Eurovision 1989: Lausanne

Switzerland had hosted the first contest in 1956 and had waited 33 years to host another. More than a dozen Swiss cities applied. Lausanne won, and the hall in its Palais de Beaulieu was renamed for the week after Lys Assia, the singer who had won that first contest.

Jacques Deschenaux, a sports journalist, and Lolita Morena, a former Miss Switzerland, presented.

Heidi and the Matterhorn

The show began with seven minutes of film setting Swiss landscapes against Swiss paintings, with an eleven-year-old girl from Morges, picked from two hundred, playing Heidi.

The logo was the Matterhorn, drawn by computer in contour lines made to look like guitar strings.

Then Céline Dion walked on. She sang the song she had won with a year earlier, and followed it with something nobody had heard: her first single in English, “Where Does My Heart Beat Now”.

The children

Two of the singers caused an argument before a note was sung. France’s Nathalie Pâque was 11. Israel’s Gili Netanel was 12. They were, and remain, the youngest lead performers the contest has had.

Some of the other competitors protested, and there were calls for both to be excluded. The organisers had nothing to exclude them with: no rule said how old a performer had to be. Both sang. France finished eighth and Israel twelfth.

The rule arrived the following year.

Other firsts

Switzerland entered a song in Romansh, the smallest of its four national languages, for the first time.

Germany and Austria turned up with songs by the same two writers, Dieter Bohlen and Joachim Horn-Bernges. The Austrian one did better. It came fifth, Austria’s first top-five finish since 1976, while Germany’s was fourteenth.

Cyprus was back after its enforced year out, restoring the field to 22.

A new tie-break

After the one-point finish in Dublin, the EBU rewrote the rule for a tie. There would be no more singing the songs again. If two countries finished level, the one with more twelve-point scores would win; if that was level too, the one with more tens.

It was not needed in Lausanne. It would be, two years later.

William Tell misses

The interval act was a stuntman who called himself Guy Tell and worked with high-powered crossbows.

His finale was a chain reaction. Sixteen crossbows were set up so that each one’s bolt triggered the next, and the last was aimed at an apple on top of his own head.

On the night the final bolt missed the apple by a few centimetres.

The result

Yugoslavia sang last, and won. “Rock Me”, by the group Riva, finished on 137 points, seven ahead of the United Kingdom.

Yugoslavia had been entering since 1961, and this was its first victory in 24 attempts. It was also its only one. The country began to break apart two years later.

Behind it, the scoreboard looked familiar. The United Kingdom was second and Denmark third, exactly as in 1988. For Britain it was a twelfth runner-up place. Sweden missed third by a point.

Finland had its best result for fourteen years, and Ireland its worst so far. Iceland, in its fourth contest, finished last without a point.

The show ran for three hours and ten minutes.