For decades, Britain’s behaviour towards the Eurovision song contest followed a reliably set pattern. First, it involved behaving as though the nation was somehow above the whole thing, disdainfully entering any old rubbish: TV talent show runners-up, manufactured pop bands years past their sell-by date, songs so unmemorable it seemed a miracle the benighted souls charged with singing them didn’t just forget what they were doing midway through the performance and distractedly wander offstage. Then, when the other countries failed to behave accordingly – awarding us deux points or ignoring us altogether, as if they somehow weren’t grateful for our weary magnanimity – we got angry about it: muttering about conspiracies and block voting, digging up ancient enmities as proof positive we weren’t being treated fairly.
Then last year, things went dramatically off-piste: we entered a decent song. Whatever you made of Space Man and its ebullient vocalist Sam Ryder, its vaguely glam-inspired, Elton/Bowie-invoking balladry was clearly a vast improvement on the stuff we’d previously inflicted on our European neighbours. You could tell by the fact that the British public actually went out and bought it. Based on purchases rather than streams, it was the third-biggest single of 2022 – as opposed to, say, Joe and Jake’s 2016 entry You’re Not Alone, which got to No 81 in the charts.
