with a blanket term less suggestive of some diabolical instrument of subliminal indoctrination. ‘“Eurovision” is a system for the exchange of television programmes between the countries of western Europe,’ he declared, and a nickname was born.
The triumph of these eclectic summer broadcasts convinced Marcel that an annual flagship event offered the most effective means of spreading unity through Eurovision. Around the Monaco conference table he outlined the options. Unless Esperanto belatedly took off in a big way there were clear drawbacks with anything overly reliant upon the spoken word. Physical competition was one obvious answer, but logistical difficulties precluded a major annual sporting tournament (the quadrennial, Marcel-inspired European football championships were launched in 1960), and it would be a decade before some oaf-rich EBU committee concocted Jeux Sans Frontières.
Marcel’s conclusion was that European harmony might be best celebrated – and the burgeoning threat of US cultural imperialism best forestalled – via the fearsome rallying might of light entertainment. His first suggestion, a ‘Eurovision cup for amateur entertainers’, lost out in the show of hands – if that Dutchman hadn’t been asleep, we’d have spent those springtime Saturday nights watching Björn saw Agnetha in half while Brotherhood of Man circled the stage on a motorcycle pyramid; how rewarding to picture Jahn Teigen as the madcap MC, hooting Norwegian one-liners through a megaphone.
Instead the delegates plumped for Marcel’s plan B, inspired by the San Remo Song Festival, a glitzy extravaganza that for five years had been drawing big names to the Italian Riviera. The framework was laid out for a contest ‘to promote high-quality original songwriting in the field of popular music’, one wherein all EBU nations would sublimate their rivalries in ritualised artistic combat. ‘After centuries of taunting, discordant chants,’ he may have declared, ‘let all of Europe sing together in harmony! Um … and in Switzerland, because it was all my idea.’
No one was about to argue with a man who had written a fond memoir of Mussolini’s adventures in pre-war Switzerland: on 24 May 1956, Thursday-night viewers across the continent watched the monochrome figure of Jetty Paerl take to the stage of Lugano’s Teatro Kursaal. She burst into De Vogels Van Holland not a moment too soon: the next day Blue Suede Shoes broke into the UK top ten, and before the weekend was out the Americans had detonated the first aerial H-bomb out at Bikini Atoll.
As a centralised European committee, the EBU did its best to strangle the new baby with red tape. Of the ten nations who had agreed to participate in what was more precisely the first Eurovision Grand Prix – still the preferred term across the continent – three (including the United Kingdom) were disqualified for registering after an obscurely declared official deadline. Abruptly faced with a humiliatingly truncated show, the organisers demanded that each surviving nation perform two songs – a convenience for the Belgians and Swiss, who were thereby able to appease the bulk of their linguistically disparate populations, but not for the Luxembourgeois: when Michel Arnaud took to the Teatro Kursaal stage for the second time, he did so in a different jacket that wasn’t fooling anyone.
Alongside mindless bureaucratic pedantry, another of the themes that now define Eurovision was apparent in that debut year. More at home on the spine of an Observer handbook than circling the label of a chart-topping 45, Jetty’s The Birds of Holland established an enduring tradition of musically saluting our continent’s fauna in general and its avian diversity in particular; Switzerland’s other entry, translated as The Old Carousel, was meanwhile the first in what for two decades would be an almost annual celebration of fairground infrastructure and accessories. When Europe was required to embody itself on the back of a banknote, it came up with a series of bridges; asked to do so lyrically, its default choice in those early years was a puppet, a small boy or a flock of starlings. The Eurovision success of Father Ted’s My Lovely Horse came as no surprise to seasoned contest-watchers.
Thus was born the trivial banality that in 1982 inspired the French to announce a unilateral Eurovision boycott. ‘This so-called pop-music competition,’ declared their minister of culture, ‘is nothing more than a monument to drivel.’ More than a little rich, for prominent amongst the many Gallic dedications decorating that metaphorical edifice is the name of Jean-Paul Mauric. On 18 March 1961, lounge-suited Jean-Paul strode out on to the stage at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes to deliver his nation’s entry, Printemps, a song whose opening line was to have unfortunate and enduring repercussions for Eurovision watchers in the decades ahead. ‘Bing et bong,’ Jean-Paul stridently declared, arms splayed, neat quiff tilted slightly aloft, ‘et bing et bong et bing.’
Yet by then the contest was well established as an institution, drawing TV audiences that no non-sporting event could match. In 1970, more than 180 million viewers tuned in; that year Brazil and Chile watched live on satellite, with Japan and much of southern Asia following the year after. The competition that started life as a rather drab parade of cocktail-bar crooners had developed into an extravagant showdown between some of the era’s greatest pop performers in all their period finery: Sandie Shaw’s barefoot victory in 1967 heralded the end of the ballgown-and-tuxedo era. Puppet on a String ended the year as the UK’s best-sellin
g single, topping charts right across the continent. Eurovision has always dragged its cultural anchor, but having belatedly acknowledged the all-conquering rise of commercial pop, the contest now swiftly established itself as the phenomenon’s mightiest kingmaker.
For an insight into the contest’s significance at this time, we need look no further than the experience of its most notable runner-up. When Spain’s La La La pipped Congratulations by a single point in the 1968 final, frilly-shirted Cliff Richard – comfortably the biggest star to have stood on a Eurovision stage – was apparently driven to such entertaining extremes of embittered fury that he ended the evening locked in the Albert Hall gents. Five years later, he arrived in Luxembourg equipped for the worst: by the time Power to All our Friends had come home third, Cliff was already slumped in a Valium-induced backstage slumber.
‘A dull song,’ he muttered, prodded awake to give an opinion of Anne-Marie David’s victorious offering – more gracious than he’d been in 1968, when confessing a desire to congratulate Spain’s Massiel by ‘shaking her warmly by the throat’. Three decades on he had still to forgive or forget. Halfway through the 1997 final, sporting that alarming Yorkshire Ripper beard grown for his musical Heathcliff, up popped Cliff between acts to deliver a snatch of Congratulations, rounding it off with an arms-folded, pursed-lip glare into the camera: ‘Good luck if any of you tonight sell as many as that one did,’ he hissed, ‘even though it didn’t win.’
With this sort of high-octane action taking place up the top of the scoreboard, there was as yet little interest in the bottom. Few even noticed when Belgium’s Fud Leclerc started the no-ball rolling in 1962, the first of four acts that year to go home pointless. (Fud’s undoing was very probably his technique of substituting volume for precision during Ton Nom’s more challenging high notes, but in all honesty the four-time veteran had been skirting the Eurovoid for many years. The decision to announce only the winner in 1956 may have spared Fud’s blushes: it’s not easy to imagine any orthodox judge putting his or her tick beside The Drowned Men of the River Seine.)
Back in 1962, the international juries had a modest ninety-six points to distribute amongst the acts: between Fud’s dud and Domenico Modugno’s 1966 nul-pointer Dio Come ti Amo, no fewer than sixteen entrants had sung for their supper and gone hungry. (In 1958, Domenico confidently crooned his way through Volare and came only third; after a further failure before that 1966 nadir he must have been wondering what he had to do to win, though calling his entry something other than God How I Love You might have been a start.) The ducks were running amok on the scoreboard, but it took a four-way tie at the top of the table in 1969 for the EBU to admit the scoring system’s flaws.
Ever reluctant to challenge bureaucratic stereotype, Marcel’s boys essayed seven alternative procedures before settling upon the one in place today. The current Eurovision rule book runs to twenty-three pages, each dense with arcane meandering: ‘If it is necessary to ask for a stand-by jury, the reason(s) must be notified in writing to the Permanent Services by a notary. Upon request, the Reference Group is authorised to make an exception to the televoting rule for a country where telecommunications penetration is less than 80 per cent … Four members of each stand-by jury must be representatives of the public in the country, the other four being music professionals … There should be an equal number of men and women on each jury, with four jurors aged below thirty and four above thirty years of age … A song may be presented by a maximum of six artists, who must all have attained an age of at least sixteen years in the calendar year of the final … Upon request, the producing organisation shall provide a comprehensive drum kit and/or a grand piano …’ If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the Eurovision is a song contest designed by a puffin.
How fondly I recall the voting system that endured from 1971 to 1973, under which two jury members from each nation – one under twenty-five, one over – were required to award every song a number of points from one to five. Overawed by the attention of a live audience that now topped 250 million, outshone by the garish period splendour of their own outfits, the decisions proved predictably wayward. In 1971, the grim Luxembourg duo truculently dispensed a total of forty-two points (the absolute minimum being thirty-four); the bug-eyed, yammering French pair, noisily straddling that drivel monument, lavished 107 points on the seventeen songs.
Throughout those years, of course, it was impossible to score zero, and it hasn’t been much easier under the procedures in place since 1975. The fourteen nul-pointers I’d found listed and had now pledged to visit were those who had met their fate in the years that followed, and doing the maths I understood what made them special. With each jury now required to vote for its ten favourite songs, awarding them twelve points down to one in order of declining preference, Jahn’s nineteen fellow competitors were competing for 1,160 points; in 2003, Jemini shared the Skonto Arena stage with twenty-five other acts, giving a total of 1,508 points up for grabs. Failure to persuade a single nation, not Bosnia, not Belgium, that your song merits even one lonely point, is a rare and remarkable achievement. Fittingly, it took a rare and remarkable performance to secure the modern era’s debut whitewash.
It was perhaps Jahn’s misfortune to enter a contest already in steep decline as a showcase for pop-musical excellence. ABBA’S triumph was at once the ESC’s finest hour and its kiss of death: having made global stars of these virtual unknowns, Eurovision thereafter found big-name international performers conspicuous by their perennial absence. Why run the just-ask-Cliff risk of being humiliated by a Spanish nobody, when even victory might achieve nothing more than unflattering comparison with the masterful winner-of-winners, Waterloo!
By the tail end of the seventies, we’d stopped expecting Eurovision to fulfil Marcel’s original brief: the songwriting could now rarely be described as original, nor high-quality. No winner has topped the UK charts since 1982, and none since Céline Dion (a Canadian singing for Switzerland in 1988) could claim to have converted Eurovision victory into enduring celebrity. Yet we haven’t stopped watching.
Yes, for the nations welcomed more recently into the Eurovision fold – Israel in ‘73, Greece in ‘74, Turkey in ‘75 – geo-political symbolism was enough to guarantee huge audiences. For them, as for the former Soviet satellites who since the mid-Nineties have annexed such vast swathes of the scoreboard, the ESC retains its significance: a pan-national pageant inaugurated to unite a troubled, riven continent, to bring together half a billion people in a march towards peace and brotherhood, a march led by two cat-suited Cypriots and a spangled Finnish accordionist.
But what lured two-thirds of all Belgians to their tellies on 24 May 2003? Why did more Swedes watch Afrodite finish eighth at the Saku Suurhall in Tallinn in 2002 than saw their national team’s extra-time exit from that year’s World Cup? And how were 54 per cent of all available UK viewers persuaded to tune in to the 2004 Eurovision voting – the highest 11 p.m. audience share recorded that year?
It’s partly the hypnotic draw of the scoreboard, the numerical nip-and-tuck played out on that giant electronic abacus with all the allure of a general-election night on fast-forward. Even as the ESC’s artistic appeal eluded me, I’d found deep satisfaction in the voting charts, a satisfaction redoubled with the discovery of those online troves of psephological analysis: running a finger along rows and down columns, fifty years of glory and hatred distilled to calm statistics.
And it’s partly that, as the quality threshold was lowered, so we got our kicks watching those who tripped over it most spectacularly. With the winning songs ever more blandly forgettable, it was the mad, bad losers who made the deepest impression. As the original reality-talent show, Eurovision was first to demonstrate a sad but universal truth: a good song sung well might win over the judges, but nothing puts more bums on sofas than a farcical no-hoper.
In this ridicule-ready environment, so profound was the impact of Jahn Teigen’s performance that it is credited with spawning the unkind epit
het that would attach itself to all those who repeated his unfortunate feat. In eloquent judgement of Eurovision’s failure to foster continental unity, the phrase is in truth no more than pseudo-Gallic nonsense: to me it’s nul points, to others it’s nil points, to the French it’s nul point, not a single point. More arrestingly still, the words have never been heard on a Eurovision stage: jury points are announced from one to 12, and no compere has ever done a bilingual run-down to those depths of the scoreboard. Like ‘Play it again, Sam’, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ and ‘Look, Cliff, just open the bloody door,’ it’s an entirely confected catchphrase.
Though as I set about tracking down my luckless fourteen, I had a feeling that mightn’t be much of a comfort to them.
22 April 1978 Palais des Congrès, Paris Jahn Teigen Norway Mil Etter Mil
AWED PERHAPS BY the contest’s magnificent foolishness, perhaps by the soothingly bounteous statistical data accumulated in its name over six decades, the brotherhood of Eurovision obsessives is populous and ever-swelling. Theirs, happily, is no jealously guarded passion: after no more than a tentative paddle into the vast ocean that is the pool of their online knowledge, I’d discovered that two contestants have been the grandchildren of Nobel laureates, that Iceland and Greece have both entered songs entitled Socrates, that when ABBA triumphed at The Dome in Brighton, they did so without a single vote from the UK jury.
I chanced upon Andreas Schacht while delving a little deeper into the life of Olivia Newton-John’s prizewinning forebear, a theoretical physicist whose pioneering work in quantum mechanics was paid fond homage in his granddaughter’s 1974 Eurovision entry, Long Live Love. A respected authority on the contest and the curator of an unrivalled video archive, Andreas was also German: a winning combination, which meant that less than two weeks after making email contact, my morning cup of in-bed tea was interrupted by the arrival of a modest but very heavy box, postmarked Bremen. Within were two clear plastic cylinders, each carrying over fifty carefully hand-labelled DVDs, together comprising every Eurovision final from 1978 until the present day. I dashed back upstairs, slotted the top disk in the bedroom DVD player, threw the still-warm duvet over myself and hit ‘play’. It was the first act of a televisual labour that would enthral, amuse, madden and distress in roughly equal measure.