1993: A Eurovision Like Never Before - Part I

Steven Perkins: 00:00:01

Hello, London. We are ready for your votes. Hello, I'm Stephen Perkins and this is Douzepois, the Eurovision podcast from the team behind Bingewatch.

It is Monday 7 October and we are back with another new episode. This time I'm going to be taking a look at a year that I think is a bit of a turning point in the history of the contest.

But first, let's take a quick look at the latest headlines.

Finnish broadcaster Yle has confirmed that it has received a record number of submissions for Finland's pre Eurovision selection process, Oden Musingen, Kilpailu or UMK for short.

485 songs have been submitted for consideration, which is a peak under the contest's current format, but only seven of them will advance to the main stage of the competition.

February: 2025

being submitted for Montesong: 2024

song confirmed for Eurovision: 2025

Finally, Brotherhood of man lead singer Martin Lee has died aged 77.

ion for the United Kingdom in: 1976

ns to do a deep dive into the: 1993

ith a then population of just: 1500

of the way first, why did the: 1993

And why is it that a lot of people in the UK werent really aware that it even happened?

Well, the number of countries competing at Eurovision and wanting to compete at Eurovision had been slowly increasing during the late eighties and early nineties, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union had created even more newly independent nations who wanted a slice of the action, feeling that participating in the Eurovision Song Contest would help to increase their profile in the wider world.

However, with Eurovision bosses wanting to keep the already fairly lengthy broadcast under control, they couldnt afford to just admit everyone who wanted to do it, but they were willing to raise the cap on the number of competing nations from 22 to 25. There were still more countries wanting to compete than there were spaces available.

ke their Eurovision debut. In: 1993

April: 1993

However, by February, for various reasons, the number of entries had dropped to six, consisting of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia.

ad opened up in Eurovision in: 1993

It was broadcast primarily to the countries that were taking part, with only a few non competing nations like Denmark, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus deciding to air the event.

hing Eurovision on the BBC in: 1993

I certainly wasn't, but of course the Internet is a wonderful thing and the program has been uploaded to YouTube in its entirety so this week I sat down and watched Kvala Vekatsieza mill Street for the first time.

t definitely has the air of a: 1990

Its held in a fairly modest tv studio and the studio audience, which doesnt appear to be vast, seems to consist primarily of guests in smart casual clothing who dont appear to respond very much apart from the occasional smattering of quietly respectful applause.

In other words, its all rather subdued in earnest, which isnt a bad thing, but when youre watching it from a modern perspective and youre used to arena sized semi finals full of fans who know all the words to even the more obscure entries, it does feel a little bit strange.

I think the tone of the piece is set right from the off, given the fact that were treated to around four minutes of sweeping, majestic travelogue footage, presumably a combination of shots from the seven different competing nations.

It's accompanied by an instrumental soundtrack that's clearly been composed to inspire awe and reverence, although at one point it does veer slightly into a pastiche of thank you for the music.

I think clearly the whole point of this is to promote these countries as being on a par with the western nations already taking part at Eurovision, showing off their natural beauty as well as their developed cities. And I'm all for that, although I would say this section does go on rather longer than it needs to. I appreciate that.

ain, I'm watching this from a: 2024

But there was a point where I found myself wondering if this was some kind of standby footage that they kept on hold in case the broadcast fell off the air at any point. Anyway, eventually they bring up the title card, which has the name of the event in both slovenian and English.

And then we cut to the studio where our presenter for the night tide Leksch enters and greets us first of all in slovenian before switching to English.

Tida Leksch: 00:06:40

Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to the studio one of T Slovenia, where is to be held this year's pre selection for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Steven Perkins: 00:06:53

Tida tells us that the running order for tonight's event was decided by a random draw, although it basically turned out to be an alphabetical order, apart from Slovenia and Slovakia switching places. So we open with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

We do get a pre performance postcard of sorts and what's interesting is that the nations appear to have been given carte blanche here to submit whatever they felt appropriate. Theres not really an overarching theme to them and even the visual style can be quite different from country to country.

Bosnia and Herzegovinas is certainly an outlier in that it contains both shots of beautiful countryside and shots of buildings on fire.

In other words, theyre not so much treating it as a tourism opportunity, as a chance to remind viewers watching at home that Bosnia is in the middle of a war, which is quite a bold move. After each postcard, we cut back to Taita in the studio for a brief intro to the song.

She tells us in this case that the song by Fazla entitled Svabolsfietr translates into all the worlds pain and its about how all of the pain of the world is in Bosnia right now, but the message of the song is to remain optimistic and not get dragged down by that. The song itself is a pretty catchy kind of a synth rock number thats staged very effectively within the confines of the setup.

I really like the way the backing singers in red jackets are standing very still but at the same time being really expressive in their arm movements. I think overall its a pretty encouraging start to the contest.

Croatia are on second with don't ever cry by put, which we are told is croatian for road. Now their postcard is constructed very differently from Bosnia and Herzegovinas.

It's definitely got more of a Windows movie maker vibe to it, with various croatian beauty spots swooping across a static background while the word Croatia occasionally scrolls up and down the sides. Back in the studio, Tida explains that this song too is about not giving up on hope.

So I'm very much sensing a theme to tonight's entries and then the bands strike up. It's a very sweet, earnest ballad with the verses in Croatian and the chorus mostly in English.

It's quite a static performance, apart from one slightly strange piece of choreography in the middle eight where each of the singers turns around on the spot with their heads kind of trading behind them a little bit. I don't fully get what that's about, but otherwise this is another decent effort.

Estonia are up next and their postcard is more of a midpoint between the previous two. It's not quite as stylised as Croatia's, nor is it as harrowing as bosnian Herzegovinars.

It's much more of a straightforward sequence of shots of estonian beauty spots. Now, at this point I should probably mention that it's a bit of a linguistically confusing evening.

Taida presents, in as far as I can discern, a combination of slovenian, French and English, and you don't always get all three languages in each break, so there are some where no English is spoken at all.

Estonia's intro is one of those, but there are enough familiar words in there for me to know that Taida is telling us that singer Janika Silmar recently played Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar. The song is called muritut milit miltia sudemitult, which seems to translate into something like a carefree mind and a heart of fire.

This is another one that I really like.

She's got a lovely voice and it's all very sweet and really the only criticism I can level at this performance is that she's a little bit too static on the stage, but other than that, a very strong entry. From there we go to Hungary, and where some of the previous postcard videos have had much more of a kind of contemporary style soundtrack to them.

This one feels much more rooted in the country's own musical traditions, although, having said that, it does get a little bit funkier towards the end. They also have footage of lots of black horses running through the landscape, so you could be forgiven for thinking it's a Lloyd's bank.

Advertising Hungary is Andrea Sulak with Ava Ragel or lonely morning, which Tida explains is a song about lost love. This one feels very eurovisiony for this particular era.

It's a torch song ballad that sounds a little bit like Eric Carmen's all by myself, with the chorus taking a slight turn more towards superstar by the carpenters. And from there we go to my personal standout of the evening, Romania.

Now, their postcard is nothing much to write home about, it's your usual mix of sun, snow and exciting wildlife.

But what their postcard lacks in excitement, they more than make up for with their representative, Dida Dragan, singing nu pleka or don't leave right from the word go. She is absolutely eating and leaving no crumbs.

Although there is an unfortunate piece of microphone feedback quite early on in the performance, I don't know whether the juries were voting on dress rehearsal footage or on what they actually saw on the night, but if it was the latter, that can't have helped Romania's chances very much. Dida is by far the most animated performer of the night with a very bombastic song.

At first I thought she just really, really wanted to get through to Eurovision, but honestly, as the evening draws on, I think she's just kind of like that as a performer. In the penultimate spot are Slovenia, our hosts for this evening with T. Dejavandin or a quiet rainy day by one x band.

And again, what's happening on stage is much more attention grabbing than the fairly unremarkable postcard that comes before it. There are some seriously gaudy shirts being worn by this group. For starters, the song is pleasant too.

It has a slight feel of California dream into it, and the style of the music in combination with those shirts gives the whole thing a fairly relaxed tropical vibe, which is quite a nice counterpart to a lot of what we've seen so far tonight. Finally in position number seven, we have Slovakia's elan with amnestya na neveru or love addiction. Their postcard is quite effective.

It's gentle and haunting, although I do find myself a little bit sad that no other nation has quite reached the same levels of graphic design as my passion that the croatian postcard did.

Anyway, Tida tells us that the final song is, and I quote, an apology for infidelity, confusion and pain, which may all be brought about because of love. So I can't claim I was particularly surprised when this group turned out to consist entirely of men.

It's a good rocky ballad with a very potent chorus and a lead singer who reminds me of con Oneill a little bit. So that is all seven of our songs and we're around 43 minutes into a 95 minutes broadcast, so there is still quite a lot of airtime to fill.

Remember, at this point in time we were still one year away from Riverdance, completely redefining the idea of a Eurovision interval act. So people's expectations were probably not that lofty at this point.

But I must admit I was quite surprised when Taida announced that while the jury members were considering their scores, the next part of the program would involve each of the seven contestants returning to perform another one of their hits in a performance that would not be considered by the juries. It just feels like a really baffling concept to me.

I know in a modern interval program we probably do get a similar number of non competitive performances, but they tend to be sketches or alumni coming back for a valedictory turn. This just felt like an entire second round that counted for absolutely nothing, which only really existed to pad out the duration of the show.

That isnt to say the performances werent good. In many cases they were.

And I was definitely delighted to see Romanias Dida doing something even more dramatic the second time around, kneeling on the floor and going full ham to the point where I thought she might be about to start speaking in tongues.

But on the other hand, we had Janika from Estonia, who I think was more of a musical theatre actress than an established pop star, although I could be wrong, performing a cover of Natalie Coles I live for your love, which was a little bit sharp and actually ended up making me like her earlier performance a bit less. In retrospect, though, I appreciate thats not a thought I would have been allowed to consider if I had been on the jury.

Anyway, I wont dwell on the second round of performances because they arent really relevant for our purposes. Suffice to say that they happened and we go on to the important bit, the voting. So heres how that worked.

Each of the seven nations competing sent one juror to Slovenia to give their votes in person. In the studio, the scoring system was a slightly truncated version of the main one due to having fewer songs.

So the lowest number of points available was five, then six, then seven, then eight, and the usual jump up to ten and twelve for the top two songs. And as usual, jurors were not allowed to vote for their own country's entry.

It was quite interesting to see the actual jurors on screen in studio giving their scores in full vision.

Some of them clearly felt a little bit self conscious about publicly rating their competitors like this and it being very clear that this score came entirely from them since there was no panel of fellow music industry experts they could blame if they were going rogue.

I wont go through the results in detail because you can watch the video if you really wanted to see all the ins and outs, but ill just pick out a couple of interesting points. For one, every single country gave twelve points to a different nation, meaning that each country got a top score once and only once.

In any other scenario at Eurovision I would suggest that was a case of clear rigor going on. But honestly, in a sample size this small, the charitable thing to do would be to notch that up purely to coincidence. So thats what Im going to do.

Slovakia emerge as the leaders after the first few rounds of voting and Romania, despite picking up twelve points from Croatia, pick up most of the five points, suggesting fairly early on that they will not be advancing.

But whats particularly dramatic is that Slovakia, despite losing the lead briefly to Slovenia, are back on top after six rounds of voting and Slovakia themselves are the final country to vote and proceed to essentially vote themselves out of contention by getting their top points to their nearest competitors.

Even though they couldn't award themselves any points in this round mathematically, they could have stayed in the top three if they'd given, say, Romania twelve points, ten to Hungary, eight to Estonia, seven to Bosnia and Herzegovina and so on.

But they opt to give eight points to Croatia, ten points to Slovenia and their twelve to Bosnia and Herzegovina, knocking themselves into fourth place in the process and missing out on qualifying by a margin of one point.

Tida Leksch: 00:15:40

The purpose of tonight's performance was to choose three songs to be performed on the stage of this year's Eurovision Song Contest. And we've just attained it.

The three winning songs are a quiet rainy day from Slovenia, performed by Enix Benz, the pain of the whole world from Bosnia and Herzegovina, performed by the group Fazza and don't ever cry from Croatia, performed by the group put so.

Steven Perkins: 00:16:25

The scores end up with Slovenia in first place on 54 points, Bosnia and Herzegovina second with 52, Croatia third with 51, Slovakia in fourth with 50, Estonia fifth with 47, Hungary 6th with 44 and Romania in last place with 38 points. Robbed. Robbed.

I tell you, although the majority of the evening has been very slickly handled, I don't think they can have done a particularly good or thorough job of rehearsing the coronation part of the proceedings because Taida clearly wants the winners to join her on stage in ascending order. So, third place Croatia first, then Bosnia and Herzegovina in second, and winners Slovenia last of all.

But the whole message gets muddled and Bosnia and Herzegovina appear on the stage first. But despite the fairly chaotic execution, the three winning countries are all given a trophy and a bunch of flowers.

And eventually Slovenia, as the overall winner, gets to return to the main stage to reprise their song after Tida wishes everyone good luck in real street. And we end, perhaps fittingly, with scrolling credits that look like they were written in comic sans.

So, to summarise, this was for the most part a fairly smoothly run and professional pre selection process with a high standard of entries across the board, even if it definitely felt more like a song for Europe than Eurovision itself.

But then I imagine there wasnt really the budget to make it more of an event than it was, especially with it being very much an untested concept at this point.

But nonetheless, Kvalithekatjas mill Street laid a lot of the groundwork for the modern concept of a semi final, even if it took another eleven years for one to actually arrive.

Next time ill be taking a look at how Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia got on Athenae Eurovision itself, as well as all of the other competing nations in this somewhat unconventional contest. So I hope you'll come back and join me for that one. Thank you as ever for listening.

Don't forget you can follow us on Twitter, ingewatch, pod and even Perkins for me personally. And please don't forget to hit subscribe to make sure all of our upcoming episodes are downloaded directly to your device.

Until next time, goodnight Europe and Good Morning Australia.