So the other day Chris was clicking around the dial, and we happened on a show called Schlager Party. Schlager music is a style of pop music that has been popular in parts of Europe since 1956.  The idea of the Schlager Party show was that the original performer of a particular song would come out in and sing one of their old hits while modern-day dancers gyrated around behind them. While the dancers were not necessarily chosen for their dancing skills, it was one singer who stood out as the most outlandish: Gitte Haenning, who is from Denmark. For reasons we didn’t understand, she was wearing a ghastly black tulle netting dress/skirt thing that was worn suspended loosely from her shoulders. I mean that literally – the top of her skirt/dress was a set of suspenders. Bizarre doesn’t begin to describe it. You can try this link to see if she’s wearing it in this video clip – the thumbnail looks right, but the video won’t play in Germany due to copyright restrictions, so I can’t tell for sure.

Anyway, I decided I needed to look on the Internet to see if I could find why the heck she was wearing that outfit. I thought perhaps was it some kind of homage to something she’d worn originally. As far as I could tell, though, she didn’t usually dress like that, nor has she in any recent photos I found. Maybe she wanted something loose fitting? I mean, she looks pretty good for her age, but she probably doesn’t have the same figure she had when she was 20 (she’s 66) – that’s a guess, since it was all hidden under the tulle “tent”. Anyway, the answer remains elusive – we may never know why she choose such an odd and unflattering outfit.

However, I bring this up because in reading about Gitte Haenning online, I came across an interesting little factoid worth sharing. It seems that back in 1962, she was scheduled to sing a song in the Danish contest to pick Denmark’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest that year.

As you may recall if you’ve been following my blogging since we lived in Bolzano,  Eurovision is a yearly Europe-wide competition that has been around since the 1950s.  Each country holds a contest to pick a song that will represent that country in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The ground rules state that a song can only be considered if it is brand-new and has never before been publicly performed.

Back in 1962, Gitte Haenning was slated to perform one of the songs entered in Denark’s song-choosing contest. The song was called Jeg snakker med mig selv, which hereafter I will refer to as JSMMS to save typing. By all accounts, early scuttlebutt said that JSMMS, a lively swing-style song, had a good chance of winning. However, just hours before the contest was scheduled to start, someone filed a protest that JSMMS had already been “performed in public”. It was therefore disqualified from the Danish contest, paving the way for the lullaby song, Vuggevise, to win in a landslide.

So, what happened? Where had JSMMS been illegally performed prior to the contest? Well, in a story rife with the possibility of backstage intrigue, it seems that the composer of JSMMS had been caught whistling his song while sitting in the cantina (lunchroom) of the TV station where the contest was being held. A very strict interpretation of the rules held that his whistling constituted an illegal public performance and thus the song no longer qualified for the contest.

Personally I envision the JSMMS composer being conned into sharing a drink with someone from the Vuggevise camp, and then tricked into whistling just enough of JSMMS to get the song tossed from the contest. I have absolutely no evidence that this took place, of course, but I love a good little conspiracy theory, don’t you?

Anyway,after all that, Vuggevise wound up coming in 10th of the 16 entries in the 1962 Eurovision show. Not a great showing for Denmark that year.

So that you can be the judge of which song should have been Denmark’s pick, here are links to the two songs:

• Vuggevise
• Jeg snakker med mig selv

I’m sure you’re now wondering how often a song gets disqualified from Eurovision, right? Glad you asked. Referred to as “The Notorious Nine”, it seems that there have been just nine disqualified songs over the years. As it turns out, there’s a website that has everything you ever wanted to know about Eurovision but were afraid to ask and they have a page with links to all the disqualified songs, should you be curious to hear them all.

That site really does have a wealth of information about Eurovision in general. Another page on the site lists the highest scoring songs in history of the contest, and a quick review of the list revealed a song that Chris and I both remembered hearing in the 1970s in the U.S.

The song is called Eres Tu. According to Wikipedia, it was Spain’s entry in the 1973 contest. After comiing in second in the contest, it was released as a single world-wide, including in the U.S. Sung in Spanish, Eres Tu became one of the few songs in Spanish to reach the top 10 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 list, and the only 10 hit sung entirely in Spanish. Who knew.

However, Eres Tu actually came close to being the 10th disqualified song from Eurovision. The composer was accused of copying the Yugoslavian song from the 1966 contest, with just a slight change in the rhythm for the new Spanish lyrics. Here are links to both songs:

• Spanish 1973 song Eres Tu 
• Yugoslavian 1966 song Brez Besed

If you ask me, the songs are virtually the same. But while whistling a song in 1962 got JSMMS kicked out, copying a song completely in 1973 was overlooked and the song was allowed to stay in. That time there was not just backstage intrigue, but political intrigue that factored into the decision.

Anyway, somehow I went from viewing a random Schlager song show to tracking down scandal and intrigue at Eurovision contents in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m not sure watching this kind of German TV show is helping to improve my German language skills, but at least it has provided some interesting digressions for a blog post.