Dispelling the myth: No one votes for the UK?

So after all the usual bleating and hollering from the more reactionary corners of the country about how nobody likes us / it’s all political / Brexit did us in / we could send Adele and still come last / why do we even bother if no one votes for us any more, we thought we’d do some proper investigative journalism and look at, well, the facts. And to be honest, the results surprised even us.

We pored over the tables of results that have come in since the turn of the century and discovered one very interesting statistic: every single country who was eligible to vote on Saturday night has given us points over the last nine contests.

Let’s put that into perspective. Over a period of time when we’ve had our worst run of results, every single country who could vote this weekend (as well as three that weren’t even in the contest this time around), thought enough of our songs enough to have put them in their top ten at least once.

Many were serial offenders, most commonly Ireland, Malta, Denmark and even, weirdly, Albania. They may not always have been especially high points – but points is points – and finishing in the top ten of a twenty four, five or six horse race, in every one of 43 competing nations, from Azerbaijan to Iceland, doesn’t especially look like a concerted cross-continent hate campaign to any sensible eye.

And do you know what was even more surprising? That 30 of those countries have given us points over the last three years. Three years! You know, the time since Brexit became a thing. A whole 75% of eligible countries. (And that’s before we even get into the old explanation about how many Eurovision countries are actually EU anyway, and whether some old nan watching in Plovdiv or Košice or Ventspils would ever say “I really love that song, but because of the singer’s nation’s stance on Brexit I’m going to vote for a song I like less instead!”)

Of course, you can bend stats around to mean anything you want them to. But these numbers – and you can go check them yourselves – suggest that there’s absolutely no credence to the hoary myth that no one votes for us. What it does suggest, though, is that there is indeed a vague will to vote for the UK – whatever old kak we send – and that on the odd occasion that we do send something remotely decent, we often get decent results.

It’s just that when we send average songs, as we have been doing for way too long now, we get average rewards in return.

Oh, and if you think we’ve made all this up, copied below is a list of every country who has given us points in the last nine years, along the last time they voted for us. (Countries with a star beside them weren’t in this year’s contest). Stick that in your pipe and smoke it breakfast TV curmudgeons, tabloid newspaper columnists and grumbly old gits on the bus! We’re doing moderately OK, it turns out. But we can clearly be doing a whole lot better – so let’s work on it, troops!

Azerbaijan 2011
Belarus 2011
Bulgaria 2011 *
Lithuania 2011
Moldova 2011
Portugal 2011
Turkey 2011 *
Ukraine 2011 *
Romania 2013
Sweden 2013
Switzerland 2013
Georgia 2014
Russia 2016
Austria 2017
Belgium 2017
Cyprus 2017
Czech Republic 2017
Estonia 2017
Greece 2017
Netherlands 2017
North Macedonia 2017
Poland 2017
Serbia 2017
Slovenia 2017
Spain 2017
Albania 2018
Australia 2018
Croatia 2018
Denmark 2018
France 2018
Germany 2018
Israel 2018
Italy 2018
Latvia 2018
Malta 2018
Montenegro 2018
San Marino 2018
Armenia 2019
Finland 2019
Hungary 2019
Iceland 2019
Ireland 2019
Norway 2019

***STOP PRESS***
Article amended after the Belarus jury incident. They may not have voted for us since 2011, but they’re still within the nine-contest limit!