United Kingdom: BBC eyeing Sophie Ellis-Bextor as their Eurovision 2024 representative?
Just a bit more than a week after the Eurovision 2023 final, BBC is gearing up for Eurovision 2024 having begun the search for their next representative. After the strong criticism of the selection of 25-year-old Mae Muller as the UK’s representative at Eurovision 2023 and her 25th placement in the Grand Final, BBC seems to be moving towards choosing a more well-known and established performer for next year’s contest.
Information so far suggests that the BBC wants Sophie Ellis-Bextor to be the UK’s next representative at Eurovision 2024.
Who is Sophie Ellis-Bextor?
44-year-old Sophie Ellis-Bextor is an accomplished British singer with hits such as “Murder On The Dancefloor”. Sophie came back to the limelight during the pandemic with a series of Kitchen Disco videos that she shared with her Instagram followers, the success of which also earned her a Radio 2 show under the same name. She is also a mother of five children.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor, in fact, appears to be the only BBC-shortlisted name for Eurovision 2024 so far. As a source from the British music industry reported to “The Mail”:
So far she is the only person on the BBC shortlist for Eurovision 2024, to which there are no plans to add more.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor seems like the ideal choice for the competition – she is an excellent singer and performer, already largely known to both straight and gay audience, across Europe and worldwide. The criticism the BBC received this year for the selection of Mae Muller has been quite harsh.
We remind you that in order to put the bad results in the past and after James Newman ‘s last place with 0 points in 2021, the BBC last year and this year outsourced the selection of UK representatives to an external agent, TaP Music .
Last year’s outstanding second place finish by Sam Ryder in 2022 was not repeated this year and the UK again found themselves at the bottom of the standings.
The disbelief surrounding the good result that Mae Muller could bring started as early as the pre-parties, where her weak vocals were harshly commented on, and continued unabated during the technical rehearsals.
Her old posts on Twitter , politically colored against the Conservative government in Great Britain and Boris Johnson, also caused a stir .
After the harsh criticism and the poor result, the BBC wants to turn to a more tried and tested recipe, to a more widely accepted artist and certainly more experienced and with his own audience. The race to represent the UK at Eurovision 2024 is just beginning!
Stay tuned to EurovisionFun for all the news surrounding the Eurovision Song Contest!
Photo: Andreas Papayiannakis
Don’t get me wrong here, I like Sophie Ellis-Bextor, but I think it would be better if we just tried having a little more fun at Eurovision. You can’t win Eurovision simply by entering a good song, because Eurovision isn’t really a singing competition, it’s more of an entertainment competition. We need to come up with something to totally out crazy everybody else. Make a total spectacle out of ourselves.