When I was at university, "nul points" enjoyed brief popularity as a way of highlighting the inadequacy of one's peers. So, someone might drop their Twix, say, on account of trying to carry it in the same hand as a bap, and the crowd would erupt with "nul points". I can only remember one of the levels on which it was deemed hilarious, and that was its garden-variety hyperbole - nul points being so purely and improbably bad that its resonance could only ever be grossly surplus to the meaning required.  It never seemed to us, in other words, that individually or collectively we would ever be on the receiving end of such a judgment, sincerely meant. The last time a generation was this certain of its supremacy, we were just about to enter the first world war.  Statistics being what they are, it is terribly rare to do worse in the Eurovision song contest than you've ever done since its launch in 1956. But for a loophole in the rules, which guarantees entry for the five biggest countries, this would disqualify us from next year's competition. It is unprecedented and, frankly, amazing - even though our representatives were as bad as they could conceivably have been, the standard of this competition is not high.  It is no wonder that commentators have looked for scapegoats besides the "singing" duo, Gemma Abbey and Chris Cromby. To deal with the apolitical excuses first: Gemma's mum said the sound system wasn't working properly, and that's why she sounded like she was tone deaf. Mums, eh? Don't you just love them? The ubiquity of the information that the duo went to Paul McCartney's stage school in Liverpool suggests that some people seek obliquely to blame Sir Paul - well, you can see why it's tempting, but it won't wash.  Likewise, the word "scouser" keeps cropping up, as though the disaster can be put down to the fact that Liverpudlians simply aren't as good at anything as the rest of us are. (If this sounds absurd, bear in mind that one or two people tried this out as a theory behind the James Bulger tragedy. Which is to say, it's still absurd, but absurdity seems to run pretty high on this matter.)  I thought for a second that Chris Cromby had put voters off with an unsightly cold sore, until I realised that I had dropped some toast on my Mirror (the newspaper, not the - oh, you know what I mean).  And so to Iraq - Terry Wogan decided immediately that the voting must have had a pacifist undertow, related to our recent undertaking of a war that most of Europe thought criminally without basis. Martin Isherwood, author of the "song", took that up like a life-jacket - "I think, politically, we are out on a limb at the moment. As a country I think we paid the price." His phrasing was rather unfortunate - certainly, we paid a price, but the people who paid the real price would be the Iraqis.  This is, in any case, undermined by the voting pattern of Israel. If our foreign policy really was the deciding issue, then they could have stumped up at least one vote for us, rather than the more conventional none at all. Perhaps Sharon entreated the voters to use the competition as a bridge-building exercise, whereby Israel could reunite with Europe in mutual hatred of us, and its prime minister could then ram home the advantage by brooking the possibility of an independent Palestinian state. It's a neat manoeuvre, but altogether too subtle, in my view, for the rufty-tufty business of international diplomacy.  No, there is no real answer to be found within the Wogan hypothesis. We are still left with a bad song that was not as bad as some other songs, but nevertheless everyone liked the least. We are still left wondering why, with our thriving industry of schlock pop and so much prime-time telly given over to the creation of more of it, we can't compete with Bosnia Herzogovina.  I think the answer lies in the very timbre of our outrage. We know we can make good pop. Everyone else knows we can make good pop. But when it's just for Europe, we don't see why we should bother. We aim low, and we never field our biggest hitters.  If there is anti-British sentiment in the Euro-voting, if there is a conspicuous lack of any country at all prepared to throw us a bone to spare our terrible embarrassment, it is not because of fair disagreement on matters of policy. It is because we are very snooty. We are the prom queen who won't wash her hair when it's only family. We appear to be getting on everyone's nerves.  And really, every discussion we ever have about Europe hinges on this idea that it's a band of limping underachievers, that its very biggest cheeses have nothing to offer but, well, cheese, and that if we do join in, it's an act of such generosity that about all that can be said for it is that we don't have to try very hard.  If we take any political message at all from this disaster, it is referendum, and referendum now - if we feel this shame keenly, imagine what it would be like if we didn't get a chance to reject the superstate, before the superstate rejects us.
Zoe Williams: Ignore the conspiracy theorists - we did badly in the Eurovision song contest because we loathe Europe.