[Earlie37]

There's no doubt that certain voting has always been part of Eurovision - even back in the days when there was no public vote and it was just a jury. However, the impact of it has always been quite insignificant and towards the end of his reign, I felt that Wogan was becoming way too obsessed over it. If it was that significant, you would see the same countries continually winning and at the top of the board which isn't the case. It also makes me laugh when people moan about the political/historic voting but then also expect Ireland, Australia and Malta to give us lots of points. I think they only exception to when perhaps political voting was really apparent in recent years was when Ukraine won in 2022 but that was certainly an unusual set of circumstances.

At the end of the day, when the UK has performed badly, it's not politics or cultural links that have caused us to underperform. It was either because we made it obvious that we weren't trying to take it seriously, putting in a very weak song or performance or in some cases, sadly just putting in a song similar to a stronger entry that year (Jamilia, for example). But using the 'no one likes us', 'all the others vote for each other' excuses were easier to use than admit that we simply weren't showing any love for the contest. Whilst I respected Wogan for what he did as a broadcaster, I do think he also seriously didn't help our attitude to the contest in his latter years and perhaps should have handed over the reigns a lot earlier that he did - he became way too cynical with it all from around 2003 onwards. I think we also started to struggle with understanding that as more countries enter, of course it is inevitably going to be more difficult to get points, let alone win - that's the basics of maths!

I think that's why in Eurovision circles, the rest of Europe does see us a turning a corner in recent years. Yes... Mae did under-perform last year but that wasn't politics again... we had a good song but the staging and her performance of it on the night just fell flat. But unlike before, they respected the fact that we tried to make a good effort and also proved that by hosting the concert in such a great way, the UK is trying to give a lot of love back to the contest again.

One thing that will always be the barrier for us is that we don't need the contest as much as many other countries - our music industry is still one of the world leaders and doesn't always need the promotion that Eurovision can bring. We've always had this problem - it wasn't until we entered the like of Sandy Shaw, Cliff and Lulu that Europe saw we could enter music artists that represented the music industry of the UK at the time and songs that you would expect to see in the charts of the time. Whilst I don't think it's a winner, that's the pleasing thing about seeing Ollie this year. Yes... he's no longer necessarily a massive artist in the UK but he's still well known and puts out songs which you'd expect to feature in our charts.