Instead all of these superb ingredients resulted in a novelty entry. The queen bee of eurovision jokes, if you so wish.
The jaunty little song tells the tale of a lovely but prude princess that bumps into the hippest swine herd around. The princess learns how to play sweet music on the herd's cooking pot and eventually convinces the cool man to swap places with her.
If you understand Swedish it is all very funny, I can promise you that. Nevertheless it proved a most controversial winner of the national final and the general public felt genuinely convinced their country would get seriously humiliated in Luxembourg.
For some reason beyond reason, the national juries of Denmark, Norway and Finland decided to let themselves go and gave all their top marks to the Swedish novelty. The audience laughed and whistled but, with the aid of an extra point from Switzerland, it was enough for Sweden to sail past everyone but the Austrian runaway winner and end in second place.
A deserved 2nd place?
Absolutely not. Entering novelties like this one into a song contest is a bit like cooking instant noodles on Master Chef. Joke entries need to be stronger and have hit factor to deserve high placings and this one doesn't cut it.
It remains a bitter pill to swallow that Lill Lindfors never got to display her talent for real with a true contender of a song, even though her presenting the 1985 final - and subsequently dropping her skirt in front of an entire world - got her written into Eurovision history for good.
Lill Lindfors & Svante Thuresson - Nygammal vals (Sweden 1966)
I understand and speak swedish (not perfectly but some), but I have never realized that this song is a comedy number. To me it is a jazzy tune performed by two great artists that makes me smile. Unlike other comedy acts this song works even without paying too much attention to the lyrics. Far from the best (or even the second best) song of the year, but why not have this kind of music in the Eurovision as well.
ReplyDeleteSweden's second place (and Norway's third place) in the results show the faults of the 1960's voting systems, where four nordic countries could play with the results this way just by giving votes to each other. Luckily it is not possible anymore (at least to that extent).