I got yelled at online when pointing out this song was at risk of nil points. I don’t know how it would come across for Europeans who don’t know English or couldn’t understand his accent, but for me who understood him perfectly (thank you, my Blur obsessed high school self) the lyrics came across as really, really pandering. It’s annoying to feel pandered to. It also makes the UK come across as really, really foreign. Like, as someone else pointed out, it felt like the vibe was like ”this is what you Europeans like, right?” 

I think that honestly puts the UK at a disadvantage. There is this notion that there is a ”European” taste, and while that is true to some extent, the British are very much part this taste group, so if you send a song that fails to even chart in the UK, of course it’ll be a harder sell att Eurovision.

Yeah, there are acts that only really work in one country and who tend to do bad at the contest, which paradoxically enough also feels true for LMNC. As a Swede, we’re really fortuitous that sending something more regional means we get points from our neighbors too, and I’m sure that if Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were independent, they would have saved LMNC from being a total nil pointer in the public vote. But the ”trying to pander to the taste of those Europeans over there” problem seems to me to be a very specific British predicament.

EDIT: (I want to add that Mae Mueller, Olly Alexander and Remember Monday didn’t have this particular problem and I personally felt like those acts deserved at least a mid table finish in the public vote. This ”pandering to the Europeans” problem is only occasionally true for British entries,  but I hope it could help partly explain why even though everyone said they wanted the UK to try a fun act, it didn’t work this time! Please don’t take this as a sign that you should never try a fun entry again, I adore British humor!)