An edited down version of the 1986 Eurovision Song Contest in Bergen with a scoreboard using today’s technology. Nothing but a fun lockdown project.
This edit will give a flavour of the evening (3rd May) with only some of Terry Wogan’s commentary this time - a source for the whole show is not easily found on KZfaq. There’s compensation in a very good quality version, rebroadcast by NRK. This year’s special edits go to Iceland’s debut, and it gives a chance to show what NRK did with their postcards.
NRK’s first hosting of Eurovision is often described as a costly affair - comments about the presenter’s dress and an ‘ice palace’ being built which was shown off to the King. This was the first time royalty had endured Eurovision - and their glum faces didn’t add to the atmosphere in the Grieghallen. The Crown Princess had just had a foul smelling mixture of oil, pepper and water thrown over her by a crazed woman from the crowd outside though, so we could forgive them. Unlike 1985, the audience was more highly selected.
The presenter, Åse Kleveland, was a steady pair of hands who had represented Norway in 1966 (the first woman to wear a pantsuit instead of a dress on stage, no doubt). Kleveland went on to become Minister of Culture in Norway in 1990. She’s a polyglot, but her grasp of English was much weaker than Lindfors’ a year earlier and this meant some of the modern, flow free presentation achieved in Gothenburg was lost. The opening number is particularly weak, although memorable.
Much later it was revealed there had been a bomb threat to the contest and the police weighed up suspending the show and evacuating the hall...luckily, with the King in attendance, the police were sure it was a hoax as the venue had been thoroughly searched.
DESIGN AND THE BOARD
So the design this year is a little confusing. I’m fairly sure there isn’t much snow or ice in Bergen in May, so I can’t explain the staging choice other than to reiterate that it snows in Norway and this is the most northerly contest (still true as of 2020, Helsinki is a smidge to the south). The logo seen on hoardings and in the titles was inspired, and used a Garamond-like typeface on bar lines...that’s a good theme....but then it transitions to postcards in the programme to end the… well, postcards. So we have ice, postcards and sheet music.
As a result, I went with postcards, which used some ice type animation on the board. Instead of using Century Gothic from the logo, I went with the very pleasing Optician Sans (Simen Schikulski, Kjetil Wold, and Vivi-Ann Slaatsveen from ANTI in collaboration with typographer Fábio Duarte Martins, via Font Arena) and a Google’s Caveat (Impallari Type) to give us some handwriting on the postcards.
Wige Data again provided the scoreboard in the hall, and the ranks were displaying much faster than in 1985. I do believe that Wogan had a feed of the placings and scores in the commentator’s booth potentially - he manages to read out placings long after they’ve disappeared from the physical board.
TRANSFER NEWS (source: Wiki)
IN: The first new country to join the gang since 1981, Iceland started their Eurovision journey.
OUT: Greece was back out, unexpectedly. They had been drawn to perform 18th, but ERT didn’t travel to Bergen - either political trouble or the eve of Orthodox Easter seems to be the reason. Italy out again too, through lack of interest.
BACK: Yugoslavia and the Netherlands didn’t have other plans, so returned.
INTERVAL ACT
"Bergensiana" performed by Sissel Kyrkjebø and Steinar Ofsdal seemed a little odd in the edit, but the crowd found it so moving they stood to attention throughout it. The production team didn’t expect it, but it’s a patriotic piece, performed excellently.
CREDITS
The wonderful Lukas ESC Archive for this high quality NRK showing.
Tasosk3 for the chopped up voting videos that actually had Wogan on it!
Yugoslav flag by Đorđe Andrejević-Kun,commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
www.countryflags.com/en/ for all the free to use images of flags
The flashing phone came from www.flaticon.com
Photo by Kuno Schweizer on Unsplash used before the board appears.
All Copyright goes to NRK and the BBC.
00:00 Intro
04:08 Song super-cut
21:19 Interval act
22:13 Voting Intro
24:35 The reorder board 86
1:04:53 Recap and reprise of winning song
1:10:35 Closing credits