Eurovision 1963: London

Denmark won the 1963 contest by two points. Whether it should have is an argument that started before the broadcast ended and took a month to settle.

London again

France had won in 1962 and passed on hosting. Its broadcaster pointed to the cost, and to the fact that it had already staged the contest twice, in 1959 and 1961. The BBC stepped in, as it had in 1960.

This time it kept the show in-house: the new Television Centre at White City, which had opened in 1960. Katie Boyle presented for the second time.

A contest made for television

Every contest before this one had been a concert with cameras pointed at it. The BBC made a television programme instead.

It used two studios. One held Boyle, the audience and the scoreboard. The other held the orchestra and the singers, who performed to cameras rather than to a hall. That allowed sets and close-ups nobody had tried before.

It also had a side effect. The sound was picked up by a boom microphone held out of shot, the way a drama would be recorded, so viewers saw singers with no microphone anywhere near them. It could look as though they were miming. They weren’t.

The sixteen countries were the same sixteen for the third year running. Ronnie Carroll sang for the United Kingdom again.

Twenty jurors and a lot of arithmetic

The voting changed once more. Each country now had twenty jurors, who each ranked their five favourite songs. The votes were added up, and the jury’s overall top five received five, four, three, two and one points.

More jurors and more sums meant more time needed. That turned out to matter.

Norway votes twice

When Boyle reached Oslo, the Norwegian spokesman read his results in the wrong format. He was supposed to give each song’s number and country before its points, and didn’t. Boyle asked him to start again. He asked her instead to come back to Norway at the end.

She did. The votes he read the second time were not the votes he had read the first time — and the difference decided the contest. On the first reading Switzerland would have won. On the second, Denmark did.

The explanation given was that the first set had never been the real result: Norway’s twenty jurors were still being tallied when the call came, and the spokesman had read out numbers that weren’t final. Swiss television was reported to be preparing an appeal. After a flood of complaints the recordings of the vote were checked, and a month after the contest it was confirmed that the Norwegian jury had not changed its votes.

Monaco had to be called twice as well. Its spokesman had given one point each to two different songs. On the recount the second of them was dropped; it made no difference to anyone’s placing.

The result

Denmark’s Grethe and Jørgen Ingmann won with “Dansevise”, 42 points to Switzerland’s 40. It was the first win for any Nordic country, and the closest finish the contest had had.

Italy was third. Further down were two singers who would become far bigger than the contest: Françoise Hardy, fifth for Monaco, and Nana Mouskouri, eighth for Luxembourg.

Four countries scored nothing. For Finland, Norway and Sweden it was a first. For the Netherlands it was the second year in a row — the first country to manage that.