Another year, another Euro-catastrophe. Here’s our breakdown of where it all went so wrong for Remember Monday
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For a moment, at around 11.20pm last night, it looked as though the United Kingdom might actually perform respectably in the Eurovision Song Contest. Our entry, What The Hell Just Happened? by girl-band Remember Monday, had already received a smattering of points when the Italian jury awarded us the top “douze points”. Cue mayhem on Remember Monday’s table in the green room.
Alas, our jubilation was short-lived. The UK went on to receive the dreaded “nul points” from the all-important public vote that followed.
We ended the competition in 19th place, far closer to the bottom than the top and below our average (since 2010) of 18th. The winner was Austria with its soaring, apocalyptic track Wasted Love, sung largely in falsetto by an opera singer called JJ.
It’s probably time for Remember Monday to forget Saturday. But why did the United Kingdom do so badly (again)? Here are our six reasons.
On the surface, Remember Monday’s song ticked lots of zeitgeisty boxes. In fact, if you fed current musical trends into an AI songwriting machine, What The Hell Just Happened? would probably come out. There was a bit of Charli xcx’s Bratty rebellion in its lyrics (“I’m still in last night’s make-up, broke a heel, lost my keys, scraped my knee”), a dollop of Chappell Roan’s Hot to Go! in its beat, and some Last Dinner Party-like tempo shifts and baroque flair.
But the song sounded too stop-start live. It lacked consistency. Remember Monday are fantastic harmonisers and we all love a bit of whimsy. But whimsy tends not to work for the UK at Eurovision, despite what we think. Our last three best-performing entries – Sam Ryder’s Space Man in 2022, Imaani’s Where Are You? in, er, 1998 and Katrina and the Waves’ Love Shine a Light in 1997 – were serious songs, seriously delivered.
Much of this year’s Eurovision staging was memorable, from Poland’s Game of Thrones theme – complete with its swooping CGI dragon – to Malta’s multicoloured psychedelic romance-meets-smut visuals. And who could forget Sweden’s sauna or Finland’s PVC-clad Erika Vikman riding a massive phallic microphone stand during her suggestively-titled Ich Komme?
But all Remember Monday really had were a padded screen, an oversized chandelier and visuals of some synchronised swimmers. These played into the song’s themes – our protagonist falls from a chandelier during her crazy night out then jumps into a pool – but the stage set, such as it was, didn’t make much sense unless you listened closely to the song’s lyrics. We’re the UK and people don’t like us at Eurovision – this means we need to go all out to get votes. This, however, looked like a student production of Beauty and the Beast performed down the local leisure centre.
The UK performed eighth in the running order. I initially feared that this would prove a handicap – it wasn’t close enough to the beginning to provide an explosive opening (to be fair we had enough of these with the French entrant, where unfortunate lighting made the cork shavings falling on singer Louane look like that time at Glastonbury when a sewage truck operator pressed “blow” instead of “suck” in the dance tent) yet it was still 19 songs from the end. We’d get lost in the sonic deluge, I worried.
However the running order actually hampered us in another way. We performed right before eventual winners Austria and shortly after Israel and Estonia, who ended up in second place and third places respectively. We were sandwiched by better songs. The front-loaded nature of this year’s show might mark a change in accepted Eurovision wisdom. According to data scientist Irini Economides, acts that perform later in the final or semi-finals have tended historically to rake in more points, a phenomenon known as recency bias. No longer, it seems.
Until 2019, the UK’s entrant into Eurovision was almost always selected by public vote via TV shows such as A Song for Europe and Eurovision: You Decide. But for the last six years – and also for the period between 2011 and 2015 – the entrant has been chosen by a private internal selection method overseen by the BBC. This means that the national broadcaster, along with BBC Studios and members of the music industry, was responsible for picking Remember Monday rather than the British public. The theory goes that industry experts know best, and when it comes to someone like Sam Ryder you can’t argue with this strategy.
However not road-testing the entrants removes the crucial element of customer research: how will they rate with TV audiences? Giving the public a say also creates a sense of “buy in”. They’ll care more if they helped get the artist to Eurovision. My six-year-old son had his own theory about why Remember Monday got nul public points. “They said that word in the song title,” he whispered when I told him the result. Which word? “The ‘H’ word.” Bless. The innocence. Thank goodness he didn’t stay up for Finland. But, hey, what if he’s right? It was never put to the public so we’ll never know.
There’s an inescapable feeling that the UK is still too high and mighty for all this cheesy Eurovision nonsense. As one of the “big five” members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), we automatically qualify for the Eurovision final because we contribute more financially. This has bred complacency. Would we really have got into the finals in recent years had we not got an automatic place? No. But it’s academic. We’re there anyway. So we put less effort in. There’s also some musical snobbery at play.
Away from the glitter and camp spectacle of Eurovision, Britain has always been Europe’s music powerhouse. We produced The Beatles, the Stones, Adele and Harry Styles. Eurovision has always been a little, well, beneath us. There were some intriguing possibilities in the 2010s when both Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker suggested they’d be up for writing a Eurovision song. Neither came to anything. Why not give Chris Martin a buzz? Coldplay have flirted with sheeny Europop and he knows his way around a tune. They’d certainly add colour to any UK entry. So long as it was yellow.
Ah yes, there’s this. Everyone hates us. It’s tempting to blame the Brexit vote in 2016: we came 24th in 2018 , last in 2019 and 2021, and 25th in 2023. Our constant underperformance is clearly a punishment dividend for leaving the EU, isn’t it? Well, no. We also came last in 2010, 2008 and 2003, so that’s not it. People just don’t like us. Is it our haughty attitude? Our nasty colonial past? Our geographical detachment as an island nation? It’s probably a bit of all of these.
Or perhaps it’s because we don’t present our results in the form of a tiny animated animal standing in front of a national monument. Now there’s a thought for 2026. After another bad year at Eurovision, it’s surely worth a try?
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5/5