Ding-A-Dong: The Song That Opened and Closed the Show

MAY 15 1975 · 12:20

Teach-In · "Ding-A-Dong" · Netherlands · 1975 Placement: 1st · Score: 152 · Language: English · Composers: Dick Bakker, Will Luikinga, Eddy Ouwens · Venue: Stockholmsmässan · Host: Stockholm, Sweden · Type: winner · Broadcast: color crt On March 22, 1975, at Stockholmsmässan in Stockholm — the Swedish capital hosting because ABBA had won the previous year — a five-piece Dutch pop group called Teach-In opened the contest in the first performance slot and, four hours later, were declared the winners. 'Ding-A-Dong' was a bubblegum-pop earworm in English, built around a chorus hook so simple it functioned almost as a children's song. The group performed in coordinated brightly-colored costumes. The song won with 152 points, making it the first Eurovision winner to perform in the opening slot — a slot traditionally considered disadvantageous because juries remembered later performances more clearly. The 1975 contest also debuted the Eurovision scoring system that has been in use (with refinements) ever since: the '12 points, 10 points, 8-1 points' distribution from each national jury, producing the 'douze points' announcement that would become one of the contest's most iconic televisual rituals. Teach-In's opening-slot win validated the new system's reduced bias toward performance-order effects. Context Eurovision 1975 was held in Sweden following ABBA's transformative 1974 Brighton victory. The Dutch broadcaster NOS had selected Teach-In through its national competition; the group's schlager-influenced pop was a direct response to ABBA-era production trends. The '12 points' scoring system was introduced specifically to reduce the chaotic potential of the narrower pre-1975 scoring scheme — a response to several years of near-ties and contested outcomes, with the 1969 four-way tie as the original trigger. The 1975 contest was broadcast across an expanded European viewer base, with the Eurovision broadcast infrastructure now reaching audiences well beyond the original Western European cable network. Legacy Ding-A-Dong's 1975 win is significant less for the song itself — which remained a Eurovision-specific commercial artifact rather than a broader pop standard — than for the scoring-system debut. The '12 points' announcement became the contest's most theatrically iconic televisual element, featured in every subsequent Eurovision through 2015's jury-reveal format and carrying into the post-2016 split-scoring era. For the Netherlands, the 1975 win was the country's fourth, continuing a strong Dutch Eurovision-era through the 1970s. Teach-In disbanded several years after their Eurovision peak. The opening-slot precedent is still cited in discussions of performance-order advantage. Mythology The claim that 'Ding-A-Dong' was the first English-language Dutch entry is inaccurate; earlier Dutch Eurovision songs had included English-language portions. Some accounts describe the 1975 scoring system as entirely new; it built on mid-1960s scoring refinements. The opening-slot win is sometimes framed as unprecedented historical achievement; it was the first time, but the disadvantage was always statistical-tendency rather than rule.