“If TAP gets it right it will be smiles all round. If TAP gets it wrong and its levels of professionalism and ambition are not rewarded with a strong result, it really will be back to square one.” That’s what I wrote 18 months ago on the eve of finding out who would be the UK’s first Eurovision representative under the new revolution spearheaded by music moguls and co-founders of TAP Music Ben Mawson and Ed Millett. A year-and-a-half later and the revolution is a thing of history.  

Mawson and Millett entered into a working relationship with the BBC in autumn 2021 with the ambition of giving an artist the platform to create a career in the music industry. The pair showed a level of ambition to succeed in Eurovision that those from the inner ranks of the BBC hadn’t really outwardly shown in years. The pair’s attitude was refreshing and confidence inducing. What ensued is a well-told story: Sam Ryder and his song Space Man were selected, he “sang his head off” in Turin, won the hearts of a collective continent and bagged a result unheard of in the lives of the core 15-24 Eurovision demographic. TAP succeeded. 

The length of the contract between the BBC and TAP was not publicly stated by the two organisations when it was initially unveiled, so there was widespread jubilation when the continuation of the collaboration for another edition of the contest was announced a matter of months after Eurovision 2022 concluded. 

The tale of 2023 was the exact opposite of the Sam Ryder story. TAP’s chosen singer, Mae Muller, delivered a genuinely disappointing performance that was rewarded by a second-to-last place in the Grand Final, poetically mirroring Ryder’s result on the Eurovision scoreboard 12 months earlier. Dress it up all you want. Make excuses a, b and c. Whichever way you look at it, TAP failed. 

Rumours that TAP heard a demo of I Wrote A Song and settled on it immediately before hearing the finished article are unfounded, but often with Eurovision speculation there’s no smoke without fire. TAP got it wrong. 

What next for the BBC? 

Square one is where the BBC was at after James Newman’s flop of all flops in 2021, so it cannot be said that the broadcaster is sat in the same position as two years ago. The learnings from the collaboration with TAP must be enormous, especially from year one. 

Expected to be stepping back into their roles as Head of Delegation and Assistant Head of Delegation at the BBC after a year out as Executive Producer and Head of Show of the whole contest, Andrew Cartmell and Lee Smithurst are television producers, not music industry professionals. Smithurst conceded this himself in an interview with The Euro Trip after the tie up with TAP was announced in late 2021: “As the BBC you need a label to be able to fund this properly. We’re TV producers, we make television shows. We don’t necessarily have the right music industry context so you need someone like Ben [Mawson] to do that second half of the jigsaw to make the two things come together.” Yes, the pair will have had an enormous professional growth over the past couple of years, but I would be surprised if either of them would admit they could steady the UK’s Eurovision ship without input from a record label or other professional music industry body. 

Despite not bagging scoreboard success at the contest earlier this year, Mae Muller has seen her career catapult. The hype surrounding the impending release of her debut record is building week by week. There’s no doubt that her career will be better off having competed in the contest. Does that give Capitol Records, to whom Muller is signed, food for thought? Its execs will know that careers can be forged at Eurovision and it may be willing to enter into a direct partnership with the BBC to create another lasting success story. Other labels, too, may well be licking their lips at a delectable dose of the Eurovision bug. Without input from enthusiastic and knowledgeable music industry professionals, I cannot see any path to success for the BBC, and I think the people that need to know that, know that. 

What the BBC simply cannot do is get ahead of itself and fall into the trap of having a televised national selection until it can show a proven track record of finding world class performers who can sing world class songs with the backdrop of world class staging. Looking back over the last few years, the BBC doesn’t have that. What it has instead is a proven track record of finding the exact opposite with one anomalous combination in 2022. That isn’t for the lack of trying, though. Cartmell et al. are some of the hardest working, most enthusiastic and dedicated individuals working in and around the contest and deserve the long-lasting payoff of success. 

The sadness and disappointment at the termination of the BBC’s relationship with TAP is natural, but any criticism of the latter organisation stepping away is unjust. TAP doesn’t owe the BBC anything. Ultimately it was Mawson and Millet who risked it all to save the UK from the doldrums, something they initially succeeded at. If the relationship continued beyond 2023, it may have proved that Muller’s poor result was the anomaly in a successful trend, rather than Ryder’s great result being the anomaly in an unsuccessful trend. 

The BBC is not going to be hamstrung by the split with TAP. Instead it has an opportunity to kick on with a new project in collaboration with a record label, music management company or other music industry professionals to make Eurovision work for a growing national audience of enthusiasts and converts. 

Square one? No. Far from it. Let’s call it square opportunity.