The song that rhymes with ‘Pepperoni’ with ‘Feeling Alright-Dookie’: The UK’s strange new Eurovision entry is here | Eurovision 2026

WWhat to do about Britain’s poor standing in the Eurovision Song Contest? It’s a question to which the obvious answer is: Who cares? We’re led to believe that millions across the UK are outraged on an annual basis by our poor showing – we’ve only made the top 10 in the final once in the last 16 years – but somehow you never meet anyone who gives a monkey, despite the efforts of the BBC’s Stakhanovites to convince us that Eurovision is the music event of the year. 2023

It is tempting to suggest that the ranks of people who care little about Eurovision in either case include those responsible for deciding whether Britain should join. Our singles success in recent years was Sam Ryder taking second place in 2022, a feat achieved through the clever new approach of providing the entrant with a relatively memorable song, a well-written Elton/Bowie song called Spaceman. You might have thought there was a lesson there, but no. Regular service was resumed the following year. Try singing the chorus of May Muller’s Dua Lipa-ish Wrote A Song (2023), Olly Alexander’s Dizzy (2024), or remember Monday’s country-tinged What The Hell Just Happened (2025), the latter duo receiving a zero in the audience vote. You can’t, right?

This year, we seem to have turned to new value. Our participant is called Look Mum No Computer, an Essex man who posts YouTube videos that mix an obviously genuine interest in vintage synthesizers with a certain degree of performative goofiness: he drives a 1929 Austin 7 and runs a museum in Ramsgate dedicated to vintage analogue instruments. In one video, he performs “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” on a huge synthesizer while wearing a furry outfit and drawing everyone’s attention to their whimsical faces on camera.

His song Eins, Zwei, Drei – a synth-pop with vocals vaguely reminiscent of those of Damon Albarn on Blur’s Girls And Boys – doesn’t have much of a melody, though there is an annoying screaming hook and a long coda in which the track’s tempo unexpectedly turns into a glistening beat of groovy rock. Whoever is responsible for choosing him has clearly decided to bet their chips on everyone’s caution angle, I’m a bit crazy instead. Watch a video of Look Mum No Computer absent-mindedly dipping his digestive system into a mug full of baked beans and pretending to drive an old Mini with a keyboard, a fire extinguisher strapped to the top and lyrics described by the BBC as “strikingly witty”: They rhyme ‘pepperoni’ with ‘feeling fine – doki’ and feature the duet ‘Counting in English doesn’t cut the mustard / I’m so tired of chewing on plump figures’. With custard.” Perhaps, on the night of the final, mainland Europe will ring to the sound of ambulances being called to attend to viewers with split sides, but you somewhat doubt it.

There’s certainly a distinct ring of fatalism emerging from Look Mum No Computer itself: “There’s a lot of stuff going on with voting, a lot of cronyism and other things,” he said when Britain’s entry was announced last month, “and the UK is probably not everyone’s favorite when it comes to Eurovision.” These words sound suspiciously like the words of a man who knows he has no prayer.