I totally forgot to post this at the time so most of this will mean nothing to most of you but I am posting so I have a record of my thoughts on Eurovision 2025!
As a post 50 year old, perimenopausal woman there is little in this life that I care about right now. Eurovision, however, is one thing I do still care about. Thankfully I don't really care if the UK wins or loses. If it bothered me that we have not won since 1997 then I would surely be inconsolable right now! I just want to watch a great show, be entertained and hope that the 4 hours it's going to take to get through 26 songs, the interval acts and the voting go by nice and speedily and don't drag. 2025 did not disappoint.
The best hosts were, by far, Hannah Waddingham and Graham Norton back in 2023 but the three hosts in Basel were actually not bad and kept everything moving along at a satisfactory pace. All but a handful of songs were really great. Quite a stellar year actually. It wasn't until the voting that I felt everything went somewhat awry.
Firstly let's address the UK entry. Remember Monday (rubbish name for a girl group but that's just my own opinion) are 3 musical theatre singers who could all sing really well, harmonised beautifully and did their absolute best with what they had to work with. The song wasn't dreadful but it was too clever for it's own good and didn't flow. It was 3 songs smooshed, clumsily together (again in my humble opinion) and was never going to win the night for the UK. Unlike last year (Olly Alexander), the performance was slick and the vocals were, almost, perfect but it didn't have the magic that Sam Ryder found in 2022.
I, most years, comment on Eurovision on my Facebook, to the chagrin of many and the delight of a few and I did say on the night that the UK entry was unlikely to bother the left hand side of the board. I was half right with this comment. After the jury vote we were 10th with 88 points and we were sitting on the left hand side of the board until the audience votes were declared. We were then unceremoniously relegated to the right hand side again having received nil points from the rest of the world. We finished 19th. Better than 26th.
The interesting thing this year is I have not heard one person say the reason we didn't do well is because Europe hates us which is like a breath of fresh air. I also think the girl's reactions to receiving nothing from the telephone vote was extremely gracious and they just seemed happy to be there and I think that is the way we should treat the Eurovision Song Contest in the future.
The UK wasn't the only country to receive nothing from the audience vote. Hosts Switzerland also received 0. Denmark received 2 points and Malta received 8. I didn't get the Swiss entry but very surprised that they received 0 when they'd done SO well with the jury vote. The Danish and Maltese entries were both fantastic Eurovision songs which, I thought, both had a shot at winning so I really didn't get it when they received so little from the audience votes.
Now, I don't want to get political but I feel we should address the elephant in the room and the fact that Israel received the highest number of votes from the audience vote, including 12 points from the UK audience vote. I had wondered why Israel were allowed to participate when Russia were banned in 2022. I urge you to look it up if you don't know but I'm not going to go into it here. I'm not completely sure how I feel about it having read up on it but the scary thing is that a very mediocre song from a country who has won the ESC 4 times in the past with some real Eurovision bangers, Milk and Honey's Hallelujah is one of my all time favourite Eurovision songs, nearly won for them again this year and was nowhere near good enough to be a winning song. At least the jury votes seemed fair but I really don't think I would say the same about the audience vote and I really don't know what I would have done had they won!
All that said, let's see what next year brings. I think we should have some sort of regional Great British Song Contest in the future to pick the UK entry. It could be a pre Christmas extravaganza. An entry from Yorkshire, an entry from Norfolk, one from Scotland (or maybe a few from Scotland) and everywhere in between. The powers that be at the BBC obviously have no idea what kind of song we should send so I think they should let us choose again like we used to.
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