Intro Post

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This is going to be my last Eurovision blog post before I leave for my trip to Eurovision 2025! When I get home, my plan is to make not just a blog post, but a full-fledged video about how the trip went, then write a pair of blog posts reviewing each song in the contest.

Introduction

Though the United Kingdom had hosted Eurovision twice already, 1968 was their first opportunity to host right after winning, and they were clearly intent on pulling off another win. Eurovision 1968 was hosted in the Royal Albert Hall in London, a concert hall opened in 1871 with a seating capacity of over 5000. It’s an impressively sized audience for its time and there are multiple floors of seats, as you can see in the broadcast. I bet it must have been an unforgettable experience in the arena! The show had the same presenter as the last two British contests, Katie Boyle, and it’s most notable as the first Eurovision contest to be broadcast in color. This means we’ll finally get to see what horrific color choices some contestants have been making. And hopefully a few nice outfits too.

The contest featured the same 17 countries as last year: all the previous participants over the years but no Denmark. The voting system is the same as last year too: each county has ten jurors who vote for one country each, but never their own. In third place came France with a returning winner, in second came the UK with the legendary Cliff Richard, and beating him by one point we have Massiel from Spain. This is the first year where Spain won the contest and the only year where they were the only winner, which means that of the countries that have already won, Spain hasn’t won in the longest. The result came as a shock to Eurovision viewers, even more to Cliff Richard himself, and it led to a bunch of conspiracy theories.

The show begins with an upbeat orchestral reprise of last year’s winner “Puppet on a String”, and as usual I enjoy the arrangement a lot. Then enters Katie Boyle to introduce the show in her usual British fashion, and after just five minutes the songs begin.

The BBC broadcast the contest without commentary this year, but unfortunately we don’t have a copy of the uncommentated broadcast. On YouTube, I could find full commentary from Norway and Sweden in color, Spain in grayscale, and a few snippets of France’s commentary in color. Last time I watched it with Norwegian commentary, so this time I’ll watch with the other commentary viewable in color, which is from Sweden and done by Christina Hansegård. I wonder how much of it I’ll understand? I picked up on a decent amount of the language throughout the middle third of 2024, partly due to my Eurovision trip that year. I think I caught her saying that the contest will be broadcast in color in seven countries, among them Sweden? See, I’m fairly good. The trick is a little something called context clues.