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What year/time period did the UK start getting low marks?
PepperPlant
Posts: 197 Forum Member
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Was there a particular political event that led to the consistently low marks for the UK? Was it the Iraq war?
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PepperPlant
Posts: 197
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The rot set in ca 2000 with Nicki French and her dated naff disco track (16th, our worst ever placing at the time). Her excuse was that Britain hadn't joined the euro (but neither had the countries that came 1st to 4th).
It's been 15 years of flops at the contest ever since (except for 2002 Jessica Garlick, 2009 Jade Ewen and 2011 Blue). In 15 years only 2 of our entries were top ten hits here in the UK. Of the last 6, five have totally flopped in our charts...something we can't blame any war for.
It's 1999 when things suddenly begin take a turn for the worse when we finish 12th place, a result that wouldn't be seen as that bad today but for the time was underwhelming, given that we'd come 2nd in 1998 and won the contest in 1997. This was also the year that the rules was changed from having to sing in your own country's language to being able to sing in any you wanted, eventually leading to almost every country singing in English and taking away the UK/Ireland advantage.
As mentioned it's 2000 when things really slip with Nicki French's poor performance. She got 28 points which is much more than recent years, but coming 16th place out of 24 was seen as a huge disaster - the UK's worst ever result at the time. 2001 wasn't much better, 2002 bucked the trend when Jessica Garlick absolutely stormed it to come 3rd place - 'Come Back' was a brilliant entry, tuneful and sung to huge cheers from the audience, and we picked up a massive amount of points that year.
Then Jemini happened
The Scandinavian countries consistently do well at Eurovision and they're as Eurosceptic as the UK is in many ways. The public in Denmark and Sweden are overwhelmingly against joining the Euro and Norway isn't even in the EU and public have no wish to join. The UK just sends rubbish songs, there is no conspiracy against it.
They are much better at "playing well with others" though (well, maybe not Norway). Whereas the front that the UK casts towards Europe and the World is one of superiority and standoffishness (which, again, isn't true of many of us!)
Also, on the topic, I think that it was a triple threat of the demise of the national language rule, the Eastern expansion and the explosion of Britpop
That's not really true though, is it? The first time that happened was with ALW in 2009 and we came 5th, our best result in a long time. Granted, we came last with Pete Waterman's offerings the year afterwards but we have had near identical (and worse) results when the public chose our entry. Andy Abrahams, came last. And Jemini, recieved nul points. We had worse results before 2009, which is probably why the BBC took the new approach after Andy Abraham's terrible result, and the same with Josh Dubovie which has resulted in annual internal selections by the BBC.
I think this year's UK entry wasn't all that bad in theory but the performance was just horrible. It looked like Albania in 1993 or something.
Having said that, Germany's performance was great but the song just didn't seem to be the right one. So it's always about finding the right mix of artist, song and performance.
Cry Baby was released on the Monday after the Eurovision Song Contest and all the negative press somehow managed to help sell the song and it went top 15.
Jade Ewen finishes 5th and just about scraped a top 30 hit.
She did release 'It's My Time' as a single though? I remember buying it.