Society

How the UK’s smug attitude to Eurovision anticipated Brexit

We don’t put in the effort but still think we should be beating the Europeans

May 18, 2021
Best of British? Bonnie Tyler representing the UK performing during the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 in Malmo, Sweden. Credit: Alamy
Best of British? Bonnie Tyler representing the UK performing during the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 in Malmo, Sweden. Credit: Alamy

However much some on the right portray the BBC as a nest of elitist Remainers, its approach to the Eurovision song contest is—and has been for many years—absolutely attuned to the Brexit zeitgeist.

I’m not talking here about the network’s coverage of the contest itself. Anchored since 2009 by Graham Norton, the BBC treats it with a mixture of affectionate mockery and unabashed love. Unlike the late Terry Wogan, who in his last years as commentator seemed to be descending into bewildered xenophobia, Norton hits that sweet spot between laughing at the most obviously ridiculous entries, while also laughing at us for enjoying them so much.  

But when it comes to its role in choosing the British entry to the contest, the BBC’s approach to Eurovision exhibits many of the same pathologies that have shaped this country’s antagonistic relationship with Europe.

The script has already been written for the British entry to this year’s contest, to be held in Rotterdam this week. Embers by James Newman is… fine, I guess. It is a generic up-tempo track co-written by this uncharismatic but professional performer. 

It will not win. It may even vanish without trace in the voting: nul points is a distinct possibility. Some British viewers will make the traditional complaints about certain countries always voting in a bloc for their favoured neighbours, perhaps spiced up with complaints about Europe punishing us for Brexit. But no one will care that much. I doubt that even James Newman will be that disappointed. Certainly, the BBC’s approach to the contest in recent years—dispensing with a public selection vote in favour of working with whoever’s turn it is within the UK music industry to come up with an entry—suggests that no one is driven by a fervent desire to win.

In fact, admitting to actually wanting to win Eurovision verges on bad taste in this country. Only the luckless UK entrants even pays lip service to it anymore. Refusing to care how Britain does in Eurovision seems to unite much of this country, beyond the Remain-Leave divide.

If all this were just a manifestation of love for Eurovision transcending patriotism, there would not be an issue. The trouble is that not caring can be a performative gesture that ironically betrays a deep investment in British success. This has deep cultural roots. The public school ideal has always been to succeed without being seen to try. That exaggerated effortlessness clearly strikes a chord way beyond those who actually attended public schools, as the electoral success of two recent old Etonian prime ministers shows.

There was a time when it was possible for this country to succeed in Eurovision without trying too hard. British popular music culture dominated Europe from the 1950s and the modest competition helps to explain the five victories, the most recent being Katrina and the Waves with the sweet-but-underwhelming “Love Shine a Light” in 1997.

Yet things have changed markedly in Eurovisionland since the 1990s. When Eastern European, former Yugoslavian and former Soviet countries began to enter the contest, they never got the memo that they weren’t supposed to actually try. They normalised entering a country’s top talent, with unusual songs and imaginative staging. Winners such as Ukraine’s Ruslana who performed the vigorous ethno-pop “Wild Dances” in 2004, were part of a wider wave in which countries across Europe expanded the range of musical influences within Eurovision. One can’t dismiss Lordi’s glorious no-holds-barred anthem “Hard Rock Hallelujah” (winning for Finland in 2006) or Conchita Wurst’s magnificent torch song “Rise like a Phoenix” (winning for Austria in 2014), as substandard dross.

The UK response to countries upping their Eurovision game was to double-down on mediocrity. One cannot read into the choice of Engelbert Humberdink in 2012 and Bonnie Tyler in 2013 as anything other than: “You sent your best, we retaliate with our past-their-best.”

The tone of the BBC’s coverage emphasises camp, yet UK entrants are almost never camp (the only recent UK camp entrant was Scooch in 2007, whose painfully forced attempts at innuendo did deservedly appallingly). For UK audiences Eurovision camp must be unwitting rather than knowing, the irony unintentional, confirming a prejudice that Europeans “don’t really get it.” From this perspective, the ideal Eurovision entry was Jacques Houdek, who represented Croatia in 2017 with a quasi-operatic slice of fabulous schlock. That Houdek was revealed as a notorious homophobe in his home country, reinforced all kind of smug assumptions about the essential naivety of Europeans.

Despite political and geographical voting (which has in any case been mitigated in recent years to a degree by changes in the voting system), Portugal’s debut victory in 2017 and the victory of the Netherlands in 2019 for the first time since 1975, shows that countries without self-evident sympathisers can win—provided they enter something exceptional. But the UK, it seems, would rather win without actually trying.

Our attitude to Eurovision is a symptom of a wider sickness. The UK’s dismal performance in Eurovision since the 1990s has been the canary in the coal mine; a harbinger of a future in which British superiority is expressed by self-satisfied incompetence. Unlike the EU, we are unlikely to ever leave Eurovision and there’s no reason why other countries would ever vote us out (if for no other reason that we are one of the “Big 5” countries that contribute a disproportionate amount of the contest’s financing). But we are becoming irrelevant to it, as we offer up mediocrity after mediocrity as definitive proof of our greatness.