To Mark’s tonight with Rich and Bill to watch the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest. Yes, a strange night out, but good fun. Back then Eurovision was a very different beast to the show we now seem incapable of ever winning today. There were just 20 contestants, the only one from Eastern Europe being Yugoslavia, which of course doesn’t even exist any more.
There was no Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland… just the countries that now complain about unfair block voting from the former Soviet Bloc without ever entering a song that deserves of beat them.
1981 was a good year for the UK, winning the contest with Bucks Fizz’s Making Your Mind Up. The image of the guys whipping off the girls’ skirts is one of the most enduring of all Eurovision moments, perhaps because at the time it was still so daring. Don’t believe me? Here it is in all its tacky velour brilliance.
Pretty tame these days, isn’t it.
But Making Your Mind Up wasn’t the best song by a long shot. The one we all went home humming was Johnny Blue, from German singer Lena Valaitis.
Back in 1981, when the Eurovision backing tracks were as live as the singers’ voices and played by a studio orchestra, the rules still stated that every country must sing in its own language, so Lena was clever to slip in a few familiar English words in the form of a proper noun. No-one could complain about that.
It would be so much better if that rule still applied, but perhaps also unfairly advantageous to the UK and Ireland, since English is a second language for more people in Europe than any other, so more people would understand (and perhaps vote for) our songs than any other.
Prize for the best stage show has to go to Denmark. The dancing is just fantastic when they get to the point where the women have clearly farted and need to waft it away before someone smells them. Watch their arms start flapping about two thirds of the way through this.
And the night’s best costumes were worn by Ireland. They were the hosts that year and they’d clearly spent their whole budget on these sparkly outfits rather than the set, which was as dodgy as a ramshackle barn. They couldn’t get the door open properly to let Buck’s Fizz back on the stage to enjoy their moment of triumph, and when they’d squeezed through it slammed shut on the camera trying to follow them.
Here is the Irish entry with their song Horoscopes, all about the fatuous nature of newspaper predictions. Those costumes are probably worth half of RTE’s annual budget for live programming.
And if there were a prize for the song guaranteed to get stuck in your head and drive you mad for the rest of the week it would go to Portugal. Click play on this one at your peril.
What I didn’t remember about this particular contest was just how close things were at the end. Going into the last round of voting we were just one of three contenders who could have walked off with the dubious honour of taking the Eurovision crown.
It looked for a while like there wouldn’t be a winner at all. Austria was first to vote and leapt in at the five point notch, ignoring one to four. They got a serious telling off by the adjudicator. Other countries’ reps apparently wandered off while hanging on to give their vote (all done by phone back then – no satellite video links) and the controllers of the decidedly cranky board at one point gave Ireland a boost of 300 points. Not bad when they’d garnered only 28 points by them. No doubt it was purely coincidental that they were also the host nation, and thus charged with working the board.
So, a classic Eurovision? Yes, if such a thing can be said to exist. It was probably Britain’s last meaningful win, as it launched four musical careers, which is more than can be said for our next trumph, Katrina’s Love Shine a Light late on in the next decade.
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