All Kinds of Puppet Strings

As BBaB mentioned last week, Puppet On a String and Congratulations co-composer Bill Martin was an invited guest at this year's event in the Jury's Inn.

As he talked about the aftermath of Sandie Shaw's victory in Vienna in 1967, he revealed that the BBC would not let him in to the after-show party, despite him being one half of the writing team which had just scooped Blighty its inaugural taste of Eurovision glory.

Not to be put off, Bill and writing partner Phil Coulter came up with Congratulations the following year, which lost by just one point at the return match in London's Royal Albert Hall. Then along rolled 1969 and the BBC knocked back the song the pair put together for Lulu and that year's Song For Europe competition. The reason? The song may have been too good, and the BBC were fearful of shelling out a fair wad of cash again to stage the competition so soon after pulling out all the stops to make Eurovision 1968 as glitzy as possible.

The lesson here is clear. Hell hath no fury like a songwriter scorned.

So what did Bill 'n' Phil do? Simple. They knocked together a simple little song, called it All Kinds of Everything and submitted it to Ireland's domestic heats under assumed names (Irish telly could only accept entries from homegrown composers).

In 1970, Bill Martin and Phil Coulter scored their second Eurovision Song Contest win when Dana, the winsome, God-fearing young miss, won in Amsterdam with All Kinds of Everything. The pair had broke another nation's Eurovision duck, but history has only just been able to record this fact.

Bet those BBC suits wish they'd let them in to that party.