Eurovision Song Contest 1964

Location

Danmarks Radio (DR) staged the 1964 contest in Copenhagen, after winning the for with the song "Dansevise" by Grethe and Jørgen Ingmann. The venue selected was Tivolis Koncertsal (Tivoli Concert Hall), which lies within the amusement park and pleasure garden Tivoli Gardens. The park, alluding by its name to the Jardin de Tivoli that existed in Paris, was opened on 15 August 1843, and is the second oldest amusement park in the world, after Dyrehavsbakken in nearby Klampenborg. At the night of the contest, 800 spectators followed the show in the audience.

Participants

Broadcasters from sixteen countries participated in the 1964 contest. Of the sixteen countries that participated in 1963 only was absent. Sveriges Radio (SR) did not participate due to a strike among members of the Swedish Union for Performing Arts and Film (). was represented in the contest for the first time, however it became the first country to score nul points on its début entry. Germany, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia also scored nul points for the first time. The Netherlands became the first country to be represented by a singer of non-European ancestry, Anneke Grönloh who was of Indonesian descent. Spain was represented by the Italian-Uruguayan group Los TNT who were the first group of three or more participants in the history of the contest.

Only one of the performing artists had previously competed representing the same country in past editions: Anita Traversi had represented , and had also provided backing vocals for .

Format

Poul Leth Sørensen served as producer, Bent Fabricius Bjerre and Marianne Drewes acted as co-producers.

The prize to be awarded to the winning artist took the form of an engraved medallion made of silver.

The event was covered by around 100 journalists and photographers. The artists were accompanied by a 41-piece orchestra. Rehearsals started on 19 March 1964.

Contest overview

The contest was held on 21 March 1964, beginning at 22:00 CET (21:00 UTC).

A political protest occurred after the Swiss entry: an anonymous man trespassed onto the stage holding a banner that read "Boycot Franco & Salazar". Whilst this was going on, television viewers were shown a shot of the scoreboard; once the man was removed by a television technician, the contest went on.

The interval act consisted of a ballet dance performance by dancers Solveig Østergaard, Niels Kehlet, Inge Olafsen and Mette Hønningen from the Royal Danish Ballet, choreographed by Niels Bjørn Larsen, and over the music of the "Columbine porka mazurka" and the "Champagne Galop" by Hans Christian Lumbye.

The immediate response of the Koncertsal audience to the Italian entry was markedly enthusiastic and prolonged and, most unusually for a contest performance, after leaving the stage Gigliola Cinquetti was allowed to return to take a second bow. Her performance was given an unscheduled repeat on British television the following afternoon. In the event, she won the most crushing victory in the history of the contest, with a score almost three times that of her nearest rival, a feat extremely unlikely ever to be beaten under the post-1974 scoring system.

An aftershow party was held for the participating delegations at the restaurant Ambassadeur in Copenhagen. Each of the 16 participating acts was awarded a silver trophy on this occasion.

Spokespersons

Each participating broadcaster appointed a spokesperson who was responsible for announcing the votes for its respective country via telephone. Known spokespersons at the 1964 contest are listed below.

• Finland

Detailed voting results

Each participating broadcaster assembled a 10-member jury panel who distributed three points among their one, two, or three favourite songs. The points were totaled and the first, second, and third placed songs were awarded 5, 3, and 1 votes in order. If only one song got every point within the jury it would get all 9 points. If only two songs were chosen, the songs would get 6 and 3 points in order.

5 points

Below is a summary of all 5 points in the final:

Broadcasts

Each participating broadcaster was required to relay the contest via its networks. Non-participating EBU member broadcasters were also able to relay the contest as "passive participants". Broadcasters were able to send commentators to provide coverage of the contest in their own native language and to relay information about the artists and songs to their television viewers. No official accounts of the viewing figures are known to exist. Estimates given in the press ranged from 100 to 150 million viewers.

Known details on the broadcasts in each country, including the specific broadcasting stations and commentators are shown in the tables below.

Lost recordings

As with the , no complete video recording of the actual contest is known to have survived. Some clips of the contest have survived, including the winning announcement by Svend Pedersen, and part of Gigliola Cinquetti's reprise. For some time, there was a rumour that a copy of the entire contest existed in the French television archives. In 2021, INA confirmed to Wiwibloggs that the French television archives do not possess a video copy of the contest. However, the audio of a French radio broadcast can be found in the archives of INA.

A persistent myth, even repeated on the official Eurovision site, is that the tape was destroyed in a fire in the 1970s. In a 2019 interview, DR claimed that the broadcast was never recorded in the first place, allegedly due to no tape machines being available at the studio at the time. The audio of most of the show, however, is still available online, without the last few minutes, and short video clips and photos from various archives also remain available.

Notes

References

References

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