Nul Points Read online

  Subsequent research pinpoints that brace-snapping/splayed-leap combo as the widely accepted sealer of Jahn’s fate. The tiny clip that graces the BBC’s online Eurovision archive distils his performance to those two actions alone. Norwegian Eurovision websites speak prominently of Jahn’s ‘splitthopp’, and expand my knowledge of their venerable tongue to include the useful phrase ‘konstante ablegøyer’, which I shall be sure to employ the next time I suspect anyone tall and blond of twanging to excess.

  Short of arson or puppy-juggling, it’s difficult to imagine what else Jahn could possibly have done to alienate the jurors more comprehensively, yet he strides off stage with a winner’s swagger. Most subsequent artistes exit too drained even to spare a nod as the next act passes them in the wings, but Jahn marches straight up to the Brotherhood of Man Italians standing in wait and kisses each of its female components full on the lips. I can only imagine what effect his only-here-for-the-beer demeanour is having upon the dumbstruck NRK commentator, but for my part I’m thinking: Way to go, Yarn. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

  Of the eighteen songs that follow Mil Etter Mil, many – perhaps even most – prove handsomely inferior. In accordance with Eurovision tradition the vast bulk are utterly forgettable, and those that aren’t you wish were. Spain’s attempt at a flamenco waltz is as bad as it sounds; ditto France’s There Will Always Be Violins. Cheryl Baker, whose detachable skirt will help Bucks Fizz to the Euro crown three years later, pre-blots her copybook with a full-on hello-Mum as she walks out with CoCo. Greece has Zorba the geek and his mother in a bowler hat and cane; entitled Charlie Chaplin, their composition is a painful monstrosity, but no one’s going to send that poor, dear woman back to her village taverna without a point. She ends up with sixty-six. Germany offer a poor man’s Money Money Money; Belgium a dead man’s Charles Aznavour.

  The aesthetically petrifying Danes – back after a twelve-year absence with four Rod Stewarts and a big drum with a heart on – are filling the screen when my nine-year-old daughter puts her head round the door. A forty-year-old father of three watching the 1978 Eurovision final in bed at lunchtime: I think I’d rather have been caught with a drugged goat in a wig. But fashion’s silly wheel has creaked full-circle, and she appraises those spike-topped blond mullets with a succinct murmur that desecrates the harrowed, never-again oath sworn by those of us trousered throughout early adolescence by Clockhouse Kids: ‘Cool.’

  Luxembourg, the perennial mercenaries, have hired Spanish-born, German-based Baccara, who perform a shamelessly transparent variant on the ultimate period boast that made their name: Yes Sir, I Can Boogie. Worst of all, and most comfortably sub-Jahn, are the flat-capped, white-suited Austrians humming their way through Mrs Caroline Robinson.

  Leathery jazz lords Stephane Grappelli and Oscar Peterson provide the interval entertainment (you can just imagine the French director blowing out a huge cloud of Gitanes smoke in the control room and sighing, ‘Now that’s music’), and the disk ends. It says something about the nature of ESC obsession that of the two DVDs allocated by Andreas to each contest, the second is wholly dedicated to the voting. I’d originally imagined that for the obsessives it was all about the music; perhaps there’d be a shot of the final totals, but no more. But when you’re into Eurovision, it seems, you’re into the whole package: it’s apparently unthinkable to separate the songs from the scoring.

  As I was learning, the ESC’s inner circle of diehard fandom is an unlikely fraternity of cardiganed stat-fiends and boa-toting champions of kitsch. For the former, there are far more numbers to stick in the cruncher than just the winning total: fondly tended online archives are devoted to percentage accrued of the available maximum votes (Brotherhood of Man still top this league with 80.4 per cent), to the triumphant entry’s place in the draw (Jahn was second out, a slot which has yet to produce a winner), to the weighting attached to language (though thirty-one tongues have been heard on the Eurovision stage – one of them a fantasy creation unknown outside the lyrics to Belgium’s 2003 entry – English and French account for over two-thirds of victories). And then, of course, there’s the rather more universally provocative issue of who voted for who.

  The scoring controversies that so dependably besmirch the Eurovision experience have dogged the contest from birth. These days Luxembourg can lay claim to the world’s highest per capita gross national product (source: my son), but so cash-strapped was the pocket duchy’s state broadcaster back in 1956 that it balked at dispatching the requisite pair of judges off to Lausanne. The hosts nobly volunteered to cast votes on Luxembourg’s behalf, and whilst it may be unfair to make a connection between this, the existence that year of a secret ballot, and Switzerland’s triumph, there you go – I’ve just done exactly that. (The year after, with voting now made public, the Swiss stumbled in second last.)

  But even as the scope for self-serving corruptibility was diminished, and with the advent of mass televoting ultimately snatched away, so the dependably corrosive influence of cross-border friendship rose to warp the scoreboard in its stead. Scandinavian back-scratching, a blight throughout the contest’s early years, reached its shameful zenith in 1963 when the Norwegian jury foreman interrupted Switzerland’s triumphant celebrations to furnish a flummoxed Katie Boyle with his revised votes: after a recount, victory was handed to Denmark. An EBU inquiry inexplicably cleared all those involved, but there were loud audience jeers in 1966 when Sweden’s starkly idiotic flute-playing swineherd claimed second place despite harvesting just one point from the non-Nordic jurors. By a similar token, Spain and Portugal have had a bit of thing going on over the years, and it’s hard to ignore Luxembourg’s embarrassment of kindly minded neighbours when asked to explain the five victories that have established the principality as Eurovision’s second most successful nation.

  Since phone voting enfranchised the European public in 1997, neighbourly and expatriate bias has run idiotically amok. In the seven years before that first televote, no German jury had awarded Turkey a single point, but when the 2.5 million Germans of Turkish origin were allowed their telephonic say, the aggregate haul over the three years that followed was thirty-six points, the maximum available. After an abysmal run of results, in 2005 the Swiss imaginatively signed up a team of Estonian pop mercenaries: without quite repeating the 1988 victory of Swiss-for-a-night Canadian Céline Dion, thirty-two Baltic-sourced points helped Vanilla Ninja secure Switzerland’s first top-ten finish in over a decade.

  But friendship is fleeting; a grudge is for ever. Those who find it hard to imagine the contest’s devotees arguing over much beyond chorus structure and heel height may be as alarmed as I was to find online Eurovision chatroom topics headed ‘Fuck the Nationalist Greek nation’ and ‘This is the ESC, not the Macedonian independence front’. Every Eurovision entry lugs its baggage out on to the stage, and sometimes there’s so much on the trolley the jurors can’t see over it.

  Repeated Irish triumphs in the eighties and nineties are commonly attributed to the magic combination of singing in pop’s lingua franca whilst keeping their diplomatic noses clean. For here in la Royaume Uni, we continue to reap a poisoned scoreboard harvest seeded by centuries of international plunder: if we’ve stolen your cod, or your antiquities, or that big rock with the monkeys on, you’re still letting us know, with an O.

  Most notorious, though, is the eastern Mediterranean hate triangle viciously etched across every Eurovision scoreboard. The Turks and the Greeks refused to enter the contest together before 1978, and for almost two decades thereafter exchanged zeroes with bitter ceremony. Cyprus first competed at the finals in 1981, but it would be twenty-three years before an Ankara jury awarded the islanders a single point, by which time its Athenian counterparts had lavished 191 upon them. Marcel Bezençon conceived Eurovision as a healer of European rifts; at times he must have sat through the voting glumly, asking himself if it was crowbarring old enemies ever further apart.

  Though deception, venality and empurpled spit
e all have their role to play, it would be remiss to discuss the workings of any European bureaucracy without mention of good old-fashioned administrative incompetence. The 1977 victory by which Marie Myriam brought Jahn and his fellow performers to Paris was secured amidst such a relentless farrago of voting ineptitude – Greece awarded four points to two nations, the Israelis to none, and the French jury foreman contrived to short-change or over-indulge Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Austria – that a subsequent audit adjusted the final totals of precisely half of the eighteen competing nations.

  Acknowledging this, the Parisian compere’s introduction to our scoreboard vigil is prefaced by an extraordinary pledge that justice must and shall be seen to be done. ‘On such an international level,’ he intones gravely, ‘one is never too strict.’ This statement raises a great many more fears than it lays to rest: it’s a frank admission that when nation goes against nation, no matter how silly the scenario, chicanery is inevitable. (Backstage in 1993, the head of a sadly unnamed delegation was overheard offering to swap maximum points with any interested counterparts.)

  For almost an hour my TV screen is filled by a huge scoreboard, its digits formed from lightbulbs in the fashion formerly associated with Wimbledon. This was an era when live jury contact meant a screeching, crackling, over-amplified phone conversation with unseen foremen across the continent; for me, the golden age. ‘This is Dublin calling,’ thunders an echoing voice, and we’re off.

  Despite knowing what I know, I’m oddly nervous. Oslo is next on the line – blithely distributing points in happy ignorance that they’ll receive none in return. Tragically, Norway’s own votes help secure their humiliation: the two points they award Finland prove to be all that prevent Jahn’s ignominy being shared and halved with Seija Simola.

  Next up Rome, then Helsinki. I find I’m willing those double zeroes alongside Norvège to do something, to wake up and snap out of it. Four rounds down, and only Denmark’s Rods and those godawful Austrians are with Jahn; after two more he’s alone. Guten abend, bonsoir, shalom. Mil etter mil, nil etter nil. With half the votes in, the NRK commentator seems prepared for the worst. He settles into a routine of simply translating French numbers into Norwegian; the words ‘Jahn’ and ‘Teigen’ do not once escape his lips. His boy is taking one hell of a beating tonight. Sweden are the last to vote, and perhaps he’s confident that they’ll step in with a late quid pro quo. When they don’t, he simply switches the mike off. It’s left to our hostess to wish the Israeli winners a long and successful career. (The many Arab broadcasters screening the 1978 contest had stuck in a three-minute ad break while Alpha Beta performed; when Israel’s votes began to pile up, most simply pulled the plug. Jordan prematurely ended their transmission with a lingering still shot of a vase of daffodils.)

  One nul-pointer down, thirteen to go. Am I really prepared for all this human tragedy? Much as I admire Jahn’s cockily defiant stage exit, it’s awful to think that the clumsy leap that preceded it hadn’t just squashed his Eurovision chances, but flattened what judging by his apparent age – he’s got to be pushing thirty – must surely have been a long career in music.

  Except, rather splendidly, it hadn’t. That evening I dispatch a missing-persons APB to my growing band of Eurovision oracles, and by morning there’s a reply from Andreas in my inbox. As I read, trepidation melts into relief, and then tickled delight. ‘Teigen is still releasing CDs and presenting shows on Norwegian TV,’ it begins. ‘He is still signed to Global Music in Norway. Should be quite easy to contact.’

  So indeed he proves to be. A quick call and a bit of web trawling and I’m sending an email off to Frida Thorsen, who I’ve found named as Jahn’s manager. He’s still got a manager! Her almost instant reply heartens and intrigues in equal measure. ‘Jahn has in the past three years directed Teigenstudio, where he is recording new talents in the music industry,’ begins Frida. ‘In the last year he has released two albums as well, the last one was a greatest hits album called “Fra Null Til Gull” (“From Zero to Gold”), it has nearly sold to platinum here in Norway. Jahn is also travelling around talking about his zero-point experience to groups and companies around Norway. He can meet you on 21 or 22 January.’

  If Jahn Teigen has had to put up with a lot of laughs since 1978, fantastically it seems that the last is his. I don’t know how many units you need to shift in Norway to go platinum. Maybe it’s 104. But the bottom line here is that two and a half decades after he made a name for himself as the world’s most hapless performer, the man who launched an international catchphrase for ineptitude and arrant failure is still making music and selling records. More than that, he’s willing to meet me to talk about it. My phobic dread of a song that I’d begun to think of as catastrophe’s theme tune instantly evaporates. I’m so happy that I locate and download the original studio recording of Mil Etter Mil, and begin to fall slightly in love with it.

  I have by now established that the Melodi Grand Prix is merely the last stage of the Norwegian selection process: just to get down to that last eight, Mil Etter Mil had first dispatched no fewer than 640 rivals. Those whose experience of the song is limited to its Eurovision variant will respond to this statistic with a haunting screech, and rightly so. However, I urge these people to unclamp those clawed, bloodless hands from their own throats and give the original a listen. Unburdened by cloying orchestration, the song is allowed to breathe. Its chopped chords give Jahn the space to let the soft, simple melody almost take care of itself; no massed brass for him to shout over (though naturally enough, he does a bit anyway).

  This is the song that the Norwegian judges heard and championed; the song that’s the one notable absence from the www.nul-points.net chart of Eurovision’s all-time worst entries. Though too down-tempo ever to have won the contest, it’s a distinctive and likeable tune. After three listenings I’m humming it. After four I retrieve my Fender Bullet case from under the matrimonial bed for the first time in a great many years, and within half an hour I’m enthusiastically strumming along from start to finish. I even join in with Jahn’s krrrrropp.

  It’s a eureka moment: sitting there, Fender in lap, I can think of no more appealing way to win over a nul-pointer than by offering to perform their song as they first heard it, with simple dignity, me on guitar, them on vocals, putting the warped record straight. Yes! Why stop with Jahn? It’s the work of an excited moment to imagine myself hauling that knackered flight case all round Europe, airport, hotel, gig, airport, hotel, gig – you know: on tour. Eyes alight, I snatch the Fender up and clamp my left-hand fingertips to the neck: C, A minor, D7, G, mil etter mil etter mil … Within two days Birna is asking me to shut up. Within two weeks I’m queuing up at the SAS desk at Heathrow’s Terminal 1, Fender by my side, hoping that Jahn will appreciate the lurid red cords I’m wearing in genuine, heartfelt homage.

  ‘What you got there?’ trills the check-in girl, eyeing up my flight case. Nowhere like a strip-lit departure hall at dawn for a brutally effective wake-up call.

  ‘A guitar,’ I mumble, feeling suddenly foolish and fraudulent. ‘An electric one.’ The case’s inset Fender logo harbours the thickly dusted legacy of that under-bed exile; the fingers clasping its handle are now cramped and tender from the forgotten rigours of chord-craft. From final exams until fatherhood, my Fender had lain undisturbed. Even since it had been withdrawn only as an occasional family-singalong prop; indeed very occasional – with their father lacking the technical wherewithal to adapt his Teenage Dirtbag to a register appropriate for the infant vocal range, the children swiftly tired of my solo instrumentals. The two performances listed on my live-music CV were both as bassist, on grounds agreed by all fellow members of Rough Justice that four strings gave me 50 per cent less to cock up. Fifteen summers had passed since the last of these performances, at a social club in north Oxford.

  I spot the Fender from afar, circling a distant carousel, as I traverse the unpeopled wooden vastness of Oslo’s handsome new airport. During the flight my misg
ivings had been efficiently contextualised: whatever performing indignities I had suffered or was about to, they could never compete with those endured by Jahn Teigen, unless maybe he threw herrings at me. When we’d done with the bad times, and the good times, he and I were going to stand side by side in Teigenstudio and make sweet, sweet music until the water trickled into our shoes.

  ‘Hallo please?’

  I’m already past the customs post – two more paces and it’s through the automatic doors, out amongst the namecard-toting chauffeurs and welcoming family groups. I turn to find myself being idly beckoned by a ruddy-faced customs officer in a shapeless pullover, his status betrayed only by the ID card dangling askew round that chubby neck. ‘English?’ he asks when I’m standing before him; I nod. He tilts his round, red head at the Fender. ‘You play music?’

  ‘Well, yes and no.’

  This is a very poorly selected response, one certain to intrigue even the least circumspect controller of borders, and as soon as those four words escape my mouth I accept that my attempt on the Heathrow to Oslo Central commuting record is at a premature end. Neither am I helping my case when, during the explanatory blather unleashed by this opening gambit, I find myself repeatedly invoking the name of Norway’s godfather of nul.

  ‘You meet Jahn Teigen?’ The significance with which he loads these latter words causes belated consideration of the pub-brewery business, particularly in conjunction with the lost weekend hinted at in a bullet-point online biography: ‘Jahn had a “down” period in the eighties and early nineties. He got divorced and his musical career was close to nothing. He has now many marks and scars after all the battles and “pranks”.’