Intro Post

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Introduction

Since Gigliola Cinquetti won 1964 with her smash hit “Non ho l’età”, the next destination for Eurovision was Italy, who hosted the 1965 contest in the concert hall of their broadcaster RAI, located in Naples. After having seen the catastrophically bad hosting of Eurovision 1991, it gives me whiplash to see RAI put on a professional (if not particularly inspired) show with a host who’s fluent in three languages. Renata Mauro did most of the show in Italian, but as with the Danish host last year, she also gave a speech in French and English at the start, and had no trouble using those two languages in the voting. Her French sounds fluent with only a slight Italian accent, and her English is a surprisingly good imitation of Received Pronunciation.

While Eurovision 1991 makes up for the shit production by having an amazing lineup of songs, 1965 has the opposite problem: every song but one is a total piece of crap. Well OK, I’m exaggerating here, but it really is insane how much better the winner—“Poupée de cire, poupée de son” by France Gall—is than everything else. She was a French singer who competed for Luxembourg in Eurovision with a song I absolutely love, then went on to have a stellar career. In second place came the United Kingdom with “I Belong”, and in third came France with a song I hate with a passion, “N’avoue jamais”. I’m warning you now: if you like any song this year other than the winner, you probably won’t like my review of it.

The lineup of countries had two additions from 1964, making for 18 in total: Sweden returned with a controversial entry after skipping last year, and Ireland (who would soon become a 20th century powerhouse) made their debut. Crazy enough, this was the fourth year in a row with four zero-pointers. The good thing about ranking this year is, I already did it a few months back (which was a pretty miserable experience) so my job this time is easier. That’s assuming none of my rankings change.

I watched the contest with British commentary last time and I’ll do the same again, even though the French commentary is archived too. That’s because the video quality on the French-commentated uploads is pretty bad and I tend to enjoy British commentators more, even though I can understand both. Our old friend David Jacobs is back for the second last year, though it doesn’t look like his 1966 commentary has been archived, so for our purposes it’s our last time seeing him.

One more fact: this is the first Eurovision contest broadcast outside the EBU. As I said in round 1, it was also broadcast in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Viewers in those countries would gradually long for the day they could join the Eurovision family.