The BBC’s commitment to losing Eurovision is genuinely impressive - comment

I don’t mean that sarcastically. Well, I do. But it really is an achievement.

I’m a Mancunian. My city gave the world Oasis, the Smiths, Joy Division, the Stone Roses, and New Order. Look further afield and see that Britain has produced the Beatles, Bowie, Queen, Adele, Amy Winehouse, Dua Lipa, Stormzy, and more. The UK doesn’t have a music problem. Britain is half the reason popular music exists.

So why does the BBC keep submitting Eurovision entries that sound like they were assembled by a focus group of people who have never heard a British song?

Well, the truth is, they sort of are.

The man who keeps co-writing Britain’s Eurovision songs lives in Denmark. Thomas Stengaard wrote Denmark’s 2013 Eurovision winner, “Only Teardrops.” He’s since branched out.

He co-wrote last year’s UK entry, “What the Hell Just Happened?” for Remember Monday, with his Danish collaborator Julie Aagaard. The same pair is behind this year’s entry, “Eins, Zwei, Drei,” performed by Sam Battle under the stage name Look Mum No Computer. Parts of it are in German.

The BBC is sending an entry partly in German, written by Danish specialists, to represent the country that produced the Stone Roses, launched SNL UK with Wet Leg, and that has spent the last twenty years exporting more pop music than any nation that doesn’t have Beyoncé in it.

This is not a competence problem.

The BBC has been finding excellent British music for almost 20 years. BBC Introducing, the platform launched in 2007 to support unsigned UK talent, has broken Florence and the Machine, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, Ellie Goulding, Lewis Capaldi, Glass Animals, Royal Blood, IDLES, Arlo Parks, Little Simz, PinkPantheress, Wet Leg, and Lola Young. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most successful music discovery operations in the world.

In October 2024, the BBC announced that BBC Introducing would help find the UK’s 2025 Eurovision entry. They went through that process. The result was Remember Monday, with a song by Stengaard and Aagaard, finishing in 19th with zero votes from the European public.

What’s missing is the confidence to believe that an actual British song, written by actual British people, performed by an actual British artist, could win Eurovision.

We know it can, because three years ago it almost did.

In 2022, Sam Ryder finished second at Eurovision with “Space Man.” He scored 466 points, the highest tally a UK entry has ever produced. He won the jury vote outright. He came within a televote of beating Ukraine in a year when Ukraine was the entire continent’s emotional preference. Liverpool hosted the following year on Ukraine’s behalf. It wasn’t a freak result – it was a deliberately engineered one.

The BBC had brought in TaP Music, the management company behind Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey, and Ellie Goulding. Ben Mawson, who used to manage Dua Lipa, publicly stated that his starting question had been, “Why do we do so badly every year?”

His team set three criteria: the right song, a voice that could carry it live, and a label willing to pay for proper staging. They weren’t looking for a famous name. They were looking for the right name. They found a TikTok singer from Essex with a song co-written by Amy Wadge, who wrote “Thinking Out Loud” with Ed Sheeran. Mawson described the song as a track that “references a legacy of British pop with a bit of Elton, a bit of Queen, a bit of Bowie.”

That is what a British Eurovision entry sounds like when the people choosing it actually believe in British music.

What did the BBC do with this proof of concept? They lost TaP Music after one more attempt. They went back to old habits.

Mae Muller finished 25th in 2023 with a song she’d written in a normal studio session without knowing it was going to Eurovision. Olly Alexander finished 18th in 2024 with zero public votes, and told Graham Norton afterwards that the next UK entrant should “get themselves a really good therapist.” Remember Monday flopped in 2025, and now we have “Eins, Zwei, Drei.”

You don’t need to be a music industry executive to see what’s happened here. The BBC discovered the formula, panicked, and went back to outsourcing the problem to people in Copenhagen. The country that produced Sam Ryder is now sending a song with a German chorus and Danish songwriters because somewhere inside Broadcasting House, somebody decided that’s safer than trusting British music to be British.

It isn’t safer. It loses. Look Mum No Computer opened at 20/1 with the bookies in February. At the time of writing, he’s at 80/1, sitting in 17th place in the outright betting. None of this is Sam Battle’s fault. He’s an interesting experimental musician who was placed in an awkward position by a selection process that long ago lost its nerve.

And then, at some point, the BBC will have to answer a serious question: if the license fee is paying for music programming, and that music programming is among the best in the world, and the BBC’s own discovery platform has launched some of the biggest British pop careers of the last fifteen years, why is the public broadcaster spending license-fee money to lose Eurovision with a song written by Danes?

I don’t know if the BBC can answer that question. I do know that Sam Ryder is touring his second album, that Wet Leg are headlining festivals, and that British music has rarely been in healthier shape. None of this is making it to Vienna.