Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  Marked ‘Norway 1978’, the first show is introduced by a title sequence so warped and blotched, so sonically wayward as to be almost unintelligible. There’s a flash and a fizz, as if someone’s just banged the top of the telly, and the modestly enhanced image allows first a stage, then a presenter, to take shape in the bath of melted colours. An earlier straw poll amongst family and friends had revealed I wasn’t alone in recalling the 1978 final, or at least the winners (Israel’s Alpha Beta, with A-Ba-Ni-Bi) and our splits-leaping brace-twanger, but now I’m questioning my powers of recall. Of course Eurovision was always a bit of a shambles, but was any audience ever that modest, any set that flimsy, any host that uncomfortable?

  It’s only when the scoreboard hardens into focus, displaying a parade of circle-topped As and crossed Os, that I begin to grasp what’s happening. Stein Ingebritsen vacates the tiny stage to make way for Britt Andersen singing Hør Hva Andre Har Fått Til, and I’m belatedly certain. This isn’t the 1978 Eurovision final at all, but what can only be that year’s Norwegian pre-selection show, broadcast earlier to decide the nation’s entry in the manner of our own A Song For Europe. I sift through Andreas’s labelled DVDs: as a bonus I’m obliged to describe as special, I find he has sourced and digitised recordings of several such domestic qualifiers, from all around the continent.

  Whatever the production values currently on display might suggest, in the weeks ahead I’m to discover that the home-grown show Norwegians call the Melodi Grand Prix means almost as much to them as the Eurovision final itself. Over many decades, the ‘MGP’ qualifier has become established as a mighty cornerstone of state broadcaster NRK’s light-entertainment calendar: the country’s leading vocalists put themselves down for it year after year. Part comforting family-TV ritual, part patriotic duty, it still dependably attracts a dumbfounding 80 per cent of the national audience.

  Sitting up in bed as the NRK presenter drones gormlessly through his next introduction, I feel my features crease in befuddlement. How could Mil Etter Mil have triumphed in any sort of musical contest, let alone a major nationwide event such as this? It seemed an affront to reason. I’d never entertained the possibility that anyone with a nul-points pedigree might ever have been a professional musician: the Eurovision selection process as I’d imagined it involved a work-experience TV researcher being sent out into the Oslo streets one lunchtime, returning half an hour later with an eager but slightly confused busker. Was I really going to sit here in bed and endure seven songs that a jury of Norwegian impresarios and music executives had adjudged worse than Mil Etter Mil? How, oh Saint Jahn of the Bad Noises, how could this be so?

  That it just might becomes apparent as the compere falteringly welcomes one hopeless hopeful after another. All the decade’s contemporary clichés are here: the footballer, the porn star, the towering Crimplene berk. Didn’t anyone not look daft or sinister in the seventies? Not in Norway they didn’t. Checked cheesecloth, chrome bar stools, one hell of a lot of royal blue. Ringmaster suits with lurex lapels and limb-swallowing sleeves and trouser legs. Girls with pie-crust collars, puff sleeves and vast beaks – their lips move and sounds emerge, but all I hear is four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. There are a great many Benny-from-ABBA beards, scourge of Scandinavian manhood for over thirty years. After one particularly harrowing close-up, the camera abruptly recoils to a distant wide shot and stays there.

  And my word, they’re a miserable bunch: one woman, arms hanging limply by her sides, exudes all the expressive physical dynamism of an unplugged standard lamp. Sometimes the tempo is so stubbornly lethargic that only by succumbing to the lure of fast-forward search do I appreciate that a performer is actually dancing. And those omnipresent brass-heavy oompah arrangements don’t help, especially when blended with the ‘happening sounds’ of bongos and Shaft-style wah-wah guitars. Eurovision’s pop-cultural clock has always run a couple of years slow, but this is ridiculous: Shaft came out in 1971.

  Jahn Teigen is up last, and before the conductor raises his baton it’s plain that we’re looking at the Melodi Grand Prix winner, the man who will go on to represent Norway in the Eurovision final. (In the event he romps home by a margin of minus five: under a voting regime impressively daft even by Eurovision standards, the song with the fewest points wins. The EBU must be flicking their own noses for not thinking of it first.) In a collarless granddad shirt and drainpipes Jahn is hardly surfing the crest of fashion’s post-punk zeitgeist, but beside the loon-panted satinette stylings of his rivals, it’s a look that’s both acceptably contemporary and perhaps just a little street. Almost alone amongst the male contestants, Jahn’s hair falls no further than his (absent) collar; his chin and long cheeks are bare.

  Showbiz it isn’t: Jahn’s appearance and demeanour are that of a laidback teacher cementing his popularity with a slightly risqué monologue at the end-of-year show. But if he’s hardly made an effort, it’s because he doesn’t need to – all the spangles and glitter that have gone before are now exposed as desperate, clumsy attempts to bolt on personality where none existed, to paint lipstick on a performing corpse. Jahn cracks a lazy, gap-toothed smile at the audience, and tosses an amused and knowing glance into the camera. Without having opened his mouth, he’s exuding a cocky yet winning self-confidence so conspicuously absent from the previous performers, all cruelly stripped of charisma at birth. And then he starts to sing.

  My recent nul-points experience, I remind myself as he does so, is restricted to five downloaded seconds of Jemini’s Cry Baby. Yes, if pressed I could recall watching four or five other contests over the decades when the voting had ended with at least one zero on the scoreboard, but put the performers in an identity parade and I’d only have picked out Jahn. And that, of course, was solely down to the unforgettable visual aspects of his performance. It was over a quarter of a century since I’d last heard Mil Etter Mil. Ask me to hum it and you might just as well as have asked a cat (ideally not the one responsible for Cry Baby’s opening bars).

  Taking all this into account, I’m perhaps more surprised than I should be at what now unfolds. Mil Etter Mil, a song whose reputation alone still reduces good people to hooting, jeering malevolence, fails to plumb the predicted depths. No Alpine horn solo, no diddle-daddle Birdie Song chorus; the non-negotiable jazzed-up orchestration aside, Mil Etter Mil proves itself a simple, pleasing composition, whose more muscular middle eight recalls that of Marvin Gaye’s politico-soul classic Abraham, Martin and John.

  The lyrics, too, seem appropriately undemanding: to learn that I’ve correctly translated the title as Mile After Mile is no cause for linguistic celebration, or at least shouldn’t be. I’d imagined the extensive journey of which Jahn sang (the rarely encountered Norwegian mile is equivalent to 10 kilometres) as a metaphorical expression of the lengths lovers will go to meet, but a quick pause to consult the dumbfoundingly authoritative database of Eurovision lyrics on diggiloo.net reveals an unexpected complexity of sentiment. ‘The water is trickling into your shoes,’ reads the on-screen translation, ‘your longing drives you towards a light that you see, but I can’t, mile after mile after mile.’ Bong-a-doo-la it isn’t.

  The disk ends, and returns to Andreas’s impressively animated menu screen. I’ve just spent over an hour watching flared Norwegians fail to qualify for a twenty-six-year-old Eurovision Song Contest. Is that really an OK thing to be doing? Figuring that the only way is up – in terms of spectacle, entertainment and my own self-esteem – I press eject and stick in the DVD of the 1978 final. The genuine, international Eurovision final.

  By hallowed Eurovision tradition, France’s 1977 victory – a triumph that remains their most recent – had won them the honour of hosting the following year’s contest. The opening titles scroll across a floodlit Eiffel Tower in swift evocation of Eurovision’s fastidious dismissal of all but the very crassest national clichés: Notre Dame, l’Arc de Triomphe … could we be in Paris? We surely could! Not that I’ll be learning so from the commentary, which in
Andreas’s archived recording is coincidentally provided (apparently from a phone box full of crisp packets) by Norwegian state broadcaster NRK. All I’ll glean from their man in the hours ahead is that he’s rather provocatively referring to the UK as ‘England’.

  In 1978 England, and perhaps even Britain, looked out over a post-punk musical landscape. Not so the dinner-suited audience at the Palais des Congrès on the night of 22 April. Plastic Bertrand might have released Ça Plane Pour Moi over a year earlier, and been Belgian rather than French, but the continental music scene in general and Eurovision in particular remained resolutely pre-punk (young Plastic reminded us all of his never-say-die adherence to solvent-fuelled anarchy when he represented Luxembourg at the 1987 Eurovision, finishing second last with Amour, Amour). Here, in 1978, it was New Avengers-style brass and white suits. All three-piece, tieless and aggressively starched.

  ‘Ah: dear old Eurovision!’ sighs the pompous old on-stage compere in fruity, faultless English. Only twenty-two years since its birth, and already the contest has become part of the cultural furniture. Yet there’s an innovation this year: the first ever co-host, a toothsome dolly-bird who alongside her leathery beau forms a winningly traditional Gallic combo. ‘This contest,’ he continues grandly, ‘is intended to encourage high-calibre songwriting, by allowing composers the opportunity of comparison on an international scale.’ You can sense the French scriptwriters fighting a doomed rearguard battle against the gathering forces of puerile pop idiocy, and the towering monument to drivel they were so busily constructing.

  Jahn is second out, following a hunched but lively little Irishman in a cravat who repeatedly bellows I Was Born to Sing through his beard. (‘How wrong can you be?’ asked Clive James in his Observer TV review.) Colm Wilkinson’s performance is more irrepressibly physical than you’d have thought possible for any song orchestrated by a bow-tied conductor, but watching it backstage Jahn might have felt himself unwisely inspired.

  In place of the usual ‘postcards from abroad’ I so fondly recalled, the ‘78 between-act slots simply follow the next performer’s progress from green room to stage. So here’s Jahn, goofing around, waving at invisible associates, walking into walls. By the standards of what’s to follow, it’s difficult to criticise his outfit: it isn’t a white suit, and it doesn’t involve huge triangles of shirt collar folded out over huger still lapels. With a narrow tie down at halfmast, an upturned shirt collar and a pair of bright red drainpipes, he could have been fronting some power-pop outfit of the sort then so prevalent (in la Royaume Uni, at least).

  Or almost. Something bad has happened to Jahn’s fringe, which since the Melodi final he’s had centrally parted in the manner that would see footballers through the coming decade. Below it are a pair of graduated-tint aviator shades, eyewear of choice for a generation of mid-Atlantic tosspots. And though the large golden rose pinned over his left nipple adds an entertainingly surreal touch, no one’s looking at that. Already I’m transfixed by the prominent silver braces, and more particularly the way Jahn (or Yarn, as the NRK man has now taught me to call him) is tentatively, ominously fingering their straps. Why has he done all this? No one, I think, will ever understand what inspired these catastrophic sartorial relapses. (Even as I lie there shaking my head, a terrible image takes shape within it: it is two months after Jahn Teigen’s Parisian meltdown, and here’s an anxiously excited fourteen year old filing into the Hammersmith Odeon for his first experience of amplified live music – the Boomtown Rats. But what’s this? On his back, a jacket of blackest, newest C&A velvet; around his neck, an orange woollen tie.)

  Carsten Klouman raises his baton; the NRK commentator emits the words ‘Mil Etter Mil’ in a hoarse, portentous, a-nation’s-hopes-are-with-you murmur; and as a brass fanfare blasts waywardly out Jahn dashes from the wings, past three female backing singers, reaching the mike just in time for his opening line. This passes without incident, but at the end of the second it’s starkly apparent that in addition to the handicap of his braces, and what he’s about to do with them, Jahn is also likely to be rather hamstrung by his mother tongue’s capacity to alarm.

  ‘Krrrrrroppp!’ he exclaims, with tongue-thrumming, phlegm-loosening relish, raising his eyebrows in amused recognition of the effect this extraordinary syllable will be having south of Oslo. Across the continent people look up in shellshocked silence from lap-bound plates of dumplings, chips or gnocchi: are 400 million of us about to see a Eurovision performer choke to death live on-stage?

  Foreigners were funnier in 1978. In the quarter-century since, cheap travel and billion-channel TV has dulled the once irresistible comic effect of someone saying something – anything – in a different language. And the more different the language, the funnier. In all the earlier shows I’m to watch, every Izel, Lars or Jarkko who takes the stage does so to a faint but clearly audible audience frisson. This one’s going to be a cracker … look, even the conductor’s called Onno Tunk!

  This golden age was inaugurated after Sweden’s Ingvar Wixell controversially entertained the 1965 audience with the English-language Absent Friend (‘We ought to walk behind the hedge, where the cowslips grow’). Reminded of the contest’s statute-enshrined intent to prevent American culture annexing a weak and vulnerable post-war Europe, the EBU’s response was a rule obliging performers to sing in their native tongue. This latest addition to Eurovision’s Bumper Book of Clauses persisted until 1973, with ABBA the most obvious beneficiaries of its abandonment. Five years later it was abruptly reinstated. ABBA had by then conquered the world, yet the EBU’s pride in catalysing this achievement was tainted with guilt: the band had done so in the language of American Forces Radio.

  With Eurovision’s eastward expansion in the early 1990s, juries confused by the Estonian and Slovakian choruses tumbling about their booths began comfort-voting for any song performed in English, and in 1999 the language rule was discarded for good (by 2005 even the Germans were plumping for pop’s lingua franca). Too late for Jahn. If in 1978 he’d been allowed to perform the English-language version of Mil Etter Mil he later recorded, ‘kropp’ would have been translated into ‘body’; perhaps that alone might have been worth a point from someone, somewhere.

  As it is, the peculiar noise he’s just made seems to galvanise Jahn in the most dangerous manner. Now that he’s got our attention, he isn’t about to let go. He strokes his chest like a stripper; he spreads his legs and throws back his head. It’s a big performance, much too big for the song. Lost under a thick layer of cloying, silly brass fills and trills, Mil Etter Mil is reduced to a period quiz-show theme. Our eyes say Aerosmith, our ears say Sale of the Century.

  We’re about halfway through when Jahn clamps his eyes shut, and with the mike held tight in both hands winds up an ambitious bray of vibrato. In terms of his vocal routine, this is the triple-axel-with-toe-loop moment: in the national qualifier he’d just about pulled it off, but here it’s arse-on-the-ice time. What was intended as a hairy-chested Led Zep roar comes out as a thin, wandering shriek that shares its pitch and intonation with the noise my eleven-year-old son makes while narrowly averting some Nintendo disaster. Another big tick on the nul-points checklist.

  The song is winding down when Jahn abruptly casts aside the rock-god mannerisms. All that remain are a dozen-odd plodding repetitions of the phrase ‘mil etter mil’, but after only two of these our man succumbs to ennui, which he proceeds to tackle in a fashion few would have dared predict. The whiff of anarchy has been in the air since Jahn emerged from the wreckage of that set-piece rock-scream with a nothing-to-lose gleam in his eye, and now it’s as if he’s suddenly undergone a liberating, joyous epiphany. If Jahn’s undone tie and drainpipes are the Eurovision equivalent of safety pins and bondage trousers, then what follows is the Eurovision equivalent of the Sex Pistols calling Bill Grundy a dirty fucker on live television.

  Jahn’s gaze darts restlessly about the auditorium: just a moment, he’s thinking, this whole thing is idiotic bollocks! What a
m I doing up here? And why are you watching me do it? Well, I’ll give you all something to remember. Oh, yes. I hope you’re ready, but I don’t care if you’re not. This is for Annie Palmen, Conchita Bautista, Fud Leclerc – this is for every Eurovision martyr who’s come up here, made a twenty-four-carat twat of themselves, and gone away with a fat fuck-all!

  And plunging both thumbs eagerly under his brace straps like a music-hall costermonger, Jahn stretches them right out and back, to the beat, first together, now alternately, now with a bandy-legged, knees-up accompaniment. His features spread into a fatuous, complicit grin, as if this is a karaoke bar and we’re the pissed-up mates who’ve dared him to get up there.

  After those first eager twangs his Lambeth Walk seems to lose a little of its vigour, and by the time a building orchestra crescendo alerts him to the song’s proximate finale, he’s doing no more than idly milk himself. Yet I know he’s not finished. The intervening years, all twenty-six of them, have not eroded the memory of what is to come.

  Turning sideways, Jahn bends his knees, swings back his arms and propels himself upwards into a spread-legged scissors leap of the type trademarked by Pete Townshend. It proves a deficient homage: at the jump’s freeze-framed ceiling Jahn’s feet are at least forty degrees shy of the intended 180, and only about two foot off the ground. And though his landing is clearly intended to coincide with the final beat, he’s come back to earth and stretched out an arm to thank them well before the orchestra honks and parps its last. Perhaps most crucially of all, Jahn has not been talking ‘bout his generation, but ‘bout water trickling into someone else’s shoes. Less of The Who, and more of The Why. In ten dumbfounding seconds, Norway’s Jahn Teigen has guaranteed himself nul points and a place in modern cultural history.