Because we have a crap song. And a rubbish stageshow. I am so sick of people claiming that we don’t win any more because of some imaginary block voting going on in Eastern Europe. Stop with the paranoia.

Yes, they do all vote for each other - that I won’t deny - but it has nothing to do with a feeling of ‘them and us’, or of new Europe punishing Britain for sticking its destructive nose into places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Eastern Europe isn’t some homogenous single entity as anyone who has done much travelling there will attest. It’s barely a decade since half the region was at war with the other half. Have they really had time to put all that behind themselves and vote each others’ songs to the top in a camp singing show? I think not.

The sad fact of the matter is that Britain doesn’t need to try to get into Eurovision, and so we don’t. Instead we buy ourselves a ticket to every final along with Germany, France and Spain. And by strange coincidence we all seem to do very poorly indeed these days.

Spain’s entry this time around is some bizarre comedy act that looks like Rolf Harris and sounds like a ringtone from 1998. France has made a language concession and switched to English, but otherwise has an entry whose whose main attraction seems to be a talent in throwing and catching a microphone. The UK has entered what sounds like an album filler and goes nowhere. It’s instantly forgettable. Nobody will remember what it sounded like by the end of the night and, as a result, we’ll poll very poorly indeed. As we deserve. Of the big four, only Germany seems to have entered anything half worth listening to.

You only need to look at some of the favourites, like Ukraine, Sweden and Malta to see what we should be doing with Eurovision. They have seen how times have changed. The voting British public, which chooses the most bland entries for us year after year and then wonders why they get nowhere, clearly has not.

I’m sorry, but if we’re serious about ever winning Eurovision again we should let the countries that know how this works - from the Balkans, the Baltic and the like - choose an entry on our behalf. Then we might stand a halfway decent chance of winning.

Meanwhile, I’ll spend tomorrow night waving the flag for the Shady Lady of Ukraine.

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