Imagine you're a public service broadcaster. You do Eurovision for a mixture of national pride, the love of music and the two week jolly in May. You've done it for decades. You just do.

But the funding is tighter every year. People are going & watching Netflix and that.

But every year you pitch for the Eurovision money and you say 'Look, we do really well and always get to the Saturday night and we get to show off our culture!'

And you get it. And the numbers are roughly stable.

But it's harder to avoid the outside world these days. Public Service Broadcasters across the continent all face varying degrees of political interference, whether it's outright control or arm's length financial squeezing.

So every year you're pitching harder on the 'yay flag waving' & 'omg numbers' aspects instead of the

And eventually your luck runs out and you get an NQ. No Saturday night for your artist. No bumper viewing figures.

The next time you pitch they bring it up.

"Y'know, it would play better with our core demographics if we just used the money to promote our own culture here, where it's appreciated," they tell you.

"And also the show contains messages that the papers say aren't suitable for kids & don't really want to argue with them"

And so you leave without the Eurovision money. And you don't put the bid in the next year.

And it wasn't because one specific person was homophobic or whatever.

Within 2 years I'll be retweeting this thread when the Tories get the BBC to withdraw by roughly the same process.