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Please enjoy my last Eurovision review of 2023! I will review Eurovision 1999 after the new year. For the rest of this year, I’ll focus on getting other projects done and finding jobs, since I was recently fired from my latest one. Luckily I already paid for my Eurovision trip, including flights, tickets, and a place to stay.
Introduction
In many ways, Eurovision 1998 was the end of an era for the contest. It was the last year where countries had to sing in their own languages, the last year with an orchestra, and until 2023, the last contest to take place in the United Kingdom. Fifteen different British cities applied to host the contest, and the winner was the second largest city in the UK: Birmingham. But it was also the start of an era for the contest: it was the first where most results came from televoting and it kickstarted a trend of LGBT visibility. More trivially, it was the first year where the names of countries appeared on screen during the songs.
Five countries were relegated from this contest (Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Denmark, Iceland, Russia) and five returned from 1996 (Belgium, Finland, Israel, Romania, Slovakia). Italy willfully skipped and North Macedonia made their proper debut, after not qualifying in 1996. Israel famously sent Dana International, the first transgender person to ever compete in Eurovision, and she won the contest.
As with the last two years, the female presenter handled the voting while the male presenter had a different job. In 1996 it was watching over the green room, in 1997 it was the interval act, and in 1998 it was commentary. That’s right: this year, Terry Wogan both hosted and commentated on this contest!* I’m glad he got to host before he became bitter about the contest. Even if I could understand every language in Europe, I would still think the only acceptable way to watch the contest was with British commentary, so that’s what I did.
Interestingly, neither of this contest’s hosts are native to the UK: Terry Wogan is Irish and Ulrika Jonsson is Swedish. However, both had been working for years as BBC presenters. The contest featured four other Eurovision hosts as a special guest. Their, or should I say her name is Katie Boyle, whose hair had gone gray but looked sharp and confident as ever. It’s weird to think she outlived Terry Wogan by two years.
* As far as I know, the only other people who did that were Léon Zitrone (1978) and Graham Norton (2023).
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