Hello! I’m Steven Perkins, and this is Douze Points - your Eurovision obsessive podcast from the Bingewatch family, here with you every Monday and brimming with excitement as we get tantalisingly close to Liverpool 2023.

Let’s get started with your usual friendly reminder that you are very welcome to follow us on Twitter at Bingewatch underscore Pod, where you can not only get regular reminders of new episode releases, but you can also get in touch with us if there’s anything you would like to tell us.

This week we’re going to be taking a look at how we ended up with such a thing as the Big Five at Eurovision, but first: what is in the news?

The results are in from the poll to find the nation’s favourite UK Eurovision entry, and the winner is… Sam Ryder! Still cruising on an enormous wave of goodwill after transforming the UK’s fortunes in Turin last year, Sam’s song ‘Space Man’ was voted the greatest UK Eurovision song by Radio 2 listeners. Bucks Fizz’s Making Your Mind Up was second, and Ooh Ahh Just A Little Bit by Gina G was third. You can listen to the full countdown of the Top 40 on BBC Sounds now, or on BBC Radio 2 on Saturday 13 May from 1-3pm. Spoiler alert: Imaani’s ‘Where Are You?’ was number 15 and IT SHOULD’VE BEEN HIGHER.

The stage for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest has been officially unveiled by King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla in Liverpool. The royals visited the arena last week to light up the arena for the first time and lend their support to UK representative Mae Muller, telling her that they will be watching and egging her on. They didn’t reveal who they’ll actually be voting for, but my money is on them being Loreen stans.

After an acrimonious split more than 35 years ago, the original line-up of Frankie Goes To Hollywood will be reforming for The National Lottery’s Big Eurovision Welcome in Liverpool on Sunday 7 May. The event, which is a huge concert to kick off Eurovision season, hosted by Joel Dommett and AJ Odudu, boasts a star-studded line-up which also includes Eurovision champions Conchita Wurst and Jamala, as well as The Lightning Seeds, Atomic Kitten and The Real Thing.

And finally, if you were trying to dodge the astronomical cost of accommodation in Liverpool during Eurovision week by staying somewhere nearby, you should definitely make contingency plans because an RMT strike has been announced for Saturday 13 May, the day of the final. If you haven’t done so already, now would be an excellent time to make friends with a Liverpudlian who either has a spare room or a car that they’re willing to run you back to your digs in.

[ news ]

Now, in previous podcasts I’ve talked a fair bit about the Big Five - that’s France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, who all qualify for the Grand Final automatically each year because they are the five biggest financial contributors to the European Broadcasting Union. That’s a given in the contest at this point, but the route here was quite a bumpy one. So how did we end up with this advantage? Well, believe it or not, to answer that properly, we have to travel all the way back to the early 1990s, and the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Relax, I’m not going to go into a long geopolitical history lesson here, but one of the many effects of the dissolution of the USSR and break-up of Yugoslavia was that a great many more independent nations existed - and a lot of them wanted to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. This posed a problem for the contest’s organisers, because it was already quite a long event and there were only so many new countries that could be admitted without making the whole thing nine hours long.

Various solutions were proposed before we got to the current state of affairs - the very first pre-selection round was held in 1993. Known as - and I offer my sincerest apologies to any Slovenians listening - Kvalifikacija za Millstreet, or Preselection for Millstreet (the name of the Irish town where the 1993 contest was being held), this contest was purely for countries that had not entered Eurovision before, and was held in Ljubljana [yoo-BYAR-nuh], Slovenia. Seven countries competed for three available slots, with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia making their debuts at Eurovision that year.

In 1994, there was no qualifying round as the EBU introduced a new system - in order to allow space for seven new countries to compete - Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia - the decision was taken that the seven lowest-placing countries from 1993 would be relegated out of the competition, meaning that Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Turkey were initially taken out of the running - although Cyprus were later granted a reprieve when Italy decided to pull out of that year’s contest. Luxembourg seemed to take this quite personally, because despite being one of the most successful countries at Eurovision with five wins overall, they never returned to the contest after that.

The idea, then, was that countries would rotate their participation in the contest, and the countries that sat out in 1994 would return in 1995, while the lowest-scoring countries from 1994 took a year off. However, this is where things get messy, and where the seeds for the eventual Big Five system were sown: Germany finished 23rd in 1995, and it’s believed that they kicked up a bit of a stink over the prospect of sitting out due to the large amount of money they put into the contest. So in 1996, a new qualification system was trialled: an audio-only preselection which every entrant - apart from Norway, the host country that year - had to go through to qualify for the grand final. Each country submitted their entry on tape, and the jurors - a different group of people to the ones who would be selected for the final - were required to listen to each song three times before voting.

Despite being an effort to smooth over the relegation system of previous years, this system wasn’t well-received: for starters, it didn’t fix things for Germany, who were two points short of qualifying - making this the only year that Germany were absent for a Eurovision final - and several countries were angry having gone to the lengths of organising national finals and selecting an entry only to not actually get a chance to compete on stage at Eurovision. So, a new solution was needed.

In 1997, we returned to the relegation system, but with a twist: to avoid countries being penalised for a single bad year, an average was taken of their scores over the previous four years - with the previous year’s winner and host country qualifying automatically. While still an imperfect system, this one seemed the fairest out of the available options and stuck around - but a new rule was added in 2000, where the Big Four countries - that’s France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, as Italy was on an extended break from Eurovision at the time - would qualify automatically, due to their financial contribution to the contest. It’s generally believed that this rule was added at this time because under the existing system, France would have been relegated in 2000, and if Germany and Spain had performed poorly, they would have been absent in 2001 - and if they decided to pull out of Eurovision entirely like Italy had ever since 1997, the financial security of the contest as a whole would be at risk. And this automatic qualifying system has remained in place for those countries, even when the competition extended itself to organising a full semi-final round from 2004 onwards.

Needless to say, not everybody was thrilled about this turn of events, with many countries feeling rightly aggrieved about the unfair advantage being granted to these four countries - particularly when the songs they were entering were, in many cases, arguably not of sufficiently high quality that they would have survived the semi-finals if they’d had to compete in them. Indeed, it’s thought that anger over the elite status of the Big Four was a major contributor to Turkey withdrawing from Eurovision after 2012.

But how fair is that assessment? Well, let’s have a look at some of the stats: every single nation in the Big Five has won Eurovision at least twice, although only two of them have won since the Big Four or Five system was introduced - Germany in 2010, and Italy in 2021. Since returning to the competition in 2011, Italy have done a much better job of representing themselves than the other four countries, only missing the top 10 twice. Or to put it another way, Italy have managed four top three finishes since they rejoined in 2011, while France, Germany, Spain and the UK have only managed five top three finishes collectively since 2000.

There are some particular lowpoints for the Big Five system that we should definitely hang our heads in shame over: in the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest, four of the Big Five finished lower than 20th. Italy, at least, emerged with their dignity intact, with Il Volo’s ‘Grande Amore’ winning the televote and finishing third overall. There’s also the fact that since 2014, the country in last place in the final every year has been one of the Big Five, except for 2018 when Portugal kindly took one for the team.

So, we’ve established that Italy is the best performer in the Big Five by a considerable margin, but let’s get down into the dirt: who’s the worst? Who’s dragging everyone else down? If your instinct was to answer “the UK” then… you’re right, pretty much. Taking the average ranking of the Big Five countries since the system was introduced, the UK has the lowest average score, then Spain, then Germany, France, and Italy a long way above. But if you want the good news - and I admit that it’s of the clutching at straws variety - if we just look at the last 10 years, we’re not the worst. Hooray! Over the last 10 years, it’s actually Germany who have the worst average by a whisker, with three last place finishes to our two, and no top three finishes to our one.

Of course, the fact that I’m splitting hairs over this probably just reinforces the overall position that four out of the Big Five are chronic underperformers at Eurovision. It would be reasonable to conclude that automatically qualifying has made us lazy - if you know you haven’t got to battle it out in the semis and you’re not overly fussed about winning, then you’re not going to send your brightest and best?

It’s just a shame that in a lot of cases, this has resulted in France, Germany, Spain and the UK sending song after song that was bland and forgettable, especially when you think how many countries would love to enjoy the sort of privilege that we have at Eurovision. Really, we’ve been going about this all wrong - instead of looking at Eurovision as a chore to complete once a year, imagine if we looked upon our charmed status as a gift and an opportunity, and submitted songs that weren’t especially commercial but were innovative and daring and challenging? What if we became the 6Music of Eurovision?

Okay, I’m getting a bit carried away. The good news though, is that all is not lost, because in the last few years there seems to have been a change in heart from almost all corners. Last year Spain and the UK were battling it out for the top spot of the leaderboard thanks to Chanel and Barbara Pravi, France finished second with Barbara Pravi in 2021. And even though it wasn’t to my personal taste, even Germany managed 4th place in 2018 thanks to Michael Schulte, and I’m sure they’ve got another Satellite in them somewhere. This year looks like it could be another strong year for several of the Big Five - including the UK - if we play our cards right. To borrow a metaphor that Scott Mills used at this year’s contest launch, you can turn a ship around - it just takes motivation and time. And given our untouchable status in the competition for now, we’ve got plenty of the latter - and it seems like we’re starting to develop the former too. Perhaps the stench of unfairness and laziness that has been lingering around the concept of Big Five has finally shamed us enough that we’ve realised we’re ultimately just embarrassing ourselves and that it’s not actually uncool to want to do well at Eurovision - but it is deeply uncool to pretend like you’re above it.

That’s it for this week. Next week is Eurovision week - can you believe it’s here already? We’ll have all sorts of Eurovision programming for you across the week, including interviews, previews and reactions - so make sure you hit Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss an episode. Thanks for listening - and until next time, good night Europe, and good morning Australia.