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Britain bombs at Eurovision -again

It may have sounded good to the UK, but the rest of Europe hated Pete Waterman's song. How could they get it so wrong?

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The United Kingdom pulled just 10 votes in the Eurovision Final, coming a humiliating last place in the contest. It was the third time in eight years it has ranked last.

The song “That Sounds Good to Me” composed by Pete Waterman, Mike Stock and Steve Gibson had been selected by the BBC, rather than being voted as the best from a national Final. It followed the entry by Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber the year before. Neither Waterman nor Lloyd-Webber could really be considered pop contemporaries in 2010, but that didn’t stop the UK.

On the night 19 year old Josh Dubovie did the best he could with the cheesy material. One of the backing vocalists was off-pitch for much of the song. Despite landing last, Dubovie was upbeat.

“It’s been a privilege to represent the UK, I will keep performing and I’m still smiling,” he said.

Waterman and his co-composers said they were “proud” of Dubovie, adding that he performed the song “brilliantly” and “did a fantastic job for the UK”.

Similarly, Graham Norton, who commentated on the event for BBC viewers, said: “The UK should be very proud of Josh and he should be very proud of himself.”

But the UK has had plenty of navel-gazing in post-Eurovision analysis before. Commentator Terry Wogan retired his role mostly in response to the bloc-voting that saw the UK continually landing flat. You can bet he will be sourced for reaction quotes this week. The BBC has also previously threatened to pull its funding of the European Broadcasting Union, which underpins Eurovision.

Meanwhile pitch perfect researchers have analysed the live performances and compared them with versions recorded for the Eurovision album.

They reckon Serbia’s Milan Stankovic, who despite coming well above Britain in 13th place hit 117 wrong notes in the Contest.

Lena, who sang bum notes at a rate of 21.9 per minute when she performed hit Satellite for Germany, earning her third place in the table.

Apparently Belgium’s Tom Dice hit eight wrong notes – the fewest of anyone.

Source: BBC , Telegraph, Coventry Telegraph

18 Responses

  3. Stock, Gibson, Waterman stuffed it up. Bring back Aitken.

    It’s traditional for the UK to put up terrible songs which the Union delights in allocating Nil Pointe to. This year was no different.

    Some years they put up Making My Mind Up and the Union delights in voting for it, just to torture everyone. It’s just a cruel game.

    UK wasn’t in the comp this time around, sadly neither was Germany, and yet still it won.

  4. Correction needed here – it did not sound good to anyone in the UK and was panned from the moment it debuted in the shockingly awful, worst programme ever on TV, selection show this year.

    Pete Waterman has zero credibility in the UK and nobody had faith in him improving on Andrew Lloyd Webbers efforts last year (which came 5th) and he proved all the doubters right when this song premiered as if it was still 1988. Wasn’t a good start when he couldn’t even remember the name of the song on the selection show!

    The BBC screwed up big style this year after a change in attitude last year to give Eurovision more respect. This year they went back to the old attitude of it’s rubbish and trying to find a “Eurovision” song, rather than a “good” song. It’s Josh I feel sorry for – look him up doing the Buble type stuff which is clearly in his comfort zone and he’s pretty good – but he never had a chance in hell with this.

    So it’ll be back to the drawing board again and the BBC probably blaming everyone but themselves again as they did after Andy Abraham’s equally awful effort a couple of years back. It really is simple though – it’s a song contest, let people submit songs and then let the viewers choose the best. Trying to match a winner of a public vote to a pre-selected song is rarely going to work.

  5. What is all this focus on people singing off-key … if you did not have the CD you would mostly not know.
    The UK entry was a poor imitation of Steps and a very lame choice, the boy is not a singer compared to many that performed on the night.
    The winning song will probably be an international hit and then disappear forever along with the singer … as expected, the weird one won again.
    You will find that the Norway song and the Ireland song will end up being the new “You Raise Me Up” and be recorded by everyone from Westlife to Susan Boyle and every Tennor in between and they will have a much, much longer life.

    The three Norwegian Hosts were the best i have seen in a long time!

  6. The London Telegraph had an interesting reflection upon the UK’s last place:

    telegraph.co.uk/comment/7787505/Is-our-part-in-Eurovision-pointless.html

  7. I think everybody has thought of a ‘dream’ Eurovision line-up of legitimately good European acts. The problem is, I guess, that Eurovision would have to pay them, rather than it being an opportunity for exposure and stardom. Plus, I think there’s a talent level requirement. That being said, one of the highlights one year was having TaTu, fresh from their global chart success, performing for Russia. Unfortunately, they bombed out after not performing ‘the hit’, which was a shame. I even heard that one year the UK act voting contest came down to some random guy and Justin Hawkins from the Darkness (post-Darkness). Naturally they picked the other guy. Idiots. With decisions like that they deserve to lose.

  8. Not a fan of much at Eurovision but the UK entry was nauseatingly bad manufactured-to-a-formula pap. It had every light pop music cliché in it – ’80s electric piano intro complete with flourishes, sustained uplifting vox leading in to light drum roll, standard 2 beats per sec drum machine bass,… ugh, I’m going to have to stop – I’m starting to feel sick again.

    Stock & Waterman – stock standard and watered down to blandness.

  9. Eurovision is a joke in the UK pop market. No songwriter or singer with an ounce of credibility is going to go within a thousand miles of it.

    Hence Stock and Waterman. Note that Matt Aitken – one half of the actual songwriting partnership from the SAW days – remains conspicuously absent.

    As for the “wrong notes” thing, err, it’s a live TV show in a bloody great big arena with token sound engineering for the performers and most of the audio attention directed at television. Lena’s pitch was fine for a live TV performance under duress. Her “dancing”, however, was hilariously bad 😉

  10. What does the UK expect when they enter a song that sounds like a cross between Jason Donovan and Rick Astley? It’s 2010 people. Not the mid 80s. The song from Germany was different and sounded like something from this century.

  11. That kid was terrible! He hit a lot of bad notes that were excruciating, so you can’t blame the off-pitch back-up totally. That song was so 80s and it sounded so much like any SAW song they wrote for Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley, et al at the time of their success.

    Interesting to note that Josh failed to make it through to both last season’s X Factor and this season’s Britain’s Got Talent. I wonder why ….

  13. The problem with Britain pulling out would be a case of financial suicide for Eurovision.

    Britain, alongside France, Germany and Spain, are the top four financial contributors to the EBU. If Britain were to pull out, other countries would likely be charged more to be EBU members (to make up the shortfall from the loss of Britain), making countries like Greece and Iceland, more likely to pull out of the EBU because of their current economic situation.

  14. Interesting about the number of wrong notes. I definetely noticed Germany hitting different notes to on the video. This could indicate that the performance on the night is less important if the song had been so popular before the contest.

  15. It’s the same every year for the UK. I think it’s stupid how the big 4 are guaranteed a final spot no matter how crap they are. And the UK are producing some great global talent at the moment, yet at Eurovision they get the worst perfromers with the worst songs. Where’s the Lily Allen, Leona Lewis, Jay Sean, Taio Cruz type people that can represent the UK?

  16. The back-up singer being off-pitch was dreadful and undermined the whole performance, which was pretty good considering the poor material Josh had to work with. But then, he blew the two big money notes at the end… ouch!

    The UK hopefully won’t complain any bloc voting this time. They know the song was awful and they got (what, 3rd place?) last year with a good, power ballad. Stock-Waterman do not equal Lloyd-Webber.

  17. i love that! people counting the number of missed notes! Other countries might have done it but the UK was particularly bad from a viewers’ perspective. It was just awful, mostly from the backing singers or at least one in particular. Last year proved that if a decent song and performance is presented then the viewers will give it points. This year the UK just didn’t do it.

  18. bloc voting for much less of an issue this year, Germany winning with Belgium also doing well proved that…even that sh***y french song ranked well…that was just a stinker of a song from the UK…the best thing the UK could do is do what Germany did this year, and call for songs from the public, I have doubt they would find a gem like ‘Satelite’. Saying that Josh did a good job with dreadful material for the UK

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