Eurovision 1956: Lugano

The first Eurovision Song Contest lasted an hour and forty minutes, went out on television and radio in more than ten countries, and ended without anyone being told who came second. Almost every rule it used was thrown out within a year. It is still the reason there is a contest at all.

Where the idea came from

The European Broadcasting Union was founded in 1950 so that broadcasters could share programmes, and by 1954 it had a network to send them over. The network was called Eurovision. What it lacked was something to put on it.

In January 1955 the EBU’s programme committee, chaired by Marcel Bezençon of Swiss television, agreed to look at an idea from the Italian broadcaster RAI: a song contest between countries, modelled on the Sanremo festival that Italy had been holding since 1951. The EBU’s General Assembly approved it that October. Switzerland offered to host, which suited everyone. The country sat in the middle of the continent, where the relay links were easiest to arrange, and the EBU’s own headquarters were there.

The room

The venue was the Teatro Kursaal in Lugano, a casino theatre on the lake with 700 seats. Four hundred of them were kept for invited guests; the balcony went on sale a week before. The Italian-language radio service ran the show, and Swiss television drove an outside-broadcast truck down from Zurich. There were three cameras.

Lohengrin Filipello presented it, in Italian. No contest since has been hosted by one man on his own.

A 24-piece orchestra played for everybody. Countries could bring their own conductor; those that didn’t were conducted by the house musical director, Fernando Paggi, who ended up conducting three of the seven countries, including the winner.

Fourteen songs

Seven broadcasters entered: Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Each sent two songs — the only time that has been allowed. Two singers, Switzerland’s Lys Assia and Luxembourg’s Michèle Arnaud, sang both of their country’s entries themselves.

It could have been ten. Austria and Denmark are believed to have wanted in and missed the deadline. The BBC chose to run its own Festival of British Popular Songs instead. All three showed the contest anyway.

A vote behind a closed door

The jury sat in another room of the same building, watching on a small television so they would see what viewers at home saw. There were two jurors from each country. Each gave every song a mark out of ten — including the songs from their own country.

Luxembourg’s two jurors couldn’t travel to Lugano. The EBU let two Swiss nationals vote in their place. That put four Swiss jurors in a room of fourteen, all of them free to mark Switzerland’s songs. Switzerland won. Whether it made the difference, nobody can say: the marks don’t survive.

Nobody outside the room saw any of it. According to a Dutch juror quoted at the time, even the jurors were sent out once they had handed in their marks, and never saw the totals added up.

The scores that were lost

At the end, the jury’s chairman, Rolf Liebermann, announced one thing: the winner was “Refrain”, sung by Lys Assia for Switzerland. No second place, no points, no table.

The marks were never published and the EBU no longer has them. Attempts to rebuild the result by interviewing jurors years later got nowhere. Two numbers surfaced at the time — an Italian newspaper reported the next day that the winner had scored 102, and the head of Swiss broadcasting told a magazine that the margin over second place was two points — and neither has ever been confirmed. That is why the table on this page has no placings. Officially, the other thirteen songs didn’t finish anywhere.

The winner forgets the words

Winning meant singing the song again. Assia came back on, was overcome partway through, lost her place in the lyrics, and had to ask the orchestra to start over.

That reprise is the only film of the 1956 contest known to survive. The rest exists as sound: most of the radio broadcast was kept, the television pictures were not.

What it changed

By the time the contest reached Frankfurt nine months later, countries were down to one song each, jurors could no longer vote for their own country, and the voting was done out loud, on a scoreboard, in front of the audience. The secret ballot lasted exactly one night.