Eurovision 1967: And the winner is...

The United Kingdom entered Eurovision for the tenth time in 1967. It already had five silver medals to its name, had hosted two technically impressive Contests, but that 'WIN' tickbox remained annoyingly blank.

Until this year.

Winner 1967: Sandie Shaw performs Puppet on a String for the United Kingdom (hurrah!)

With hindsight, sending an act as unsuited to the Contest as Kenneth McKellar to Luxembourg in 1966 was just the jolt the BBC needed to try harder than ever to win in 1967.

Realising that a pop star even more relevant to the charts than Kathy Kirby was in 1965 was the route they needed to take, Auntie had the tough task of finding a singer who was prepared to sip from the potentially poison chalice of Eurovision participation. But, by crikey, did they find one...

Your red, white and blue, God Save the Queen 1967 facts:

(a) Puppet on a String, the winning song, was Sandie Shaw's least favourite of the five shortlisted in that year's Song For Europe - but was the one her manager thought ideal for the competition in Vienna.

One song a week was performed by Sandie on Rolf Harris' Saturday evening BBC One show before the public voted for their favourite by postcard. Rolf himself performed the UK commentary on that momentous night in Austria (if anyone has a recording of it, I'd love to hear it).

Surprisingly, 'Puppet' was not the song much of the public expected to go to Austria. The most contemporary and catchy tune in the shortlist - and perhaps capable of taking the trophy in Vienna with even more points that Puppet on a String got - was the Song For Europe runner-up, Tell the Boys.

Will Rolf Harris ever age? The first three entries in A Song For Europe 1967 - Tell the Boys is the first one up.

When a barefoot Sandie performed on the big night in the ballroom of Vienna's Wiener Hofburg Palace, her mic failed for the first few seconds of the song. That, thankfully, was the only glitch of an otherwise superb performance. If she loathed the song as much as she said she did, it didn't show when it mattered. In later years, Sandie admitted she knew she had won before she even sang that first non-amplified note.

For a country who was making a habit of having a healthy lead in the voting slowly nibbled away as the latter juries were called, the UK's first victory was never in doubt by the time the second of the 17 juries which voted.

Once the sixth country (Switzerland) had been called, Sandie had 25 votes from a possible 60 and already enough to win the whole shebang. By the very end of the voting, runners-up Ireland had 22, fewer than half of GB's eventual tally of 47.

Puppet on a String spent three weeks at the top of the UK charts in April 1967 - as well as charts across the continent - a fact which probably exacerbated Sandie's hatred for Bill Martin and Phil Coulter's song rather than appease it.

Sandie seems to have become more relaxed about the Contest in recent years. A re-worked version of Puppet was made available on her official website for 60 days after her 60th birthday in 2007 and she announced a section of the votes in the 2005 UK heats. Age really does seem to mellow us all.

(b) However - Puppet on a String was not the biggest hit to emerge from the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest. That honour went instead to the fourth-placed Luxembourgeois entry, L'amour est Bleu, performed by Greek singer Vicky Leandros and written by the composers of France's winning song from 1960.

Vicky's love is blue. Her sadness is beige.

Translated as Love is Blue, before the year was out, an instrumental version of it would be at the top of America's Top 100 Billboard charts - with cover versions aplenty sprinkled about the lower reaches of the same hitlist - but Vicky's version never became a stateside smash. However, she would return to Eurovision...

(c) Serge Gainsbourg was back in 1967, but still annoying his French compatriots by entering a song for Monaco this time. He must have been having an off day when he wrote Boum-Badaboum, although the countdown bit sung in French is rather funky.

If Doctor Who ever needed a French assistant...

It still came fifth.

(d) This was also the first year the production team interspersed the voting with shots of the green room to show the assembled acts nervously following the scores as they came in. 1966 winner Udo Jurgens can be seen clamped to Sandie Shaw's side throughout, although she appears oblivious to his presence. Poor fella.

You're not dreaming. That is the UK loads and loads of points in the lead.

(e) So, for the first time, the BBC would host the following year's Contest as title holders.

It needed something big to mark the occasion, something to set the 1968 competition apart from all the others that had gone before.

Over in London, those technical types at Television Centre were working on bringing the Eurovision Song Contest to the watching world in glorious tecnicolour.