Watching Eurovision in the UK is a whole mix of emotions.
Whether people will admit it or not Eurovision is embedded in our culture. This year alone 8 million of us Brits tuned in to watch the contest unfold live; Eurovision songs crept their way into the Official UK Top 40 and the newspapers simply can’t help themselves but to indulge in sharing the woes of our Eurovision placements every year. For the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), entering Eurovision is simply a no brainer. Brits tune in time and time again to watch the contest regardless of whether the country is on a winning or losing streak. This is probably helped in no small part by the BBC’s ‘big 5’ status which simply means that due to the BBC putting in higher financial contributions than most of other broadcasters to the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) budget, their performance in the Grand Final is guaranteed. This high volume of viewers in a prime time TV slot is nothing to be sniffed at and even with the high cost paid for ‘big 5’ membership – as a TV shows of this scale it certainly appears that the BBC is getting a good financial deal and they appear very happy with the cost. Add into the equation all the other things we love about Eurovision – the celebration of the arts; the appreciation and representation for diverse communities and cultures; the competitive (almost sport-like) nature, and it’s rapidly easy to see how the contest fulfills the BBC’s goals of informing, educating and entertaining the public.
And yet our results of late have been far from ideal.
Whilst participating in Eurovision is brilliant for a broadcaster, there is less incentive to do well (especially if you are not reliant on getting a good enough result to qualify in order to bring in views). I do not for a minute believe the BBC doesn’t want to do well. On the contrary, I believe the advantages of national/broadcaster pride, hosting opportunities, public and media scrutiny etc. all can and do push the BBC to want to achieve a good result at Eurovision. The issue seem to at least from an outsider’s perspective seem to come more from firstly understanding how the contest has evolved and secondly fighting the negative narrative the BBC themselves, almost inadvertently created around the contest that has spread like wildfire through popular media.
Both these issues have been covered extensively by other fans on various platforms and news sites, so I am not going to focus in on them in too much detail at all. Rest assured however if you want links to read on these matters or me to write a future article on such a topic just give me a shout. Instead, I want to focus on a potential solution that has been brewing at the back of people’s minds for long enough now. The idea is pretty simple, if the UK (and BBC) struggle to do well with Eurovision these days, why not let the constituent nations of the UK participate instead?
There is a problem with this idea, right from the get-go… Yup, I don’t see why the BBC should want to (or would for that matter) give up their rights to the contest. There are more obvious manners in which they can go about addressing their results without needing to pull the plug on what is ultimately a very profitable show for them. However, there are already other ‘Eurovisions’ the BBC does not participate in and they have indeed seen the UK represented in constituent parts. The EBU has been pretty clear on the concept that they consider England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to be countries within a country and therefore eligible to participate should the wider the UK not already be doing so, so the notion is not completely ludicrous. And with all the buzz a nil points result creates – this idea has become pretty mainstream, with even the Welsh football team mentioning it.
But would this actually do anything?
Well the closest way of answering this is to look at the most relevant examples of a divided United Kingdom participating in a European song contest. Luckily for us, there already exists an official Eurovision branded contest in which the BBC does not participate but separate UK national broadcasters have. If you haven’t already guessed by now, it is of course Junior Eurovision (JESC), where Welsh language broadcaster Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C) participated in the years before the pandemic hit.
It is of course worth noting that this contest works very differently from Eurovision, in that it has an online vote where people can vote for their own country, however it is still worth noting how an independent Wales did in this contest and the results weren’t exactly a landslide victory. S4C only came 20th in their first year competing and then improved their result marginally to 18th in their second year vying for the trophy. So at first glance, no it wouldn’t appear that having a different name alone is going to pull the UK’s results up (at least if Junior Eurovision is anything to go by). Then again, this is without the same competitive fire that would emerge should all four UK nations be competing with each other and S4C to be fair could well be at the early stages of experimenting with what works well at JESC – it is too early to fairly assess.
How about we look at another similar event (with an even lower sample size of one whoops) the Free European Song Contest (Free ESC). This technically has nothing to do with Eurovision and is really broadcast solely for Germans, so again the voting system potentially is pretty unreflective of what would go down at ESC but it does allow for an example of multiple separate UK countries competing with each other in a European song contest which may be a useful comparison. In this contest, out of a field of 16, Scotland came in 4th and England in 9th, both better results than the UK’s 12th out of 16 place from the year prior.
Ultimately, when it comes down to whether or not the UK would be better off sending separate participating countries (asides from the potential of forming a voting block) the main advantage would simply be the increased competitive spirit. If a friendly rivalry was developed where the UK nations all wanted to at the very least to do better than the others, the broadcasters would have a reason to have that fire in their bellies needed to push for an even better result. If that could be achieved then it may be a really good move, if not I can’t see it resulting in better results alone.
This should be both good news and bad news for the BBC. The bad news is their results still aren’t as good as they clearly want and it is hard to see a real driver to get them to where they need to be. The good news however, is there are so many different avenues they can potentially explore with Eurovision to build on the nation’s appetite for the contest that if they can find a way to get the nation to want to seriously compete, let’s just say the future could be very exciting indeed!
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