.png)
9 hours ago
8
What is to be done about Britain’s lowly standing in the Eurovision song contest? It’s a question to which the obvious answer is: who cares? We’re led to believe millions across the UK are rendered livid on an annual basis by our poor showing – we’ve made the top 10 in the final once in the last 16 years – but you somehow never actually meet anyone who gives a monkey’s, despite the BBC’s Stakhanovite efforts to convince us that Eurovision is the musical event of the year. In 2023, Radio 2’s coverage involved broadcasting not merely the final itself, but a documentary, a Eurovision after-party show, both semi-finals, a show involving Sophie Ellis-Bextor playing non-stop Eurovision winners, a show involving Sophie Ellis-Bextor playing tunes from Eurovision celebrities, a show involving Sophie Ellis-Bextor playing Eurovision runners-up and an all-request Eurovision party: it is unrecorded if the latter was deluged with requests to make it stop.
It’s tempting to suggest that ranks of people who don’t care much about Eurovision either way includes those responsible for deciding Britain’s entry. Our solitary success in recent years was Sam Ryder coming second in 2022, a feat pulled off via the cunning new approach of equipping our entrant with a relatively memorable song, a well-written Elton/Bowie pastiche called Spaceman. You might have thought there was a lesson in there, but no. Normal service was resumed the following year. Try humming the chorus of Mae Muller’s vaguely Dua Lipa-ish Wrote A Song (2023), or Olly Alexander’s Dizzy (2024), or Remember Monday’s country-hued What The Hell Just Happened (2025), the latter pair scoring zero in the public vote. You can’t, can you?
This year, we seem to have gone for novelty value. Our entrant is called Look Mum No Computer, a man from Essex who posts videos to YouTube that mix an evidently genuine interest in old synthesisers with a certain degree of performative zaniness: he drives a 1929 Austin 7 and runs a museum in Ramsgate devoted to vintage analogue devices. In one video, he performs the Teddy Bear’s Picnic on a huge modular synth while wearing a furry onesie and pulling watch-out-everyone-I’m-a-bit-nutty faces to camera.
His song Eins, Zwei, Drei – synth-pop with vocals that vaguely recall those of Damon Albarn on Blur’s Girls And Boys – doesn’t have much of a tune, although there’s a nagging shouted hook and a lengthy coda in which the track’s rhythm unexpectedly shifts into a stompy glam rock glitter-beat. Whoever’s responsible for its selection has clearly decided to bet their chips on the whole watch-out-everybody-I’m-a-bit-nutty angle instead. Cue a video featuring Look Mum No Computer absent-mindedly dipping a digestive into a mug full of baked beans and pretending to drive an old Mini with a keyboard and a fire extinguisher strapped to the top of it and lyrics which the BBC described as “strikingly witty”: they rhyme “pepperoni” with “feeling okey-dokey” and feature the couplet “counting in English doesn’t cut the mustard / I’m so sick of munching roly-poly with custard”. Perhaps, on the night of the final, mainland Europe will ring to the sound of ambulances called to attend viewers suffering from split sides, but you somehow doubt it.
Certainly, there’s been a distinct ring of fatalism emanating from Look Mum No Computer himself: “There’s a lot of stuff going on with the voting, a lot of favouritism and stuff,” he said when he was announced as Britain’s entry last month, “and maybe the UK isn’t everyone’s favourite when it comes to Eurovision”. Those sound suspiciously like the words of a man who knows he hasn’t got a prayer.
