Eurovision 2000: Stockholm

Sweden put the first contest of the new century in the Globe, the world’s largest hemispherical building. Thirteen thousand people were inside, the biggest audience the contest had ever had. Kattis Ahlström and Anders Lundin presented, and for the first time the show could be watched live on the internet.

The logo was a pair of open lips. At the side of the stage the same mouth was filled, for each song, with a distorted version of that country’s flag.

Who was there

Twenty-four countries sang. Latvia entered for the first time. Russia returned after two years out. And France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom took up their new guaranteed places.

Greece, Hungary and Slovakia could have come and chose not to. Money was the reported reason.

Israel disowns its act

Israel’s entry was “Sameach”, by a group called PingPong, and it was in trouble before it reached Stockholm. The video showed same-sex kissing among the band members and had them singing into cucumbers, which upset religious leaders and right-wing groups at home.

The song is about an Israeli woman’s love affair with a man from Damascus. On stage the group planned to wave Israeli and Syrian flags together, as a call for peace between the two countries.

Israeli television objected in rehearsals and told them to drop the Syrian flags. They refused. The broadcaster then disowned its own entry. It did not stop the group performing, but it was reported to have withdrawn its funding altogether.

PingPong sang first, flags and all, and finished twenty-second.

Postcards with a joke in them

Each film showed something from the next country turning up in everyday Swedish life: a Danish lamp in every flat of an apartment block, two ice skaters eating Cypriot oranges in the underground, a man coming home from an Austrian ski holiday with a suntan.

Sweden’s own postcard went the other way. It showed building workers in Germany watching the contest.

Enschede

The Netherlands spent the evening on something else: the fireworks disaster in the city of Enschede.

Dutch television suspended its broadcast of the contest partway through. With no broadcast there could be no public vote, and the Netherlands’ points came from its stand-by jury.

Latvia used its jury as well, for a different reason. So many people tried to vote that the telephone lines were overwhelmed.

The result

The fans and the bookmakers agreed that Estonia would win. Neither had paid much attention to Denmark, which had sent two brothers with a song called “Fly on the Wings of Love”.

The Olsen Brothers won easily. They finished on 195 points, at that time the third-highest total ever, and forty ahead of Russia. It was Denmark’s second victory, 37 years after its first.

Russia’s second place and Estonia’s fourth were the best either had managed. Latvia was third at its first attempt, one of the best debuts the contest has seen.

A complaint

Russia did not let it rest. After the contest its delegation asked for Denmark to be disqualified, because for a brief moment one of the brothers’ voices had been put through a vocoder to give it an electronic sound.

The EBU turned the request down.