The Cold War rival to Eurovision

"The Soviet singer was so eager to win that she did a cartwheel up on stage. But her skirt fell down and she revealed everything to the judges. I'll never forget the face of the Soviet ambassador in the front row. We laughed like hell." - Jerzy Gruza, Polish director of Intervision Song Contest

During the Cold War, Europe was divided by a concrete wall and by rival ideologies. East and West competed in everything.
The Western allies had Nato; the Eastern bloc had the Warsaw Pact.
The West had the Common Market; the East had Comecon.
We had the Eurovision Song Contest; they had... the Intervision Song Contest.
The Soviet Union could not take part in Eurovision. It was not a member of the European Broadcasting Union, the club of western broadcasters that organised the show. But that did not mean that behind the Iron Curtain people did not want to wear sequins and sing their hearts out. Of course they did. So the communist world created its very own songfest.
Intervision was born in August 1961 - just one week after the appearance of that rather more sinister Cold War icon, the Berlin Wall. With the division of Europe now a physical reality, artists in the East shrugged their shoulders and decamped to the shipyards of Gdansk in Poland for a socialist sing-song.
It was not a Communist party functionary, though, who had come up with the idea - it was a Polish pianist.
Wladyslaw Szpilman was a Jewish musician who had worked for Polish Radio before World War II. On 23 September 1939, as the Nazis pounded Warsaw from the ground and from the air, Szpilman was performing Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor live on air. It would be the last live music on Polish radio until the end of the war.
Decades later Szpilman would become famous as the hero of Roman Polansky's film, The Pianist; he had survived Nazi invasion, desperate conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto and arrest. His family had been put on a train and sent to the gas chambers. But Szpilman escaped from the railway station and spent the rest of the war in hiding. After an experience like that, arranging a song contest must have been a walk in the park.
It soon became clear, though, that a shipyard was not the ideal venue for Szpilman's song contest. In 1964 his musical extravaganza relocated up the coast to the Polish seaside resort of Sopot. A spectacular open-air amphitheatre, the Forest Opera, became the annual home of the Sopot Music Festival...
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