Intro Post

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Introduction

As of this writing, Eurovision 1964 is the oldest Eurovision to take place in a city I’ve been to: Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. The show took place in the Tivoli Concert Hall, known in Danish as Tivolis Koncertsal. It’s hard to visit Malmö without also visiting Copenhagen, especially if you’re playing from abroad, and it’s a real beauty of a city. This couldn’t have been reflected much in the broadcast because it was in black and white, and fans aren’t able to see it today because nobody has been able to find the full video broadcast of Eurovision 1964. The reason why is that Denmark’s DR is one of few host brodacsters in the early years that didn’t save a copy of the show. At some point, DR wiped their video tape of Eurovision 1964 to make way for a different recording. The missing video broadcast is what the contest is best known for today. Well, that and the smash hit from Italy that won by a landslide, “Non ho l’età”.

Sixteen countries competed once again, but the lineup was different from the last three years: Sweden dropped out due to a strike and Portugal made their debut. Italy got first place as I said, the UK got a distant second, and Monaco scored third. Strangely enough, for the third year in a row, four countries got zero points, one of which was the newcomer Portugal. The voting system was changed from each jury awarding 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 points to just 5, 3, and 1 points, and the headcount of each jury was reduced from 20 back to 10. The scoreboard was redesigned too: now it showed only country names without song titles, and had a horizontal bar graph to the right showing how many points each entry had.

Now back to the video footage problem: the only parts of the show that have surviving footage are the winner’s reprise and a few other snippets from the beginning and end of the show. Some of those snippets came from Denmark’s broadcaster DR, others from Finland’s Yle. This means we have small portions of the commentary from both countries, as well as audio of the French commentary. Over the past few years, fans have been making video reconstructions of the 1964 contest assembled from these snippets, as well as footage of contestants performing their songs in other shows. You can look at these YouTube uploads (1, 2, 3, 4) to see how the reconstruction has evolved over the years. Italy is lucky enough to have the winner’s reprise recorded. Portugal’s song has their national final performance archived, since RTP has preserved every single year of Festival da Canção. Not too surprising because FdC is Portugal’s pride and joy. Most other songs use a later video recording of the artist performing their song, but a few use footage of the artist performing a completely different song, which I don’t like because the lip movements don’t match the song.* For those songs I’d have preferred to just have photos, but I admire fans’ efforts to reconstruct the show regardless.

The show opens with a military march of some sort, which if the reconstruction is to be believed is interspersed with a video montage of Copenhagen. Then comes the presenter, Danish actress and TV presenter Lotte Wæver. She did most of the show in Danish (which I can understand much more of than last time), but graciously gave short speeches in English and French at the start. Fitting the increase in internationality of the hosting, the scoreboard had all the country names in English this time, instead of the local language. The reconstruction has the screen captions feature each country’s name in Danish, but I’m not sure if the show itself did that or not. I’ll watch the latest reconstruction I linked for this blog post. It’ll feel a lot like watching the music videos and national final performances of Eurovision 2020.

* As of this writing, those are the Netherlands, part of Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Spain. 11.5 out of 16 songs have a recording of the artist performing them, which is pretty damn good!