Eurovision 1978: Paris

France, five times a winner by now, put the contest in the Palais des Congrès in Paris, a four-year-old hall in the 17th arrondissement, and changed how the show was fronted. For the first time there were two presenters, Denise Fabre and Léon Zitrone. Zitrone was the first man to host since 1956, and he was doing two jobs: he also commentated for French viewers from a booth backstage.

Twenty

The field reached twenty for the first time. Denmark came back after twelve years away, and Turkey after two.

Security

Two fears shaped the evening: an attack like the one at the Munich Olympics, and a stage invasion like the one in Copenhagen in 1964. Two hundred police officers were on duty in and around the building, some of them in plain clothes, and the audience came in through metal detectors.

Walking to the stage

The postcards were live. A camera followed each act along a corridor and into a lift; when the doors opened, the act that had just finished was waiting to greet them, and they walked on.

The cameras also roamed the audience, and found Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg.

The singer who forgot his words

Sweden’s Björn Skifs did not like the rule that made him sing in Swedish. His plan was to sing in English regardless. At the last moment he thought better of it — and the switch back wiped the words from his mind.

He got through the opening lines in gibberish, then found his place. He finished fourteenth.

Nul points

The scoring system brought in three years earlier had been designed with ten sets of points from every jury, and nobody had yet failed to pick up any.

Norway’s Jahn Teigen did. “Mil etter mil” received nothing from any of the nineteen other countries: the first zero under the twelve-point system. It was the fifth time Norway had finished last.

The winner

Israel won for the first time, with “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” by Izhar Cohen and the Alphabeta. It finished on 157 points, 32 ahead of Belgium.

It is a love song built on a children’s language game, in which extra syllables are slipped into words; the title is the Hebrew for “I”, stretched out that way. It was the first winner sung in a Semitic language. And it is the only winning song to have been conducted by a woman: Nurit Hirsh, who had first conducted here in 1973.

Belgium’s second place, for Jean Vallée, was its best result yet. France was third.

The daffodils

The contest was being shown in several North African and Middle Eastern countries that were not taking part. According to John Kennedy O’Connor’s official history of the contest, most of the Arab stations ended their transmission once it was clear during the voting that Israel was going to win.

Jordanian television closed its broadcast on a photograph of a bunch of daffodils. It later announced that the winner was Belgium.