LONDON 1963

The 8th Eurovision Song Contest took place in London, despite a French victory in the preceding year. Denmark’s first victory would become controversial topic. The honour of hosting this year’s song contest was handed over by the French to the United Kingdom. The main reason was that France did not want to host the song contest so soon after hosting it twice in Cannes in 1959 and 1961. Host Broadcaster BBC tried a different approach for the presentation of the Eurovision Song Contest. All songs were performed in one studio, but the audience was located in another. Each song had its own unique staging, and the change of set was done very quickly. Because of that, rumours arose that the performances were pre-recorded which later turned out to be untrue.

Big international stars took part in this year’s competition, like Esther Ofarim for Switzerland, Nana Mouskouri for Luxembourg and Francoise Hardy for Monaco. Norway’s jury was not ready with its voting when called in by the presenter Katie Boyle. The Norwegian head of jury was still busy adding up the individual votes of the 20 jury members. Struck by panic, the Norwegian jury secretary gave an intermediate result, reading the points very quickly and in the wrong order. In accordance with the rules, Mrs. Boyle told the TV audience that she would come back to the Norwegian jury after all the other countries had voted. When the final result came in from the Norwegian jury, they were decisively different from the intermediate ones and gave the victory to Norway’s Nordic neighbour Denmark in a close race with Switzerland.

VOTING GRID: FINAL