Talk:Eurovision Song Contest

The categories Category:Eurovision Song Contest entrants and Category:Eurovision Song Contest conductors are currently being considered for deletion. Please share your thoughts on the matter at this category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. SRamzy (talk) 13:25, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

@Ferclopedio has pointed out that the beginning sentence in the Origins and history section includes suspicious claims about the motivations of creating the ESC:

“The Eurovision Song Contest was developed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) as an experiment in live television broadcasting and a way to produce cheaper programming for national broadcasting organisations.”

I have looked into the claims of that section, their references, and compared that to other sources. I’d say the Eurovision Song Contest was created with several motivations in mind, the difficulty is to tell which of these motivations was the most important one.

I’ll start with the “cheaper television production” goal:

Surely, the Eurovision network per se is motivated by the goal of making programmes cheaper by exchanging them. When you look into TV listings magazines of the 1950s, the TV programmes are full of Eurovision broadcasts (reports, football games, classical music concerts…). Television programming is very expensive at that time so the Eurovision network is a great resource for any broadcaster in Europe to fill their schedules with often high quality programmes produced by another broadcaster.

While I don’t see the creation of the Song Contest itself as motivated by cutting costs, the international live transmission via Eurovision is surely motivated by the will to produce a high quality (and hopefully popular) programme at an affordable price. In this respect, the inclusion of “cheaper” in the Origins section is misleading.

There is also no clear reference for that claim: The two references for the sentence are [https://eurovision.tv/history/origins-of-eurovision a eurovision.tv site] (which says nothing about cheaper production) and the book "Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest" by Dean Vuletic, but without any page number. I have looked up relevant passages in the book as to the origins of the contest but couldn’t find any sentence where it is claimed that costs or cheaper production played a role in the creation of the contest. So I propose to delete the claim about "cheaper production" from the Origins section.

As to the "experimental" nature of the first ESC, this is a claim repeated in several sources, such as:

"It started out as a test for the emerging technology of television, to see whether the same programme could be broadcast across several countries in Europe at the same time – and live."

({{Cite book |last=Österdahl |first=Martin |title=The Eurovision Song Contest: an academic phenomenon |publisher=Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group |year=2023 |isbn=978-1-03-203774-5 |editor-last=Dubin |editor-first=Adam |location=London ; New York |page=xii |chapter=Foreword |editor-last2=Vuletic |editor-first2=Dean |editor-last3=Obregón |editor-first3=Antonio}})

Similarly [https://eurovision.tv/history/origins-of-eurovision eurovision.tv]:

"The Eurovision Song Contest began as a technical experiment in television broadcasting: the live, simultaneous, transnational broadcast that Europe has now been watching for nearly 70 years was in the late 1950s a marvel."

Dean Vuletic:

"Utopic ideas of the ESC's innate Europeanism are, however, not justified in the documental archives of the EBU: the founders of the ESC really did only conceive of it in the mid-1950s as an experiment in television."

({{Cite book |last=Vuletic |first=Dean |title=The Eurovision Song Contest: an academic phenomenon |publisher=Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group |year=2023 |isbn=978-1-03-203774-5 |editor-last=Dubin |editor-first=Adam |location=London ; New York |page=8 |chapter=The Grand Tour: the origins of the Eurovision Song Contest as a cultural phenomenon |editor-last2=Vuletic |editor-first2=Dean |editor-last3=Obregón |editor-first3=Antonio}})

So this claim is widespread and one of the official positions of the EBU about the contest’s origins if we look at eurovision.tv and at the sentence by Martin Österdahl.

However, I share the uncomfortable feeling that there might be put too much weight onto this.

If we look closer into the mid-1950’s and the first programmes broadcast via the Eurovision network, it becomes clear that the REAL experiments were those broadcasts from 1953 and 1954, as mentioned by Dean Vuletic in his book "Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest" (p. 27):

"four weeks of experimental programming held in June and July 1954” (see History_of_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest#Origins for examples)

I wouldn’t really say that the ESC that took place in May 1956, two years later, can be interpreted primarily as an experiment. Transnational live television surely was still a challenge, and newspapers stress that by praising how smooth it all ran. But the way that the first ESC was organised, with detailed rules laid out, organised preselections in many participating countries, shows that it was more than just an experiment. It is known that the Programme Committee watched the Sanremo Music Festival 1955 and Sanremo was highly influential when the Eurovision Song Contest was created. So even if it was never explicit, I would guess that the Programme Committee wanted to build something that could be repeated, that could take place regularly… maybe annually like the Sanremo Festival.

In terms of reasons for the creation of the contest, there are also others mentioned by various others:

Dean Vuletic in “Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest” (pp. 27–28):

"When the Eurovision network broadcast its first programmes in 1954, discussions ensued in the EBU as to how the offerings could be made more modern and spectacular. Following suggestions put forward at the meeting of its Programme Committee [...] in Monte Carlo in 1955, the EBU decided at the session of its General Assembly in Rome later in that year to establish the ESC [...]"

[https://web.archive.org/web/20040811033906/http://www.ebu.ch/en/union/diffusion_on_line/television/tcm_6-8971.php Jacquin: Eurovision’s Golden Jubilee]:

"Following the success of the Summer Season, Marcel Bezençon [...] was convinced that it was necessary to take a new initiative every year to promote television."

Bulletin de l'U.E.R., no 35, p. 172:

"La Commission des Programmes avait fait mettre à l’étude l’organisation d’une vaste compétition internationale destinée à encourager la production, dans tous les pays d’Europe, de chansons originales."

[= “The Programme Committee had studied the organisation of a large international competition aimed to encourage the production of original songs in all European countries.”]

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160620231134/http://www.eurovision.tv/upload/history/1956/56_rules.pdf The official rules of the 1956 contest], Article II:

"Ce concours a pour but d’encourager la production, dans les pays des participants, de chansons originales en provoquant, à cet effet, par la confrontation internationale de leurs oeuvres, une émulation parmi les auteurs et compositeurs."

[“This contest has the goal to encourage, in the participants’ countries, the production of original songs by provoking, to this end, a competition among the authors and composers by the international confrontation of their works.”]

So the published sources of the EBU from 1956 stress the production of original, European popular music as the main motivation of the ESC. Historians like Dean Vuletic see promoting television and finding new, exciting programmes for the audience as a factor. The EBU today sees it as a technical experiment. And in the end, the motivation of transnational television production at an affordable price was also there (but there’s no source which explicitly mentions that for the ESC).

Since there is no ultimate way to tell which motivation was the most important one, I propose rewriting the sentence in a way that accounts for those multiple factors. How about something like:

“The Eurovision Song Contest was developed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) as an experiment in live television broadcasting, a way of promoting television, as well as a way of encouraging the production of original songs.”

EurovisionLibrarian (talk) 14:44, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:Hi @EurovisionLibrarian. Thank you very much for such an in-depth analysis. I fully agree with your statements.

:What you have said and the references you have provided confirm my discomfort in saying that it was an experiment. Experimenting to do something isn't the same as putting something to the test once you've already developed it. So, copying Österdahl who says "test", and bearing in mind that every ESC to date has always been a test for television broadcasting, I propose:

:"The Eurovision Song Contest was developed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) as a way of putting transnational live television broadcasting to the test, promoting television, as well as encouraging the production of original songs." Ferclopedio (talk) 18:29, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

::Thank you, I've made the corresponding changes in the article. EurovisionLibrarian (talk) 18:42, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Thanks. I moved the sentence to the end, I think it's its natural location, so that what the paragraph says is in chronological order. Ferclopedio (talk) 20:08, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

The Eurovision Song Contest is always broadcast to Brazil on RTP Internacional Guib25 (talk) 15:41, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

The two figures about political influence are badly in need of explanations. They are pretty much uninterpretable as it stands.Bill (talk) 16:31, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

I've placed several tags for vague language around dates. Valereee (talk) 10:09, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

The entire first section is written without notes or sources. It includes claims that could be controversial (political criticism of the contest) as well as numerous hard facts that require verification. Archanglican (talk) 00:28, 18 May 2025 (UTC)