{"id":41113,"date":"2026-05-13T17:29:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T17:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/41113\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T17:29:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T17:29:36","slug":"the-bbcs-commitment-to-losing-eurovision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/41113\/","title":{"rendered":"The BBC\u2019s commitment to losing Eurovision"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t mean that sarcastically.\u00a0Well, I do. But it really is an achievement.<\/p>\n

Most countries enter Eurovision hoping to win<\/a>. Britain enters it the way most British people go into the sea in April: they do it. They don\u2019t like it. And they come out worse than they went in.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a Mancunian. My city gave the world Oasis, the Smiths, Joy Division, the Stone Roses, and New Order. Look further afield and see that Britain has produced the Beatles, Bowie, Queen, Adele, Amy Winehouse, Dua Lipa, Stormzy, and more. The UK doesn\u2019t have a music problem. Britain is half the reason popular music exists.<\/p>\n

So why does the BBC keep submitting Eurovision entries that sound like they were assembled by a focus group of people who have never heard a British song?<\/p>\n

Well, the truth is, they sort of are.<\/p>\n

\"RememberRemember Monday, representing the United Kingdom, perform ”What The Hell Just Happened?” during the Grand Final of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland, May 17, 2025. (credit: DENIS BALIBOUSE\/REUTERS)<\/p>\n

The man who keeps co-writing Britain\u2019s Eurovision songs lives in Denmark. Thomas Stengaard wrote Denmark\u2019s 2013 Eurovision winner, \u201cOnly Teardrops.\u201d He\u2019s since branched out.<\/p>\n

He co-wrote last year\u2019s UK entry, \u201cWhat the Hell Just Happened?\u201d for Remember Monday, with his Danish collaborator Julie Aagaard. The same pair is behind this year\u2019s entry, \u201cEins, Zwei, Drei,\u201d performed by Sam Battle under the stage name Look Mum No Computer. Parts of it are in German.<\/p>\n

The BBC is sending an entry partly in German, written by Danish specialists, to represent the country that produced the Stone Roses, launched SNL UK with Wet Leg, and that has spent the last twenty years exporting more pop music than any nation that doesn\u2019t have Beyonc\u00e9 in it.<\/p>\n

This is not a competence problem.<\/p>\n

The BBC and British music<\/p>\n

The BBC has been finding excellent British music for almost 20 years. BBC Introducing, the platform launched in 2007 to support unsigned UK talent, has broken Florence and the Machine, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, Ellie Goulding, Lewis Capaldi, Glass Animals, Royal Blood, IDLES, Arlo Parks, Little Simz, PinkPantheress, Wet Leg, and Lola Young. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most successful music discovery operations in the world.<\/p>\n

In October 2024, the BBC announced that BBC Introducing would help find the UK\u2019s 2025 Eurovision entry. They went through that process. The result was Remember Monday, with a song by Stengaard and Aagaard, finishing in 19th with zero votes from the European public.<\/p>\n

So we know the network exists. We know the talent exists. We know the BBC is perfectly capable of producing live music<\/a> brilliantly when it wants to. None of these things is the bottleneck.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s missing is the confidence to believe that an actual British song, written by actual British people, performed by an actual British artist, could win Eurovision.<\/p>\n

We know it can, because three years ago it almost did.<\/p>\n

In 2022, Sam Ryder finished second at Eurovision with \u201cSpace Man.\u201d He scored 466 points, the highest tally a UK entry has ever produced. He won the jury vote outright. He came within a televote of beating Ukraine in a year when Ukraine was the entire continent\u2019s emotional preference. Liverpool hosted the following year on Ukraine\u2019s behalf. It wasn\u2019t a freak result \u2013 it was a deliberately engineered one.<\/p>\n

\"SamSam Ryder from United Kingdom performs during the final of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, Italy, May 14, 2022. (credit: Yara Nardi\/Reuters)<\/p>\n

The BBC had brought in TaP Music, the management company behind Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey, and Ellie Goulding. Ben Mawson, who used to manage Dua Lipa, publicly stated that his starting question had been, \u201cWhy do we do so badly every year?\u201d<\/p>\n

His team set three criteria: the right song, a voice that could carry it live, and a label willing to pay for proper staging. They weren\u2019t looking for a famous name. They were looking for the right name. They found a TikTok singer from Essex with a song co-written by Amy Wadge, who wrote \u201cThinking Out Loud\u201d with Ed Sheeran. Mawson described the song as a track that \u201creferences a legacy of British pop with a bit of Elton, a bit of Queen, a bit of Bowie.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is what a British Eurovision entry sounds like when the people choosing it actually believe in British music.<\/p>\n

What did the BBC do with this proof of concept? They lost TaP Music after one more attempt. They went back to old habits.<\/p>\n

Mae Muller finished 25th in 2023 with a song she\u2019d written in a normal studio session without knowing it was going to Eurovision. Olly Alexander finished 18th in 2024 with zero public votes, and told Graham Norton afterwards that the next UK entrant should \u201cget themselves a really good therapist.\u201d Remember Monday flopped in 2025, and now we have \u201cEins, Zwei, Drei.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finding talent elsewhere<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need to be a music industry executive to see what\u2019s happened here. The BBC discovered the formula, panicked, and went back to outsourcing the problem to people in Copenhagen. The country that produced Sam Ryder is now sending a song with a German chorus and Danish songwriters because somewhere inside Broadcasting House, somebody decided that\u2019s safer than trusting British music to be British.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t safer. It loses. Look Mum No Computer opened at 20\/1 with the bookies in February. At the time of writing, he\u2019s at 80\/1, sitting in 17th place in the outright betting. None of this is Sam Battle\u2019s fault. He\u2019s an interesting experimental musician who was placed in an awkward position by a selection process that long ago lost its nerve.<\/p>\n

Saturday night in Vienna<\/a> will produce another joke at the UK\u2019s expense. Graham Norton will deliver the gentle British self-deprecation that has become the BBC\u2019s only consistent contribution to Eurovision. Someone in the BBC press office will start drafting a statement about \u201cnext year.\u201d The bookies will collect their money.<\/p>\n

And then, at some point, the BBC will have to answer a serious question: if the license fee is paying for music programming, and that music programming is among the best in the world, and the BBC\u2019s own discovery platform has launched some of the biggest British pop careers of the last fifteen years, why is the public broadcaster spending license-fee money to lose Eurovision with a song written by Danes?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if the BBC can answer that question. I do know that Sam Ryder is touring his second album, that Wet Leg are headlining festivals, and that British music has rarely been in healthier shape. None of this is making it to Vienna.<\/p>\n

The writer is the social media manager of The Jerusalem Post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t mean that sarcastically.\u00a0Well, I do. But it really is an achievement. Most countries enter Eurovision hoping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20858],"tags":[11004,1011,20859,20860,6477],"class_list":{"0":"post-41113","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eurovision","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eurovision","11":"tag-eurovision-song-contest-2026","12":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}