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!

Image Credits: BBC.