Eurovision Song Contest

Eurovision Song Contest 1975 vs 2019

Once upon a time, a long time ago… Say Ding Ding Dong. It has been a while since Teach-In won the Song Contest for The Netherlands. Forty-five years, to be precise. And apart from the lead singer Hilda Felix’ blond locks, the biggest Song Contest in the world has also gone through quite a transformation. Duncan Laurence managed to bring this beautiful event back to the Netherlands in 2019 with his song Arcade. Every Song Contest lover’s heart broke, of course, upon hearing that the song contest would be cancelled this year. But that won’t make us any less enthusiastic, and what happened in the meantime?

The amount of partaking countries alone already makes a big difference. Where in 1975 there were just a few more contestants than players in a soccer team (19), in 2019 this has more than doubled! No less than 41 countries fought an exhilarating battle over that so desired title: winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. With the small number of contestants in 1975, there were not one, not two, but a whopping zero semi-finals. The winner was directly announced in the only live show: the finale. Maybe for the better. If those 19 countries would be divided into two semi-finals, every live show would be shorter than an episode of GTST (and that’s without commercial breaks). In 2019 there’s two semi-finals and a grand finale. The best ten of every semi-final moves on to the final, and the five countries that pay the most (that might be hypocritical) and the host country move on to wage war on each other.

Oh, and then, that grandiose finale… nowadays a satellite connection is used to get every representative live on screen. In 1975 that went just a tad different. Back then, every representative was called. And yes, that means with one of those old-school phones with a rotating disk and a cable. About cables, in 1975 nothing was wireless. There our Hilda had a microphone with twenty metres of cable attached to it. Naturally, there were not a lot of dance moves. That said, Duncan Laurence wasn’t the greatest dancer either. But thanks to the wireless microphone on the piano, Duncan was able to get his moment to shine. During the musical intermezzo of Arcade, he made the audience clap together. An innovative The odd fashion during the Song Contest: From wide-legged pants and flowery dresses, to glitter headdresses and dresses with cleavage deeper than the Atlantic Ocean. Australia surprised us last year, with some kind of flying act and a ginormous glitter dress. In 1975 it was the long, wide-legged pants that would have to catch the eye. Bittersweetly looking back to last year’s Song Contest, I hope that the Netherlands presents a grandiose singing fest. Thinking back to some less clear voices of some contestants might ease the pain a little.