Saturday night saw the weird and wonderful turn-up in Ukraine to celebrate the 62nd rendition of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Under the slogan of Celebrate Diversity, which is rather at odds with Ukraine’s choice of three male presenters, 6.7m of us tuned in to watch the UK once again fail to make an impact, finishing in 15th place.
Shocked? Neither am I! But what did shock me is how we can possibly even think about leaving Eurovision.
In a poll commissioned by Ladbrokes, OnePoll found that 53.6% of the UK population wanted to make a Brexit from Eurovision, which is remarkably similar to the number who voted to leave the European Union last year.
50% of the 1,000 UK adults surveyed by OnePoll believed that Brexit would have negative consequences on the way other nations would score us. My answer to that would be that we never scored that well in the past when Brexit was not a thing. If the reason is that we never win it, then watch out FA as the next vote may be to leave the European Football Championships where we have performed even worse in.
What is true however, is that Eurovision and our Eurovision successes and failures have helped shape our musical tastes and British pop culture since 1957, which is a whole 16 years before the UK joined the European Communities which would later became the European Union.
This year’s UK entry, sung by Lucie Jones and called ‘I Will Never Give Up On You’, held a double-meaning as the UK begins the process of leaving the European Union. In spite of 53.6% of Brits wanting to leave, let’s hope that a Eurovision Referendum does not find its way into the election manifestos of any of the main parties so that at least we can hang-on to a bit of Europeanness.
