I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in the United Kingdom watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Or perhaps the only one watching it voluntarily. A little later a Dutch presenter, when reporting her country’s scores, said: ‘Hello girls and gays.’ It wasn’t a slip of the tongue but an accurate summation of the audience – the one in Liverpool and the rest of us, sitting in front of our televisions.

Eurovision, like Crufts, has been a gay domain for the best part of a quarter of a century, of course, but it is so gay now that it doesn’t even need to advertise its credentials with rainbow flags. Gays and women were in the audience, gays and women were watching at home. Both of these sections of society have a certain thing about hedonism and this was the most gleefully hedonistic contest in years. You may remember the Cyndi Lauper hit ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’, which was criticised at the time by Cyndi’s radical-feminist older sister, Ellen, on the grounds that actually women wanted justice and equality, free childcare and the chance to run the world. But Cyndi was closer to the truth, I think.

In recent years Eurovision had become infected with jiggery-wokery, grandstanding and virtue-signalling – by the performers, the presenters and also, of course, the voters. But this year even much of that was gone. A drippy little twerp from Austria, wearing a T-shirt with ‘Equality’ written on it, said – apropos nothing – that it would be nice if women were paid the same as men, but he was pretty much by himself and was not cheered at all for his pious little lecture.

But other than that, nothing. There was a merciful absence of all faux-seriousness and the few songs which tried to get a bit political, such as Switzerland’s dirge about not wanting to be a soldier (keeping up a good national tradition, then) didn’t do very well at all. There were no overt displays of transgender solidarity or bleating about refugees or moaning about capitalism.

And while there were plenty of Ukrainian flags in attendance, that country’s song did not storm the public vote as happened last year, despite the fact that it was a markedly cleverer slice of R&B than the Kalush Orchestra’s ‘Stefania’, which swept all before it in 2022. We’re kinda still with you, was the message, but tonight we just want a bit of a laugh, if that’s OK.

So it was with the voting. For the first year that I can remember – and I’ve been watching this dross since 1969 – there was an almost complete absence of countries voting for their friends and not voting for their enemies. OK, San Marino voted for Italy, and the Greeks – whose announcer spoke in French solely to piss us off, I would guess – voted for Cyprus, but that aside the voting seemed remarkably free of politicisation. Hell, the Irish even gave our lamentable entry a couple of points.

Majority Muslim Azerbaijan proudly handed over its top score to… Israel. The Scandies still tend to vote for each other, but then so does everybody else: for a quarter of a century they have been the canniest manipulators of this tournament, much as the Swedish songwriter and producer Max Martin has become the most successful purveyor of pop music globally. The Germans are apparently in a fury because they came bottom again and various newspapers have speculated that this is because Europe hates them for being arrogant and powerful. You may remember we made similar complaints before Sam Ryder came along and (effectively) won last year’s contest with ‘Space Man’. All it takes, you Germans, is for you to find a decent singer and a decent song, rather than foisting upon us a bellowing halfwit dressed as an orc churning out a piece of tuneless, histrionic heavy metal. It is nothing to do with you being powerful and arrogant.

The music? Largely awful, of course, as has been the case since the very first tournament in 1956. The first and gravest injustice came in Azerbaijan being evicted at the semi-final stage. The identical twins TuralTuranX, who resembled a pair of cheerful village idiots from some remote mountain goat hut in the Caucasus, had a beautiful song – ‘Tell Me More’ – which was easily the match of the eventual contest winner. But I don’t think that the voting audience was terribly taken with the idea of carefully constructed tunes and subtlety. It wanted gimmicks and lunacy, which is what it got with Finland’s ludicrous Kaarija and ‘Cha Cha Cha’ (it easily won the popular vote). The various juries tended to go for machine-tooled electropop, which is why the Swede Loreen won with what was a powerfully sung half-decent tune with the requisite elements of surprise and familiarity in the melody. A few good songs seemed to pass the audience by – especially Belgium’s cute piece of modern soul, ‘Because of You’, performed by an unprepossessing man called Gustaph.

I enjoyed Slovenia’s entry, but Eurovision has never been very big on jangly guitar pop. The songs need to strike home with an immediacy preferably buttressed by brutal synths. If you can’t chant or hum it after 20 seconds, it’s not going to win – Tin Pan Alley values still count.

Meanwhile, we should sack the music management company TaP, who selected Mae Muller as our entrant with ‘I Wrote A Song’. How Europe wished she had not bothered. It was boring, with a substantial portion of its tune lifted bodily from the sax break in George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’ and performed without a shred of commitment or panache.

We finished second bottom not because nobody likes us, but because nobody liked Ms Muller. I don’t think we’ll hear much from her again.