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The UK actually came even more last in Eurovision

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 23 May 2019

So, we all know that the UK came last at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. But it turns out we actually came even more last. Which is almost not possible. Almost.

But, you see, the final scores for this year’s Eurovision have been recalculated. Why? Because the jury from Belarus wasn’t allowed to vote in Saturday’s grand final after it emerged that they had published their votes from the first semi-final, which is apparently a big no-no in Eurovision land. To compensate for that missing jury vote, organisers decided to add a substitute ‘aggregated score’ that was calculated based on the jury votes in other countries with similar voting records to Belarus.

That all sounds unnecessarily complicated. Which is possibly why whoever was charged with the task of calculating that substitute score screwed it up. Eurovision organiser the European Broadcasting Union explains: “Following standard review practices, we have discovered that due to a human error an incorrect aggregated result was used. This had no impact on the calculation of points derived from televoting across the 41 participating countries and the overall winner and top four songs of the contest remain unchanged”.

Yeah, so fixing the error and redoing the sums doesn’t change the fact that the Netherlands came first or that the UK came last. But now The Netherlands is more first and the UK is more last. The Netherlands’ total score (with jury and public votes combined) goes up from 492 points to 498, while the UK goes down from sixteen to eleven. But hey, it’s still not none, so there’s that.

Why did the UK come so very, very last though? That’s the big question. Brexit, say lots of people. Not least the singer of the UK entry, Michael Rice, who told The Sun: “I always knew I was going to come in this position because of Brexit. Do you know what? If it was Gary Barlow or Elton John, they still probably would have come last too. I’ve still had so much fun and I’ve not once doubted my talent or my singing”.

If he was always quite so certain that he was going to lose, it makes you wonder why he even bothered. Also, I’m not sure it’s very becoming to suggest that two of our biggest pop stars couldn’t sell a song to Europe. After all, British music is still selling pretty well across the continent, despite all that Brexit stuff. Plus the UK was already doing pretty badly in Eurovision every year before Brexit was even a thing.

Of course, if you do exclude the Brexit backlash excuse, that mainly just leaves the song itself to blame for the last place position. And, while it was our most credible entry for some time, said song was simply not as good or performed as impressively as almost every other one in the competition this year. Other than Slovenia. What the fuck, Slovenia?

Of course, if you don’t want to exclude the Brexit backlash excuse and you are still bothered about how we might look to other Europeans after three years of being a total dick, you could all use today’s European elections to send a message to Europe that says we’re all cool and friendly and want to be part of the gang again. Then maybe we could all sing a song about it at next year’s Eurovision and steal the show! Except Eurovision is non-political, so that won’t work. The voting thing might though.