It was almost 3:30am when I finally accepted that I would not have a drink with Olly Alexander after Eurovision.
Saturday night’s song contest in Malmö had ended a couple of hours earlier and I was ensconced in a hotel bar in Sweden’s third-largest city. At a party hosted by Loreen, the two-time Swedish winner who triumphed in Liverpool last year, I was expecting to see Britain’s entrant and toast his efforts at the end of a turbulent week.
With just a few minutes before the bar closed, Alexander had still not arrived; I finished my gin and tonic and padded off to bed.
You can understand why Alexander, 33, may not have been in a party mood. The Years & Years singer placed 18th of 25 artists at Eurovision — and suffered the ignominy of being the only act not to get a single point from the viewing public. Reports suggest that he was instead elsewhere in the city with his mum, Vicki, drowning his sorrows into the small hours.
Alexander got a disappointing 46 points from the juries of the 37 competing countries, which makes up half of the overall score; by contrast, Switzerland’s Nemo Mettler topped the judges’ board with a score of 365. Alexander needed his performance to resonate with the estimated 160 million at home watching on TV to have a chance of a strong finish.
It did not. The loudest groans of the night in the 9,000 capacity arena came when it was announced that he had, instead, got the dreaded nul points from the people of Europe. Talk about a hard Brexit.