Queen Elizabeth II and the first milestone of the Continental Television Exchange network, the Eurovision

Although Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was only indirectly involved in the development of the Eurovision Network – and thus the history of Eurovision live events – the UK and Commonwealth leader who died on Thursday night was an essential participant in the creation of the EBU as we know it today; a look back from a media perspective.

We have to travel back in time 75 years to understand the aims and motivations behind the creation of the Eurovision Song Contest – and even more so the Eurovision Network – in which the former British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, had an indirect role. The 1950s were mainly about encouraging nations and their leaders to cooperate in some way, to bring nations closer together, following the world wars, but of course, they were also about finding ways of developing.

On 12 February 1950, the British public broadcaster BBC hosted a conference in Torquay where the 23 participating broadcasters formed the European Broadcasters’ Union, also known as the Eurovision Song Contest organiser. The aim of the organisation was defined as creative cooperation and the exchange of different television programmes in the fields of news, music and sport, which later became the main tasks of the so-called Eurovision network. (In Eurovision.tv article, the name was coined by George Campey, later co-worker of the BBC: in an article in the London Evening Standard of 5 November 1951, it originally referred to a BBC programme which was later shown on a Dutch television channel.)

From the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the Song Contest

Eurovision was therefore “technical system of media content interconnections initially across Europe, but later progressively linking to the world. It allowed content to be exchanged, seen and heard, as it happened or recorded for later use”, and this system (the Eurovision Network) later became the backbone of the EBU subsidiary Eurovision Services, which still serves the various players in the media and events industry.

The first major milestone in this network and collaboration was the live, international broadcast of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation ceremony on 2 June 1953, which was broadcast not only in the UK but also, thanks to the system already in place, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany. Although in some instances the coronation of the second longest reigning monarch is presented as a test broadcast, the television achievement fundamentally changed British television, the BBC and the way television was professionally understood. A year later, the now much more widely known Narcissus Festival in Montreux, more closely associated with the launch of the EBU, was broadcast, but in 1954 a tour of the Vatican, a Royal Navy parade passing of the Queen was also broadcast, while football matches from that year’s World Cup in Switzerland were also broadcast live on the Eurovision network.

Hoping that the initial successes would continue, the EBU Programme Committee met in Monaco in January 1955, where the broadcasters’ representatives agreed on two programme formats: a pan-European version of the San Remo Song Festival and a European version of a television show called Top Town. While in the first case, the aim was to create original songs and to challenge musicians to a friendly competition, in the second case it was a question of competing amateur teams from some cities against other cities. The rest is history: while the first was known as the Eurovision Song Contest, the second was known as It’s a Knockout (originally Jeux Sans Frontiers), during the first half-century of the European Broadcasting Union.

The common feature of these formats has been their popularity, with tens to hundreds of millions around the world following – and still following – these live EBU events on television sets. However, a period of (media) history is now coming to an end: following The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the funeral service of the late monarch of the United Kingdom, who died on 8 September 2022, will be broadcast worldwide by the BBC, the European Broadcasting Union and Eurovision Services from 12:00 (Central European Summer Time) on Monday 19 September 2022.

God save the Queen! Rest in Peace!

Illustration: BBC
Source: EBU, Eurovision.tv, BBC