What's the point?

It's the taking part that counts. Or is it?

Can I ask a slight favour, if I may be so bold, before starting out on this one? If you’ve been enjoying this series, or it’s emboldening you to think, “I have something to say too,” please give a thought today to simply sharing it. Here comes a teeny button to enable you to do so. My thanks, ahead of some rambling thoughts about awards, and why we watch/enter/find meaning in them.

I was simply going to name this Halfway, Un Point, and try to pronounce it in my best “You’re not fooling anyone” French accent.

But “What’s the Point” in a piece generally about awards and validation seems to scratch all itches, if I’m not mismatching metaphors completely incorrectly.

Pic: Austin Neill

I probably need to dot a few i’s and cross some t’s, as not everybody listening will understand the Eurovision Song Contest.

It is, as the tin label says, a song contest, only it isn’t, much as many of the accolades in the awards-sphere equally have nothing to do necessarily with recognition. Well, they recognise something, but not necessarily what you might expect.

In the words of Spock, “They’re awards, Jim, but not as we know them.”

So, Saturday just gone was the Eurovision Song Contest 2026.

The Eurovision final saw 25 countries take to the stage in Vienna, Austria, in front of an audience that stretched into the hundreds of millions worldwide. Austria hosted because that’s the Eurovision tradition: win the thing one year and you inherit the organisational migraine the following year.

Bulgaria won for the first time ever, collecting a huge 516 points with DARA’s song Bangaranga, while the UK finished last with a single point, which almost deserves its own trophy at this stage, though there have been years we’ve received zero.

We watch it every year, missing only a handful. It was a party at Mum and Dad’s house, the, if you will, Superbowl of European Pop.

Eurovision has actually launched or massively boosted quite a few huge careers over the years, which is one reason people still enter despite the risk of becoming a GIF for the wrong reasons these days.

The obvious giant is ABBA, who won in 1974 with Waterloo and then went on to become one of the biggest pop acts in music history. Without Eurovision, there’s every chance they might simply have remained a very successful Scandinavian band with excellent jackets.

Celine Dion is another wonderfully odd Eurovision story because she actually won the contest representing Switzerland in 1988, despite being Canadian. Which somehow feels peak Eurovision already. You’ll understand why in a moment.

Julio Iglesias appeared for Spain in 1970 before becoming one of the world’s biggest Latin recording artists.

But the Eurovision Song Contest is, as I have suggested, a bit of a contradiction.

It’s a song contest, technically. Countries from across Europe, and now apparently bits of places nowhere near Europe at all, like Australia, each send an act to perform an original song live before a massive TV audience. Then everybody votes for each other while pretending geopolitics, neighbourly alliances, and decades of historical resentment have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the outcome.

And every year, the UK enters the thing with all the confidence of a man returning to a restaurant that has already given him food poisoning on 65 previous occasions.

I’m going to say it, and I don’t care, because I think there is something in this: Brexit affected our relationship with Europe in all the ways you might expect a “where-did-that-one-come-from” divorce to challenge your ability to pop round unannounced to your ex, borrow the lawnmower, and continue sharing a Netflix password as if nothing happened.

Don’t get me wrong, just for balance, Brexit did, of course, achieve things. Depending on where you sit politically, those things range from “historic acts of sovereignty” to “administrative rearrangements accompanied by queuing.”

Some industries benefited. Others absolutely did not. The country didn’t collapse into the sea, as some predicted, nor did it instantly transform into a gleaming Singapore-on-Thames utopia populated entirely by smiling customs officials and sovereign haddock.

Mostly, the UK carried on being the UK, only now with more forms to fill in — ironic, really, because the paperwork was the thing we were trying to escape.

I feel like I am back in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy land, because those last few paragraphs could well have been written by Douglas Adams, in a way.

But anyway. The other thing that happened was that the Eurovision Song Contest became an opportunity for everyone who doesn’t understand our obsession with jellied eels, warm beer, apologising to lamp posts, and queueing in absolute silence at bus stops, to collectively decide that perhaps the UK needed to be gently punished by being awarded precisely no points in a singing competition.

You’d think it too ridiculous to hurt really, but hmmmm, this is the country that produced The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Adele, The Stones, David Bowie, Queen, Kate Bush, Simple Minds, Annie Lennox, Tom Jones, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, and about four thousand pub bands who still believe they could have been the next Oasis had things gone differently in Swindon back in 1993.

Yet every May, we now end up looking like somebody’s dad trying to join in at a student disco. And we actually celebrate this result in a way akin to the Head of School on sports day, reminding all parents that it’s not at all about winning; it’s only about taking part.

Quick aside. The points system has had interesting ways of working over the years, and it was always conducted in English and French. One point, or un point.

But there is something that perhaps I am missing; it’s not so much a competition now, more a well-produced, albeit strangely scored, absolute spectacle.

The Nordic countries usually look as if they’ve been assembled by minimalist interior designers. France treats Eurovision like an opportunity to remind everybody that it invented culture. The United Kingdom often turns up like somebody persuaded late to attend a fancy-dress party and is now trying very hard to look relaxed about it. Then there’s Eastern Europe, which approaches Eurovision with the energy of nations fully aware that subtlety is for cowards. Fire, chains, masks, lots of chanting and figures that look like they’ve been dressed by the Grim Reaper.

And somehow, despite all of this sounding utterly absurd, they are very often magnificent.

This year looked briefly as though Australia or Israel might actually win the thing, which only adds to Eurovision’s ongoing identity crisis. Australia being in Eurovision still feels like discovering your plumber has somehow qualified for the Super Bowl. None of us really remembers how it happened.

This year’s UK entrant, Sam Battle, who performed under the name Look Mum No Computer, was an eccentric inventor type, building synthesisers and stuff, and I have to say the wonderful thing was that he didn’t appear especially crushed by the possibility that the UK might once again receive next to no interest at all.

He more or less shrugged and got on with it.

I think he got it. This is no longer a quaint singing competition, but a massive entertainment business, and no matter where you come in the pecking order, there’s kudos to being a part of this spectacle.

This is now a proper industry.

And I can’t help thinking that many of the new photography awards are now as much an industry as they are a platform for recognition and inspiration too.

Not the genuinely respected competitions. Those exist. There are awards that carry real weight, judged seriously by people who actually know what they’re looking at.

But orbiting those is another entire universe of slightly suspect recognition schemes where everybody appears to be “carefully selected” moments before being asked for three hundred dollars.

I had one recently.

An email arrived informing me that my work had apparently caught the attention of an international panel somewhere. There was praise and flattery, and for a moment, I’d been emotionally courted with this suggestion that I had been noticed rising above the photographic noise.

Then came the fee.

Three hundred dollars to take part in the award I had supposedly already been selected for.

Which is a magnificent business model if you think about it carefully enough.

Photographers, and creative people generally, are walking around permanently wondering if they’re any good. Most of us spend half our lives comparing ourselves to other people while pretending we aren’t. We look at awards, publication credits, followers, exhibitions, books, workshops, likes, reposts, and all the other modern forms of public approval, hoping somewhere in there will be a little sign saying, “Yes, alright, you’re allowed to call yourself this thing.”

I felt special until I realised everybody had been picked, if they were just willing to pay the entrance fee.

But with a bit more digging, I found that some of the biggest awards on Earth have always involved campaigning and politics too, and many far more than in a “send us 300 dollars for your platinum visionary distinction certificate” sort of way.

Film studios spend astonishing sums during awards season pushing films toward voters for things like the Academy Awards and BAFTA Awards. There are screenings, lunches, advertising campaigns, interviews, networking events, “For Your Consideration” billboards across Los Angeles. Entire teams exist purely to position performances as award-worthy.

Nobody simply wanders accidentally into an Oscar. Well, not anymore anyway.

Which doesn’t make those awards meaningless. Far from it. But it does remind you that recognition has always involved storytelling, influence, visibility and timing alongside talent itself.

And I suppose that is just like Eurovision.

We all want to be seen.

Countries want to be seen.

Artists want to be seen.

Photographers want to be seen.

The UK’s problem may simply be that we still think the world views us through the lens of our musical past, while much of Europe views us more like an eccentric former headmaster who keeps reminding everyone he once captained the rugby team.

And perhaps that’s the point, really?

Not the winning.

Not the plaques, trophies, certificates, rankings, scores or carefully worded emails telling you that you’ve been “selected” from thousands of entries moments before requesting your credit card details.

The point may simply be that people keep making things anyway.

Songs. Photographs. Paintings. Films. Odd electronic music performed by a man in front of Europe wearing what appears to be a soldering iron attached to a jet engine.

We continue putting pieces of ourselves into the world despite knowing full well the scoreboard may light up with absolutely nothing in return.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of anything creative that can be measured by awards only. Some of the most important photographs ever made never won awards. Some of the greatest songs ever written didn’t top charts. Some artists spend their whole lives unnoticed, only to suddenly matter enormously years later to somebody they’ll never meet.

Could “What’s the Point,” be the wrong question entirely?

Maybe, just maybe, the point is simply to keep turning up with something to say.