Eurovision 2000: Can’t play that song again | Super-cut with animated scoreboard

An edited down version of the Eurovision Song Contest 2000 in Stockholm with a scoreboard using today’s technology. Nothing but a fun lockdown project.

This edit will give a flavour of the evening (13th May) with Terry Wogan’s commentary. Thank you to Joris Peters for getting in touch and getting me the full Wogan performance – it’s very much appreciated!

After being pleased to be able to provide Terry, I instantly cut him out of the best opening to a Contest ever. I would have thought it would have been better for the director’s notes to say that commentators shouldn’t speak during it – Wogan rabbiting all the way through rather ruined the effect. The execution of the opening, I read, was a last-minute addition to the show.

Now, I’ve had to use a slightly sulky title as the copyright owners and 2000 don’t get on. If I left my edit un-clipped, it wouldn’t be seen by 70% of my viewers, and the culprit: the winner. A real shame.

What’s annoying is that there’s some songs this year which should have been blocked for reasons of exceptional poor quality. I began to think that there were technical issues in Globen – so many performances were vocally flat! That said, the quality of the uploads of 2000 is generally lower, so maybe it’s some VHS wonkiness creeping through.

I am also annoyed that I wasn’t able to make it to a betting shop in May 2000. Denmark were being offered at 125/1…150/1 at one point in the UK! Perhaps I’m overusing the benefit of hindsight, but a record audience size and an anthemic, genuine performance was always going to be successful, especially when offset by some rather lightweight performances elsewhere. The use of the audience lights and the fake pyrotechnics showed that the Swedish directors felt this was the winner too, I think.

Going into the Contest, the biggest known star was Nicki French. But that’s where the advantage stopped. An awful running order position, plus a dated song and off-kilter dress sense would send the UK to their worst performance so far. We just didn’t know it could get any worse! I think there’s a few others that missed the boat too, Malta being one – great song…wrong year. I think Norway’s in there too, but fared much better at the hands of the Baltic obsessed televoters.

Overall though, the production was excellent. Great presenters, and a snappy show – both in duration and look…

DESIGN AND THE BOARD
2000 is a personal favourite of mine – mainly because I think we see a scoreboard (and a Contest) that has design at its centre. The logo isn’t a corporate collection of shapes…it’s a mouth – sensual and overbearing in it’s placing and size. Offset by the rigid typeface which is the first to be especially designed for the Contest, it’s a shame it wasn’t adopted as the permanent logo in 2004.

1998-99 saw a skeuomorphic approach – coins that looked like coins, stars that flew and landed where they needed to be. 2000 was different, not scared to take risks with replacing smooth motion with jolted flashing. The viewer is left to fill a bit of the gap…there’s nothing obvious about it, other than it’s rigidity. The map was bent nearly out of recognition, which meant it was heavily styled, but still useful. Using it dramatically at the beginning of the sequence was a nice touch – I love how the names of the countries transitioned seamlessly from map to scoreboard too.

It felt like a natural step to evolve the ‘?’ theme used at the beginning and use an inbuilt plugin of Viz Artist that randomises text build up. My board leans heavily on the original but has had a slight rebuild. Unlike all the others, countries don’t move…the text reorders itself to reveal the new entrant to be placed in that slot. Think airport departure boards.

I certainly went through the same process (I expect) as the 2000 designers. I found a typeface called SchoonSquare (Michiel van Kleef) which felt near to the custom typeface used, but then needed a rounder typeface to offset it…I settled on the beautiful Nurom by The Northern Block.

TRANSFER NEWS (source: Wiki)
REL’D for this year were: SLO, BIH, POR, POL, LIT.
BACK automatically (rel’d in 98): FYROM, FIN, SUI, ROM.
NOT BACK: GRE, financial reasons. SVK, who would sit out until 2009, dismayed at having to sit out every other year.
DEBUT: LAT.


INTERVAL ACT
Really enjoyable movie/song directed, composed and edited by Johan Söderberg and produced by John Nordling. Apologies for missing them out of the graphic in the video. Class editing and catchy music – worth a watch, sums up that millennium celebration type feeling.

CREDITS
Joris Peters for Wogan
The artful @Mosè Michielin for the highest quality I could find
Michael Widell on Unsplash for the photo from Stockholm
Flags: countryflags.com (Cyprus altered).
All Copyright belongs to SVT, BBC

00:00 Intro
05:33 Song super-cut
23:23 Audio less part
26:35 Super-cut part 2
43:08 Interval act
46:39 Voting intro
48:14 The reorder board 2000
1:35:54 Recap, data & reprise