Eurovision 1988: Dublin

Two future stars sang at the 1988 contest. One of them won it, by a single point, on the very last announcement of the night.

It was Dublin’s third contest and the second in the Simmonscourt Pavilion. Pat Kenny and Michelle Rocca presented, and Johnny Logan opened the show with the song that had brought it there.

Cyprus is ruled out

Twenty-two countries entered. A few weeks before the contest, somebody noticed that the Cypriot song, “Thimame”, had been heard before: it had competed in Cyprus’s own national selection in 1984, under a different title.

That broke the rules. On 12 March the Cypriot broadcaster cancelled its choice. Its selection had no provision for a runner-up to step in, and there was no time to hold another. Cyprus, drawn to sing second, did not take part.

A contest made to look younger

The Irish producers set out to win a younger audience, and changed the look of the show to do it.

The scoreboard, a physical object since the 1950s, was replaced by a computer-generated one, shown on two video walls either side of the stage. The same walls showed the performances and the faces in the green room, so that for the first time people in the hall could see what viewers at home were seeing.

The stage was the biggest yet built for the contest. It filled nearly a third of the building.

There were smaller novelties. Italy performed to a backing track with no orchestra, and its recording ended in a fade-out, the first the contest had heard.

The juries grew as well. Each country now used sixteen jurors instead of eleven, balanced between men and women and across four age groups.

The interval

The interval act was a music video. The Irish band Hothouse Flowers had filmed their song “Don’t Go” in eleven European countries, with money from the European Economic Community, which saw it as a contribution to European integration. Their singer, Liam Ó Maonlaí, introduced it from the piano, first in Irish and then in English.

The last three juries

With three countries still to vote, the United Kingdom’s Scott Fitzgerald was fifteen points ahead of Switzerland.

The next two juries cut that to five. Only Yugoslavia was left.

Yugoslavia’s votes came up in ascending order. Six of them went to Switzerland, which put it one point in front — but with the big scores still to come, that looked like nowhere near enough, and the director cut to Céline Dion in the green room, looking beaten.

Then the rest of the Yugoslav points were read out. None of them was for the United Kingdom.

Switzerland had won by 137 to 136.

What it meant

It was the closest finish since the four-way tie of 1969. For the United Kingdom it was an eleventh second place, and the second time it had lost by exactly one point; the first was to Massiel in 1968.

For Switzerland it was a second victory, 32 years after it won the very first contest. “Ne partez pas sans moi” is also the last song in French to have won.

In Britain the result was not forgotten. The losing song had been written by the daughter of the entertainer Bruce Forsyth, who later went on a television show about pet hates and nominated Yugoslavia.

Austria, at the other end, finished last without a point.

Two careers

The winning song was not a big hit. The win itself mattered more. It is reported to have let Dion’s manager negotiate four times the budget for her first album in English, which came out in 1990 and sold more than four million copies. She returned to the contest in 1989 to open it.

The other future star finished fourth, for Luxembourg. Lara Fabian was born in Belgium and later moved to Quebec, and is now considered the best-selling Belgian-born female singer there has been.