Eurovision 1971: The Song Contest 2.0 | Song super cut and animated scoreboard

An edited down version of the Eurovision Song Contest 1971 from Dublin, with a scoreboard using today’s technology. This all started as a lockdown project!
This edit will give a flavour of the evening (Saturday 3 April, 9:45pm) with some commentary from ORF.
Not only had Dana’s commercial success tempted the abstainers back into Eurovision, but there was also the impressive audience figures too. Now the EBU altered the rules to placate some of the grumpy delegations. Unfortunately, the Nordic bloc didn’t get a relaxation of the language rule, but groups were allowed, and each country was required to provide a pre-Contest preview video, giving the lesser-known nations a chance of some exposure ahead of the big night.
RTÉ had a mammoth task on its hands. Not only had the 9-year-old TV service never organised an event on this stage, it felt obliged to do so in colour (despite Irish adoption being at 1%), and it had to implement the new voting system. The cramped Gaiety Theatre certainly looked a technical challenge, but the real difficulty was in the budget sheets, where £250,000 was spent on this one show. This caused a black hole in programme budgets and wrecked home-grown programming for much of the early 1970s.
Ireland’s love affair with hosting Eurovision was not evident in 1971. Not only had RTÉ employees picketed the event, but the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement protested outside handing leaflets out that said Irish women had little to sing about, reminding delegations that bringing contraception with them was breaking Irish laws. The interval act was criticised for not promoting Ireland fully enough, the Irish Council Against Blood Sports protested at the inclusion of hunting in the same video, and that’s before complaints that the Irish song should be sung in Irish.
Also, the situation in Northern Ireland was continuing to worsen - the British Army had been deployed in 1969 after civil rights marches had turned ugly, and relations between Dublin and London were strained. To that end, the BBC (as well as helping with colour equipment) sent County Down born TV-star Clodagh Rodgers to represent the UK - a Catholic, Rodgers has said she received death threats from the IRA afterwards. The Swedish conductor noted that the UK delegation were sure of victory in Dublin and made that known - Irish journalists, however, were more concerned that ‘every foreign woman seen around Dublin this week has entire wardrobe of just hot pants’. Luckily for Clodagh, she’d had her legs…or her voice (or both) insured for £1m.
Away from hot pants, the new voting system fundamentally shifted the role of the juries away from picking their favourite song against the others, but instead they had to rate every entry on a scale. Not only could jurors give maximum points to as many songs as they liked, the eradication of ‘0’ from the scale avoided the embarrassment of scoring nothing. Today, that would surely attract as waspy journalistic coverage today as hot panted foreigners did in 1971.
Once the jurors had completed their arduous task, they had continued the magic of Amsterdam, electing little known Séverine as their champion with a song that stood out amongst a strong field. Although the scoreboard read that Monaco had won, in fact it was the French music industry that had triumphed once again, to the chagrin of French singer Serge Lama, in particular. Séverine noted that she’d not been to the principality before (although her preview video says otherwise), and her conductor noted that he saw little of any Monegasque delegation in Dublin. The EBU had worked to save the show, now it had a fresh challenge, but RTÉ had delivered the goods - a competent refreshed show that proved very popular.
DESIGN AND THE BOARD
This board was a challenge! Like the real show, I have all the scores already loaded and simply display them in order as the jurors do their work. The ‘CanYouWin’ function highlights the problem of this system, particularly when the popular songs are all bunched up at one end of the RO. I noticed the commentator had worked out that Monaco had won so early on. The design from RTÉ was great, and on par with Amsterdam. There’s some Futura type used in the main title of the show, the rest is in lovely Helvetica on simple white boards. I created a very gently animating version of the green and purple backing too, hopefully keeping the modern Celtic feel - avoiding the jewellery inspired stage backing!
TRANSFER NEWS
IN: MLT - first addition since Ireland in 1965
BACK: SWE, FIN, NOR, POR, AUT.
INTERVAL ACT
The ? Castle Entertainers
CREDITS
@FMR134 for footage;
@fintan_hughes28 on Twitter for helping me so kindly with the Irish, and to @scottdebuitleir, @willovision for helping make contacts and @B C for replying on RUclips too!
Flags: countryflags.com
00:00 RTÉ Report
03:04 Intro
07:30 Song super-cut
30:20 Interval
31:43 Voting intro
33:30 The reorder board 71
54:05 Recap, data & reprise