In this week's episode.

Oh, Vienna.

Orf confirms the 2026 host city.

To the surprise of pretty much nobody.

Russia's revival of Intervision adds another dictatorship to the roster, but not one that you might have expected.

And we're quick on the draw as we take a look at the evolution of the tiebreak process across Eurovision history.

I'm Stephen Perkins and this is Douzpoix.

Hello, London, we are ready for your votes.

Hello.

It's Monday 25th of August and the big news from the last fortnight is that we now know exactly where we're heading for next year's contest.

The EBU and Austrian broadcaster ORF announced last Wednesday that Eurovision 2025 will take place in the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna, the same venue that hosted the contest in 2015.

This does sadly bring Eurovision's six year run of being held outside of capital cities to an end.

But in all honesty, the smart money was always on Vienna to be confirmed as next year's host city, because pretty much all of the other cities that were interested lacked the necessary infrastructure.

The only other city that went all the way to submitting a bid was Innsbruck, and reports suggest that their proposed venue of the Olympiahalle didn't really meet the EBU's requirements, as apparently it couldn't have contained the stage and the green room at the same time, meaning that they'd need to put the artist's green room and the dressing rooms in a separate venue and ferry the artists to and fro, which felt like one logistical hurdle too many.

Also, a lot of Innsbruck's hotel accommodation is outside the city centre, whereas Vienna doesn't have that problem.

It is a little bit of a shame because one of the things that's been so joyous about the contest in recent years is seeing smaller cities get a chance to shine by hosting a major international event like Eurovision.

The fact that Austria didn't really have any viable options outside of Vienna does perhaps throw up some questions about the ever increasing scale of the contest and whether it's reaching a point where only the truly large or particularly wealthy nations have more than one option for a host city.

But that's a bigger subject for a different time.

In other news this week, Lithuania's head of delegation, Audius Girijadas, got the fandom talking when he hinted during an interview that there are plans for Eurovision to launch a post contest arena tour.

Speaking on Labas Ritas Lijutuva or Good Morning Lithuania, he intimated that the contest is looking to launch a 10 date pan European arena tour for 10 acts from the final of the contest, presumably intended to be the top 10, although I imagine they are still nailing down that level of detail.

It's an intriguing idea, although we don't really know how far along in the planning stages it is at the moment, and the EBU has yet to officially comment on the matter, so we're just going to have to watch this space for now.

And possibly the most baffling Eurovision adjacent news to come from the last fortnight is not about Eurovision itself, but about Russia's planned revival of Intervision.

Intervision originally ran from 1965 to 1968 and then again from 1977 to 1980 as a kind of Eastern Bloc alternative to Eurovision.

And since Russia were exiled from the Eurovision song contest in 2020, they've constantly been threatening to revive it so they can have their very own playground.

At present, the inaugural edition of the new Intervision is scheduled to take place in Russia on 20 September this year, with participants including Russia, China, Ethiopia, Kenya, India, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

But there's been a slightly left field addition to that list with the revelation that the United States of America is planning to take part, with singer Brandon Howard set to represent them.

To be perfectly honest, we're not planning to do any extensive coverage of Intervision on this podcast because we've got enough scandals in our own song contest, thank you very much.

But we will be keeping a very curious eye on Intervision 2025 nonetheless.

Now, back in April, we did an episode all about one of the most notorious contests in Eurovision history, the 1969 Eurovision that ended with a ridiculous four way tie for first place.

It seems unthinkable that Eurovision managed to run for 13 years without anyone involved coming up with an official system to resolve a scenario where more than one song ended up in first place.

But what's even more bizarre is that it took another 20 years for the contest to come up with a system that didn't just involve ask the juries to vote again.

And it's a system that the contest has tweaked multiple times over the years, becoming ever more intricate and complicated.

So I thought it would be fun, if that's the right word, to devote one of our episodes to the history of ties and tiebreaks at Eurovision and how we got to where we are now.

We can track the history of ties all the way back to 1957, remembering, of course, that the scores for the very first contest in 1956 were never publicly declared back Then only the winner was revealed.

So if there were ties in that first contest, we don't know about them.

In 1957, however, we got two of them.

Luxembourg and Germany tied for fourth place with eight points, and Belgium and Switzerland tied for eighth place with five points.

However, since it didn't affect the outcome of the contest, with the Netherlands winning by a margin of 14 points over second place France, there was no particular need to resolve the ties and they were allowed to stand.

This approach carried on for a while, and officially no rules about resolving tiebreakers were made until the result of the 1969 contest made it necessary to have some.

But I know what you're thinking.

How close did we get before that?

Should the EBU have seen this coming?

Well, to be perfectly honest, yes, they absolutely should.

It had been very close at the top a few times prior to 1969.

In the 1958 contest, France beat Switzerland by three points.

And then in 1963, the gap narrowed a bit more when Denmark beat Switzerland again, this time by just two points.

So even from those, there really should have been some alarm bells ringing.

But what really makes the 1969 situation comical is that just one year before, in 1968, SP beat the United Kingdom by one point.

Eurovision 1969 was coming off the back of the closest result it had ever had, literally the closest result it was possible to have without being an actual tie.

And yet somehow the organisers still did not see the writing on the wall.

So for reasons that will never be fully clear to me, we went into the 1969 contest with no tiebreak rule in place.

And we ended up with, needless to say, the whole four winners thing didn't really go down terribly well.

After all, it was a full quarter of the songs that entered that year, which did make a slight mockery of the whole thing.

And Finland, Sweden, Austria, Portugal and Norway all boycotted the contest in 1970, officially because they felt that smaller countries were unfairly marginalised by the contest.

But it's generally, generally understood to have also been a protest against the four way tie from the previous year.

So where did that leave us?

Rules wise, the EBU decided it wasn't in their best interest to have multiple winners at the same contest again.

So from 1970 a new rule was implemented.

In the event of a tie for first place, the juries would vote again between the tying entries until they had a majority for one winner.

There's not a lot of information on exactly how this vote would have been conducted, and we never actually ended up in A situation where it was implemented.

So I don't know what would have happened if, say, the revote had also ended in a tie.

But frankly, I like to think it would have been a bit like when they have ties at the Tribal Council vote on Survivor and if they couldn't reach a decision under normal circumstances, they would have ended up having to draw rocks out of a bag to determine the winner.

Anyway, the revote rule was officially in place from 1970 until 1988, and if you know your Eurovision history, you'll probably have already spotted why they decided to revise the rules for 1989.

It's likely that Eurovision actually learned from their previous mistakes this time and looked at the 1988 result when Switzerland beat the United Kingdom by just one point and figured they should probably take a very close look at their tiebreak resolution plans to see if there was a better way of managing it.

For whatever reason, it was decided that a revote would not be a sensible manner of doing things and instead we moved on to a new system.

This time the winner would be the song that had received the highest number of maximum 12 point scores from other nations.

If it turned out that the tie was still there after all the 12s had been counted, we'd move down to the 10 points.

And if at that point the tie still hadn't been resolved, then however many countries were involved would have been declared joint winners of the contest.

Again, this rule only applied to determining the winner.

Any ties further down the leaderboard would be valid and this rule remained in place until the 2000 contest.

But wait, hold up there.

Before we go any further, we have a very important stop off to make.

That is the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest, which remains to this eight the only time a tiebreak procedure to determine the winner has actually been implemented.

In 1991, we found ourselves in Rome for the contest where we had a rather nail biting voting sequence.

At the end of the night, Italy was the last country to award their scores and the top three on the scoreboard were Sweden with 146 points, Israel with 139 and France with 134.

Italy didn't award any points to Sweden or Israel, but then gave their full 12 points to France, at which point we could see confusion in the green room as the scoreboard showed France and Sweden tied for the top score.

But Sweden's number was flashing, which seemed to imply that they were the winners.

So we were went straight to the Invigilator.

A quick bit of checking later and it was confirmed that while France and Sweden had Both been awarded 12 points four times, Sweden had received five sets of tens, compared to only two for France, giving Sweden the win.

And it's pretty lucky for the contest that there was a difference in the number of tens awarded to the two countries, because, remember, at this point there was no further tiebreaker to apply.

If France and Sweden had had the same number of 10s under the rules of the contest at the time, they would have been declared joint winners.

Given that the conversation between the invigilators and the host was carried out largely in French and Italian, there was a little bit of hesitation in the room before Swedish representative Carola realised that she'd triumphed and celebrated by performing her winner's reprise of Vongad Aven Stormwind, partly in English.

The tie was all resolved quite quickly on screen, and I can imagine all of the regional commentators were kept very busy that night explaining to the viewers what was going on, because it wasn't clear from the graphics at all.

Still, the whole of the 1991 contest was kind of delightfully chaotic, so the need to suddenly deploy the emergency tiebreak felt completely appropriate.

Ok, back to the rules.

A slight amendment was made to the rules in 2001.

From this point onwards, the tiebreak process would be extended beyond the 12 and 10 point countbacks to go all the way down to one point if it became necessary.

It was also extended to apply to the process for determining the qualifiers for the following year's contest, as this was back when we didn't have semi finals yet and were still operating a relegation system based on an average of scores from the previous five competitions.

Although this part of the rule was dropped again for some reason in 2003, when there was also a slight tweak to the process in that the first criteria of the tiebreak became which song had received points from more countries overall, and if all countries were equal on that front, then we would go to 12 points, then to 10 points and so on.

Come 2004, of course, we had reached the point where Eurovision now had a semi final, so we had to adjust the rules slightly there as well.

The tiebreak would now be implemented both to determine the winner, if necessary, and also to determine the song qualifying in 10th place from the semi final.

By 2007, the system had been tweaked again to bring in a new and possibly slightly controversial rule.

Having multiple winners just generally wasn't acceptable.

So now, if we had implemented all of the previous tiebreak criteria and there was still not a decisive outcome, the Victor would be the song that had performed formed the earliest in the running order.

That is, to my mind, fairly arbitrary, and I can't help thinking that if we ever had had to use that particular rule to determine the winner, people would be up in arms.

But then, in the unlikely event that you get that far down the line and you still don't have a winner, what is the fairest way of resolving it?

Flip a coin?

Arm wrestling?

Sudden death?

Missing vowels?

Question like on only connect.

There's probably not a solution that everyone is going to feel good about, but in all honesty, the likelihood of it ever coming to that seemed fairly minuscule.

From 2008 onwards, it was decided that tiebreaker procedures would now be implemented for all ties on the scoreboard, however low down or unimportant they might be in that year, it allowed Georgia to claim 11th place over Latvia, despite both finishing with 83 points, Spain to claim 16th place over Albania, Sweden to secure 18th place over France, and perhaps most importantly of all, to separate the three countries languishing at the bottom of the leaderboard with 14, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom.

Intriguingly, all three nations had only received points from two countries, but Germany's 12 from Bulgaria put them in 23rd.

Poland's 10 points from Ireland got them 24th.

And with the United Kingdom's highest individual score being 8 points from also Ireland, we ended up in last place.

Who would have expected that Ireland would end up being, well, what's the opposite of a kingmaker that we have also on occasion had the need to use the running order tiebreak process to solve the embarrassing issue of multiple countries getting zero points, the first occasion being in 2015 when both Germany and host country Austria.

Austria received no points at all, but Austria were spared the indignity of finishing dirt last because they performed in position number 14, while Germany were in number 17.

The most recent change, for now at least, came in in 2016 as part of the general overhaul of the voting system that saw jury points and televote scores being awarded separately for the first time.

From this point onward, it's been up to the televote to break any ties.

So the first thing to check is which of the tied countries received more televote points overall and break the tie that way.

If that doesn't resolve it, then it's which song received points from the most countries in the televote and then whoever had the most sets of 12 points, then 10 points and all the way down to one.

And if somehow we still don't have an answer it's the country that performed first who emerges on top.

We've never had to use the televote as a tiebreak to determine a winner in this scenario, but we did have the fairly memorable moment in 2021 where four countries the UK, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands received zero points in the televote.

So for the purposes of the televote scoreboard only they were ranked from their running order, a rare win for the UK that year.

As having been in position number nine, we got to technically be 23rd in the televote, with Spain 24th, Germany 25th and the Netherlands last, though it hardly spared our blushes because of course we still ended up last overall with a grand total of 0 points.

Still, you have to take those victories where you can.

Right?

That brings us to the end of our journey through the history of tiebreaks at Eurovision, but I'm going to leave you with a very special teaser of what we've got coming up in two weeks time.

You may have heard me talking about the Eurovision Pod Crawl, in which a group of Eurovision fan podcasts all got together and decided to record episodes based on the unifying theme of years in which a particular country hosted for the first time.

Well, finally it's our turn.

I will be joined by friends of the pod, Adrian Bradley and AJ Clay, as we take a look at the 2012 contest, the first and so far only time that Azerbaijan has hosted Eurovision.

It's the year of Loreen's first victory, but also of our first encounter with Valentina Mineta, and also the year when the UK made the faintly baffling decision to send Engelbert Humperdinck.

But there's plenty more to discuss, so I hope you'll join us for that one.

And in the meantime, why not catch up on the other episodes in the series?

You can find out more about the other podcasts taking part and check out their episodes by visiting linktree.

Eurovisionpodcrawl that's L I N ktr EE eurovisionpodcrawl Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode.

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Until next time, good night Europe and good morning Australia.