Morten Thomassen from Norway decided to write about some of his memories of Eurovision and the Norwegian Eurovision selection. ESC Covers again will publish it after google translating it from Norwegian to English.
Although for us fans it is the performance of the songs that gives us the most joy during an ESC broadcast, it is actually the case that for the “ordinary” TV viewer, there are more when the voting starts, in other words, it is the competition between the different participating countries, which attract more than what they have put in musically.
A strange priority may seem to us fans, but we have to stick our finger in the ground and admit that without a vote, ESC would never have been able to celebrate its 70th birthday as a TV program in a few years’ time, and one wonders whether the interest would have been as great from our side if your favorite song hadn’t occasionally won, occasionally never even made it to the finals and occasionally ended up undeservedly very far down the list.
It is still Alexander Rybak and his 169-point lead over Iceland in 2nd place that tops the list of most superior victories, last year, by the way, Kalush Orchestra was only 4 points short of touching young Mr. Rybak’s record, so it is nice to have a list in the ESC we top then, besides the one with the most last places then.
At the other end of the scale, victories with the smallest possible margin, there are 2 years where the victory was secured with a margin of only 2 points, then we are talking about the years 1963 and 2003, the former year the Norwegian jury really messed it up and actually had to come back after of the voting was over and give their points again, which first caused Switzerland to lose the first place you had and our neighboring country to the south, Denmark got its first win.
A margin of victory of just 1 point has also happened twice, in 1968 and 1991 respectively and both times it was Great Britain who drew the shortest points.
There were rumors that especially the German jury, who generously gave the Spanish Massiel a whopping 6 points, had been promised a free trip to the Spanish heat if they voted for them, well they at least gave 2 points to Cliff Richard, the Norwegian jury did not give him a only one point and Spain 1 point, so perhaps it was a special Norwegian taste in music that became Cliff’s path in his first ESC performance.
The megastar Celine Dion’s victory with a paltry point was of the particularly exciting kind and you can see her when she “only” got 6 points from the last jury from Yugoslavia and thus passed Great Britain by 1 point that she considered the battle lost, that song had to get points from the final jury and then the battle would be lost and the shock she gets when Yugoslavia gives France 12 points and the victory is assured is that ESC memory of the very big ones.
In 1969, we remember that there were no rules about what to do if someone finished on the same score at the top and we thus had a total of 4 winners, it was only the following year that rules for this were introduced, well the truth is that rules in the ESC mostly have been introduced after something has happened if the need for a rule about such things suddenly arose.
Well it would be 22 years before the rule about what should happen in the event of a tie at the top of the results list had to be brought up and one thing is for sure, the presenters Toto Cotugno and Gigliola Cinquetti had no idea about the rules and had to bewilderedly ask the legendary Frank Naef what to do do then.
Swedish Carola and French Amina had received the same number of 12-points, but on the number of 10-points Carola drew the longest straw of them, she had received 5 of them, while Amina had only received 2 of them and then a slightly dazed Carola could come out on stage and celebrate their victory.
However, if the rule had been which country had received points from the most countries, France would have won, they did not receive points from 3 countries, while Carola did not get on the points list with 4 countries and since I have always loved Amina’s song much more than Carola her song, it is therefore only appropriate that she is shown this time.
The latter rule is actually the reason why Tooji from Norway made it to the final in 2012, because we ended up with the same number of points as Bulgaria in the semi-final, but got points from 11 countries, while Bulgarian Sofi Marinova only managed to get points from 10 countries. so in fact one of my favorite songs was cheated for a better ESC fate, yes, yes, that’s ESC life you guys.
My memories from 1991 are of a lot of good songs. My top song is DIESER TRAUM DARF NIEMALS STERBEN by ATLANTIS 2000. I love this but I have discovered over the years very few people share my passion for this song. This year also produced NINA for Iceland. I got Afrikaans lyrics written for it (also called Nina) and it became the biggest selling Afrikaans cover of a Eurovision song, so much so that in South Africa the sales account to almost 70% of the Icelandic population at the time.
Featured image – Wikipedia