Eurovision 1962: Luxembourg City

Luxembourg hosted for the first time in 1962, in the Grand Auditorium of the Villa Louvigny, its broadcaster’s headquarters in the city’s municipal park. It is the contest where the power failed twice and where four countries went home with nothing — the first time anyone had.

The same sixteen

For the first time since the contest began, the list of countries didn’t change. All sixteen from Cannes came back and nobody new joined.

Half the singers were, or would become, repeat visitors. Belgium’s Fud Leclerc was making his fourth appearance, the first artist to reach that number; only three acts have matched it since. And Jean Philippe, who had sung for France in 1959, turned up representing Switzerland — the first person to sing for two different countries.

New sums

The voting was rebuilt. Instead of ten jurors casting one vote each, every jury now agreed its three favourite songs and gave them three points, two points and one.

It made the scoreboard easier to follow. It also meant a song could be every jury’s fourth choice and score nothing at all.

The juries were meant to stand for the ordinary viewer and listener. Composers, publishers and record-company staff were not allowed to sit on them.

A Sunday, a clown, and the dark

The show went out on Sunday 18 March at half past nine in the evening. It is the last time the final wasn’t held on a Saturday. Mireille Delannoy, one of the station’s continuity announcers, presented; her four-year-old son had helped her draw the running order two days earlier.

The interval act was the French clown Achille Zavatta, performing as the contest’s seventeenth entrant, for a country called Zavattaland.

Then there was the electricity. During the Dutch song, eighth in the running order, the power dipped: the picture degraded, and some broadcasters lost it altogether for around thirty seconds. Straight after the next song, France’s, it happened again, worse. The auditorium went completely dark for about a minute and a half. Broadcasters put up their “breakdown” captions, and Norway’s singer had to wait.

The result

France won, with Isabelle Aubret and “Un premier amour” on 26 points. It was France’s third win in five years, and the first time any country had won three times.

Monaco was second and the hosts third, which meant the top three songs were all in French. Monaco’s François Deguelt had been third in 1960; he became the first singer to finish both second and third without ever winning.

Nul points

Four countries scored nothing: Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. It had never happened before, and the new system made it likely: with each jury rewarding only three songs, most of the field got nothing from most of the room.

Two of the four had particular reason to feel hard done by. Fud Leclerc’s record-setting fourth appearance ended on zero. And the Dutch duo De Spelbrekers were the ones singing when the lights first went.

The winner’s medallion carried a winged lion, the emblem of the host broadcaster. Jean-Claude Pascal, the previous year’s winner, presented it.