Given that Britain’s politics are quite a sizeable reason that we do so badly in Eurovision: here’s something that will definitely, absolutely, categorically help us do better in the competition … interference from MPs. Digital, culture, media and sport committee chair Caroline Dinenage has announced that MPs will scrutinise the UK’s reliable failure in the competition to see where we’re going wrong, with a hearing to be held over the coming months. The answers surely don’t take that long to work out.
Currently that’s the BBC, with the assistance of a label or management company. Is our embarrassing misfortune down to “bad song choice, weak performance or something else”, she asked. Can you hear three red cherries dinging?
Our songs are embarrassing, the humdrum performances indicative of a nation who think we’re too good for Eurovision high camp, and the “something else” is the lingering whiff of Brexit. Dinenage’s statement concluded by fretting about why we continually come last, or as good as, when as a nation we have “world-class songwriters and musicians”? Let me help there: that’s because no world-class British songwriter or musician would enter Eurovision at this point.
No matter how good the song, our reputation as the dunce of the competition is fixed in perpetuity. We’ve tried the electro-swing beloved of the continent. We’ve tried oldies, besmirching Bonnie and Engelbert’s good names.
At this point, I doubt that even Paul McCartney could pluck victory from the pyro-belching jaws of defeat. No self-respecting artist is going to sacrifice their beautiful creation to those cruel, gnashing European heathens. What about plucky Sam Ryder, who finished second in 2022?
Space Man is quite a good song, I’ll grant you that. In summer 2022, at a very trying time in my life, it caught me unawares and made me cry. Improbably, later that day, I actually saw Ryder himself at a service station en route to the south-west and thanked him, very earnestly, for writing it, and got a warm fist bump in return.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
