Eurovision: UK's dire points haul of 16 revised down to 11

The UK’s last-place finish in the Eurovision song contest was a national humiliation – but it turns out the result was even worse than previously thought.

Michael Rice’s song Bigger Than Us performed disastrously in the contest in Tel Aviv on Saturday, with viewers told it had won just 16 points from national juries and public votes across Europe. However, organisers discovered an error and have now revised this downwards to 11 points – compared with 498 points for the winning Dutch entry.

The issue arose after the Belarusian expert jury was dismissed for revealing how it had voted before the final had aired. The European Broadcasting Union, which organises the contest, tried to create a substitute result to replace the Belarusian jury votes but made a miscalculation, inadvertently boosting the UK’s score.

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“The EBU can confirm, following standard review practices, we have discovered that due to a human error an incorrect aggregated result was used,” they said in a statement. “This had no impact on the calculation of points derived from televoting across the 41 participating countries and the overall winner and top 4 songs of the contest remain unchanged.”

The EBU said it regretted that the error was not identified earlier and would “review the processes and controls in place to prevent this from happening again”. Several countries moved up or down the leaderboard as a result of the change.

The result is potentially embarrassing for the German televoting company digame, which organises the phone-in votes, and the accountancy firm Ernst & Young, which serves as Eurovision’s voting monitor to ensure the contest is run fairly.

The UK’s dismal performance has again focused attention on how the country selects its entry for the competition.

There is a long history of watching Eurovision in Australia, and in 2015, as a one-off, the country was invited to participate in the 60th contest. The popularity of Guy Sebastian’s participation with ‘Tonight Again’ led to the invitation being made permanent, and Australia have competed every year since. There are plans in place for this to continue until at least 2023. The country’s highest placing to date is 2nd in 2016. 

Were Australia to win the contest, it has already been agreed that they would not host it in the southern hemisphere, due to the logistics. Instead, Australia would co-host the country in Europe with a partner. This is generally believed to be Germany, with the UK as a back-up plan. Ironically, Australia winning might be the UK’s best chance of ever hosting the event again.

Britain is one of five countries that automatically qualify for the Eurovision final without having to go through a semi-final process, owing to the financial contribution it makes to the European Broadcasting Union.

Some countries, such as Sweden, go through a highly competitive process to select their entry, attracting many leading performers in the process.

By comparison the UK selects its entry through a single live programme on the BBC, with six entrants performing three songs selected by a jury. The performer who will represent Britain is decided by a public poll of those watching the programme, which attracted 1 million viewers.

The UK’s entry was written by the Swedish singer John Lundvik, who entered a different song, Too Late for Love, in his country’s selection contest and won the nomination, finishing in fifth place on Saturday.