A song for (post-Brexit) Europe?

By Christine Quigley

This weekend will see the sixty-fifth edition of the Eurovision Song Contest held in Rotterdam. While the competition is often dismissed in the UK as a bit of a joke, this year’s contest will see 39 countries compete in the biggest music competition of its kind. 

Britain didn’t always write off Eurovision – in fact the UK has won the contest five times, firstly with Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a String in 1967, and most recently in 1997 with Love Shine a Light by Katrina and the Waves. The UK has also come second on 15 separate occasions, most notably in 1968 when hot favourite Cliff Richard was pipped to the post by Spain, attracting accusations made of General Franco for vote-rigging.

However, in recent years, the UK’s fortunes at Eurovision haven’t been so favourable. The British entry has only reached the top ten twice this century, and has come in last place in 2003, 2008, 2010 and in 2019 – with Gemini’s entry in 2003 distinguishing itself by attracting the dreaded ‘nul points’. 

So why has the UK’s winning streak been broken? Geopolitics, partly. Having introduced televoting by members of the public in 1998, the competition has subsequently seen distinct patterns of countries supporting their neighbours. The Scandinavian countries tend to vote for each other, as do the former Soviet states. Diaspora also plays a significant factor in voting patterns, with the UK regularly awarding high points to countries like Ireland and Poland with significant resident populations. (As an Irish national myself, I will confess to always voting for Ireland, no matter how good our song actually is.). There were strong suggestions that the UK’s last place in the 2019 competition was at least partly due to anti-UK feeling within European Union countries at the drawn-out process of Brexit. Other commentators have suggested that the song just wasn’t very good. 

However, since 2016 the competition reinstated jury votes to sit alongside televoting, partly in order to break the pattern of neighbourly voting and to reassert the ‘song contest’ part of Eurovision Song Contest. In theory at least, the jurors, made up of senior representatives of each nation’s music industry, are more impartial and focused on song quality. There are distinct differences between the two sets of results. For example, in 2019 Norway’s KEiiNO won the televote by a comfortable margin but only came 18^th in the jury vote (despite being an absolute banger), while North Macedonia won the jury vote but came twelfth in the televote. 

The UK, as one of the Big Five countries whose broadcasters contribute the most to the European Broadcasting Union, won’t be competing in the semi-finals this week, but will instead go straight through to the final. This year’s British entry James Newman has some real-world musical credibility, having won a BRIT Award in 2014 for co-writing Rudimental’s ‘Waiting All Night’. His song, ‘Embers’ has had some positive reviews, but is currently languishing between 100/1 and 750/1 to win on the betting markets. A solid mid-table finish may well be the best result the UK can expect following Brexit. 

On Saturday, I’ll be cheering on Ireland (but probably betting on Iceland and Italy), joining nearly 200 million people watching the competition from across the globe. Do tune in – if not for the singing, at least for the politics.