In 2002 Estonia hosted the 47th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest in Tallinn.
The show started with some highlights of the host city and country with "Everybody", the winning song of 2001, in the background. Shortly after, the 2001 winners appeared on stage to finish the song. For the first time we had a slogan, "Modern Fairytale". In accordance to this, the 24 countries were introduced with the usual postcards, but Estonia was the first host to use a metaphor on those: each one related to a famous fairytale.
Keeping on with the "debuts" the Marcel Bezençon Awards, for which the accredited press, commentators and composers voted for the songs in different categories, were first awarded.
Initially, only 22 countries were set to take part but then EBU increased the number to 24. That gave Israel and Portugal their spot in Tallinn. Funny fact, maybe the funniest fact of all related with Eurovision 2002 is that Portugal declined the spot they were given and Latvia, the “best” of the countries that had been relegated in 2001, took Portugal’s spot with "I Wanna", by Maria N. and... Latvia won the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time!
20 out of the 24 entries were selected through a national final: only Cyprus, Russia, Israel and France selected their song internally. However, one of the national finals winners did not make it to Tallinn: B'Avarija, with the song "We all" was disqualified as the song was released on CD at the end of 2001. So Lithuania had to send the second place from Eurovizijos of that year.
We had a wide mix of genres: from boys band to ballads, passing through techno pop and euro pop, for sure there was a song to fit everyone's musical taste. At the end, The TOP 5 songs were all perform by female solo singers and the TOP 4 were only sung in English. Actually, out of the 24 songs, ⅔ was only performed in English, while another 3 songs had parts of the lyrics in English.
After all the performances, as usual, we had recaps and then the voting. But in 2002 the broadcaster decided to reverse the song recaps - starting instead with the last performed song (Lithuania) and finishing with the first performed song (Cyprus),
Several countries kept using the televote, and in the next picture (from Wikipedia) we can see which method was used by each country
: During the voting, the first five top marks were awarded to five different countries: Greece, Malta, United Kingdom, Cyprus and Latvia. By then, Malta was leading, two points ahead of Latvia, and Lithuania, together with Denmark (one of the pre-contest favourites, that ended up in the last position), were still waiting for their first points. Every country, but Romania, voted for the winner and runner-up. Only three countries were in the lead during the voting: Greece, after the first set of votes (from Cyprus), Malta, until just before the Swiss votes and then Latvia, the winner, from there on until the end. In Tallinn, a few countries achieved their best result in the Eurovision up to 2002. We had the best results for Latvia (still their best place), Malta and Romania. On the other side, not counting with the contests where we have semi-finals and nonqualifications, Denmark and North Macedonia got their worst Eurovision result so far. It was the only time Denmark placed last and for North Macedonia, their 19th place out of 24 songs is slightly worse than the 19th place in 1998 out of 25 songs.
This reports end with this… awkward (or funny) fact: 20 seconds into Cyprus' performance, and just after a close up of the lead singer, we have the screen showing the phrase "the ugly duckling"... a technical failure as the next postcard, for the United Kingdom, was about that fairytale.