The UK, Briefly, Airborne Again

MAY 15 2022 · 12:45

Sam Ryder · "Space Man" · United Kingdom · 2022 Placement: 2nd · Language: English · Composers: Sam Ryder, Amy Wadge, Max Wolfgang · Venue: PalaOlimpico · Host: Turin, Italy · Type: upset · Broadcast: HD On the night of 14 May 2022 in Turin, a thirty-two-year-old British singer with a blonde rockstar mane and a TikTok following in the millions walked onto Eurovision's stage and, for most of the jury-vote announcement, looked like he might actually win the thing. Sam Ryder had broken through on TikTok during the 2020 lockdown posting vocal covers that reminded older listeners of early Queen and younger ones of a falsetto they had not yet named. 'Space Man' was a co-write with Amy Wadge — a songwriter with Ed Sheeran credits — and it sat, deliberately, at the intersection of festival-pop and old-school vocal rock. On broadcast night Ryder sang in a white jumpsuit against a lunar-horizon stage, hit the high notes that had seeded his TikTok, and delivered the single cleanest British Eurovision performance of the century so far. When the jury vote finished, the UK was in first place with 283 points — an almost inconceivable number for a country that had finished last in the previous contest. Then the Ukrainian televote landslide for Kalush Orchestra's 'Stefania' arrived, the order flipped, and Ryder finished second. It remains the UK's best Eurovision finish since 1998, and it ended twenty years of British self-mythology about being mathematically incapable of doing well at the contest. Context The UK's Eurovision drought had become a national running joke. James Newman's 'Embers' had famously scored 'nul points' in Rotterdam 2021, and the BBC had spent the intervening year rebuilding its Eurovision selection process via TaP Music, a commercial management company. 'Space Man' was the first product of that partnership: a song deliberately written to sound like a festival-main-stage closer rather than a Eurovision-committee approximation. The Turin contest was structured around Ukraine's inevitable televote victory — Russia had been banned in February, and European public sympathy was pouring into Kalush Orchestra's slot — but the night's scoreboard drama came from the UK's jury lead and the question of whether the televote would honour it. It did not, but the answer reshaped BBC programming around Eurovision for the next three years. Legacy Sam Ryder's second place reset British expectations of the contest almost overnight. The UK was chosen to host Eurovision 2023 on Ukraine's behalf, in Liverpool — a logistical arrangement that drew on Ryder's performance as partial proof the British delegation was serious again. Ryder himself released a debut album that topped UK charts, and his TaP-era pipeline model has since been emulated by other struggling delegations. 'Space Man' charted in several European markets and is now one of the most-streamed British Eurovision tracks since Katrina and the Waves. Mythology Many UK viewers remember 'Space Man' as having won the jury 'by a large margin' and 'losing on televote' — the margin over Spain was smaller than remembered, and the song actually placed fifth on televote, not near the bottom. People also sometimes misremember Ryder as a BBC-manufactured talent; he was TikTok-native, and most of his audience pre-existed the contest.