It was only natural for Eurovision countries to try to select the meta if they wanted to do well. A stubborn, conservative and stagnant consensus had formed. The ballad-schlager axis.
Occasionally a new strand would emerge accidentally (traditional Celtic/Irish music), and there was a rush to exploit it. It did not last long, and once again Balladageddon re-established itself. In the real world, these songs were not selling.
There was a push to encourage national selections to be braver and some were, but nothing managed to challenge Eurovision orthodoxy. It was time for the EBU to take action.
The juries were the problem. Not only did they consistently fail to vote for the new or experimental, they also tended to favour neighbouring countries or countries with similar musical cultures to their own. Block voting had been an issue as far back as 1963 when there were accusations that the Norwegian jury changed their results to favour Denmark. It had never really gone away, and now it was discriminating against the newcomers.
The juries needs a shake-up.
Luckily there was a solution. Telecommunications technology had recently begun being able to handle televoting. Short phones calls to exchanges that could record numbers and could cope with a sudden burst of incoming calls. It had been used in several national finals for some years, even if there were some teething problems like those that afflicted the Finnish national selection final in 1996.
In 1997 the EBU took the plunge. Five countries with the most experience at running televotes were selected to replace their juries with 100% televoted results. These could be gathered and verified during the interval act. There was only a short time for voting, but it was enough. It had the additional benefit in that those televotes cost the callers money, so there was income to be generated, although at first that reward was taken by the telecommunications companies themselves.
Even in 1997, the results were there to be seen. Some counties that scored reasonably highly with juries, did not with the televote:
Slovenia got 60 points and finished 10th, but it didn't get a single point from the televoting countries.
Spain got 96 points and finished 6th, with 17 counties giving them points. Among those that gave them nothing were three of the televoting countries.
Malta, the perennial English-language boosted nation got 66 points, finishing 9th, but no points came from the televote.
Other countries were more favoured by the televote but not at all by the juries.
Iceland got all but 2 of its 18 points from the televote
Denmark got 10 of its 25 points from just three televoting countries
Bosnia & Herzegovina got 13 of its 22 points from four televoting countries in possibly the first case of televoting sympathy for a country recently at war (although I know it's hard not to vote for Alma)
There were still some oddities, and there was some neighbourly voting clearly remaining. The German televote gave Türkiye 12 points which could be the first instance diasporic voting, but Türkiye's song finished with 121 points and finished 3rd overall, so possibly not.
Was it a success? Well more data would be needed, but there were some shifts in the direction the EBU wanted to go. That data would start rushing in during the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest. The first one to be 100% televote. Well except for the three countries that still had juries. What would the brave new jury-less world look like?
