Eurovision Song Contest 2000



The Eurovision Song Contest 2000 was the 45th Eurovision Song Contest and was held on 13 May 2000 at the Globe Arena in Stockholm, Sweden, following Charlotte Nilsson's victory in Jerusalem the previous year.

It was the first time since 1996 that the contest was held on mainland Europe. The contest was the second to be held in Stockholm, and the fourth held in Sweden. The presenters were Kattis Ahlström and Anders Lundin, and the contest was won by the Olsen Brothers who represented Denmark with the song "Fly on the Wings of Love" (originally: Smuk som et stjerneskud). The song was written by one of the brothers, Jørgen Olsen. The Globe Arena was, at the time, the largest venue chosen to host the contest with a capacity of 16,000 spectators. The postcards used to introduce each country participating involved Swedish themes that incorporated each nation in some respect. All the postcards are filmed in Stockholm, Sweden, however, the only exception is the postcard for Sweden, which is filmed before Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. The logo for the contest, a pair of open mouth lips, was chosen by SVT, and was described by its designers as "a sensual, yet stylistically pure mouth representing song, dialogue and speech", and was later one of the possible choices for the generic logo introduced at the 2004 Contest.

The favourite in this year's contest was Estonia, who was also a fan favourite and praised by the press. However, as the voting results came in, Denmark immediately took control of the scoreboard, beating Russia into second place and Latvia into 3rd place. Slovakia, Greece and Hungary decided not to compete for financial reasons. The countries with the five lowest average scores over the previous five contests who had participated in 1999, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia were excluded meaning that five countries could return. These countries were: Finland, Macedonia, Romania, Russia and Switzerland. Latvia also joined contest as the only country to debut.

For the first time, an official CD compilation was released; it contained all of the songs of the participating nations and was available throughout Europe. Such a disc was attempted in the previous year, however it lacked four of the competing songs.

Format


SVT announced on July 7, 1999 that the contest would be hosted by the Globe Arena in Stockholm. Other possible candidates had been Scandinavium in Gothenburg and Malmömässan in Malmö. They had previously hosted Eurovision Song Contest 1985 and 1992 respectively. The Globe was said to be chosen because Stockholm hadn't hosted the contest since 1975 and that it would be somewhat cheaper than the other options.

Design
The graphic design programme for this year's contest was developed by Stockholm Design Lab and was centred around a stylised mouth symbol. It was given the Excellent Swedish Design award later that year. The softness of the mouth was contrasted with a pointy typeface, made specifically for the contest.

The intermission during the finale of the ESC was "Once Upon a Time Europe Was Covered With Ice", a movie/song directed, composed and edited by Johan Söderberg and produced by John Nordling. For the film Söderberg had traveled all over Europe to record children performing the score. On stage were violinist Caroline Lundgren, drummer Strängnäs Trumkorps plus street musicians from Stockholm and dancers from the Bounce Street Dance Company.

Incidents
There were some controversies concerning some participating countries. Israel, who opened the contest, entered a group who waved Israeli and Syrian flags advocating peace between the two nations. The two male singers in the group also ran up to each other and kissed for a brief moment. The Russian delegation petitioned for the winning Olsen Brothers to be disqualified, after they had used a vocoder to give Jørgen Olsen an electronic sound to his voice, during one of the verses of their performance. This issue was rejected by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

In the Netherlands, NOS decided to take the Contest off air halfway through because of the Enschede fireworks disaster that happened earlier that day, so it could use the channel for continuous news broadcasts. Later, NOS declared that it was both for practical reasons as well as because they found it "inappropriate to broadcast a light entertainment programme on the night of such a catastrophic event". As a result, televoting had to be suspended and the Dutch votes were given by a stand-by jury instead.

The contest was also broadcast in Canada, Australia, Japan, the United States and via the internet for the first time.

Results

 * 1.Contains some words in English.

Scoreboard
According to the EBU rules of the 45th Eurovision Song Contest 2000 (published on 23 September 1999), all participating countries should have used televoting, where the top ten most voted for songs were awarded the 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 point(s). In the televoting household shall not be permitted to vote more than three times. In exceptional circumstances where televoting was not possible, a jury was used instead: Russia, Macedonia, Turkey and Romania.

The Dutch votes were the votes of the backup jury due to interrupted broadcasting of the contest in the Netherlands because of the fireworks disaster in the Dutch town of Enschede.

12 points
Below is a summary of all 12 points in the final:

Commentators

 * – Andi Knoll (ORF1), Stermann & Grissemann (FM4)
 * – French: Jean-Pierre Hautier (RTBF La Une), Dutch: André Vermeulen and Anja Daems (VRT TV1)
 * – Ismeta Dervoz-Krvavac (BHT)
 * – Aleksandar "Aco" Kostadinov (HRT 1)
 * – Evi Papamichail (RIK 1)
 * – Keld Heick (DR1)
 * – Marko Reikop (ETV)
 * – Jani Juntunen (Yle TV1)
 * – Julien Lepers (France 3)
 * – Peter Urban (Das Erste), Thomas Mohr (Deutschlandfunk/NDR 2)
 * – Dafni Bokota (ET1)


 * – Gísli Marteinn Baldursson (Sjónvarpið)
 * – Marty Whelan (RTÉ One), Larry Gogan (RTÉ Radio 1)
 * – No commentator
 * – No commentator. The contest aired on July 14, 2000. (NHK BS2)
 * – Kārlis Streips (LTV)
 * – Darius Užkuraitis (LTV)
 * – Milanka Rašik (MTV 1)
 * – Charlo Bonnici
 * – Willem van Beusekom (TV2), Hijlco Span (Radio 2)
 * – Jostein Pedersen (NRK1)
 * – Artur Orzech (TVP1)


 * – Eládio Clímaco (RTP1)
 * – Leonard Miron (TVR1)
 * – Alexey Zhuravlev and Tatiana Godunova (Public Russian Television)
 * – José Luis Uribarri (TVE1)
 * – German: Sandra Studer (SF2), French: Jean-Marc Richard (TSR 1), Italian: Jonathan Tedesco (TSI 1)
 * – Pernilla Månsson Colt and Christer Lundh (SVT2), Carolina Norén (SR P3)
 * – Miša Molk (SLO1)
 * – Ömer Önder (TRT 1)
 * – Terry Wogan (BBC One), Ken Bruce (BBC Radio 2)
 * – There was no broadcast of the contest live, but Third channel of RTS aired just the performances without Israel, and the winning performance, without voting. (RTS 3K)

Spokespersons

 * – Dodo Roščić
 * – Thomas Van Hamme
 * – Marko Rašica
 * – Loukas Hamatsos
 * – Michael Teschl (Danish representative in 1999)
 * – Evelin Samuel (Estonian representative in 1999)
 * – Pia Mäkinen
 * – Marie Myriam (Eurovision winner for France in 1977)


 * – Axel Bulthaupt
 * – Ragnheiður Elín Clausen
 * – Derek Mooney
 * – Yoav Ginai (Lyricist of 1998 Eurovision winner "Diva")
 * – Lauris Reiniks (Latvian representative in 2003 as part of F.L.Y.)
 * – Sandra Todorovska
 * – Valerie Vella
 * – Marlayne (Dutch representative in 1999)


 * – Marit Åslein
 * – Andreea Marin
 * – Zhanna Agalakova
 * – Hugo de Campos
 * – Astrid Von Stockar
 * – Malin Ekander
 * – Osman Erkan
 * – Colin Berry

Official album
Eurovision Song Contest: Stockholm 2000 was the official compilation album of the 2000 Contest, put together by the European Broadcasting Union and released by EMI Records and CMC International on 13 May 2000. The album featured all 24 songs that entered in the 2000 contest, and was the first time that the EBU had produced such merchandise.