The Eurovision Song Contest 1963 was the eighth Eurovision Song Contest. France had won the contest in 1962 but they handed the honour of hosting the event to the United Kingdom because they did not wish to host the contest again so soon after hosting the 1961 event. The same thing happened when the Netherlands won in 1959 and refused to host it in 1960. The contest was held then at the BBC Television Centre in London.

There was some controversy during and about the voting. When it was the turn for Norway to announce their votes, the spokesman in Oslo did not correctly follow the procedure consisting in that he had to anounce the song number and the name of the country before awarding the votes. The presenter, Katie Boyle, realised that the name of the country did not match the song number and asked Norway to repeat their results from the beginning but the spokesman in Oslo asked Katie to return to them later. And so she did, after all the countries had announced their results the presenter went back to Norway but to everyone's surprise their votes had apparently changed, giving the victory to their neighbour, Denmark, at Switzerland's expense. The doubt would always be whether Oslo's spokesman gave the correct results the first time or not.

Denmark's win was their first. Finland, Norway and Sweden all scored zero points for the first time. Netherlands scored zero points for the second time and became the first country to go two years in a row without scoring a point.

See you in Copenhagen for the 9th Eurovision Song Contest in 1964