Please, please, please let me get what I want

So, is Morrissey really what I wanted? The UK National Selection is a topic that has dogged the minds of your bloggers over recent months. Despite a series of disappointing results in the ESC, the majority of the show's UK viewers still comfort themselves that Eurovision is just a chance to have a chuckle at all those silly Europeans anyway (Dear British citizens: Which continent is the UK in exactly?) . Well, that's all got a bit difficult. There we were in 2003, praising the glorious advent of Turkish ethno-pop, while one half of a little-known Liverpudlian duo strutted around like a faulty Tina Turner robot and made our ears bleed by singing a semitone out the whole way through their aching 3-minute performance. In 2004, a young man in a powder blue suit, who could best be described as dead behind the eyes, encouraged us to "Hold On". Oh, we tried... and while 2006's Manc in a yellow anorak captured our hearts, a thirty-something rapper with a clutch of Martine McCutcheon-esque schoolgirls was never going to set the the scoreboard alight. Particularly not when MTV Europe's Russian Act of 2006 was numbered against his opponents. The tables have turned - the UK is the joke of Eurovision. There we are we a host of top-selling International artists and we can't even rustle up one of them for a 3-minute performance in front of millions. Shouldn't they be jumping at the chance?

The BBC is promising to raise the calibre of artist for 2007, and they've whet our appetite with talk of negotiations with Morrissey. No doubt he's a fine songwriter - one of the best - and at least we've all bloody heard of him. And crucially, as far as we know, he was never a contestant in a reality TV show. Sounds good. However, I get the feeling there was a middle ground that the UK could have occupied in their quest for recognition in Europe. Eurovision isn't going to go wild for credibility alone. This is a contest that likes nothing better than a toe-tapping, catchy pop anthem - see Sertab 2003, H Pap 2005, Carola and Dima Bilan 2006. And we've got this stuff by the bucket-load in the UK. Not only have we got loads of it - we have the best, in the form of Girls Aloud, Sugababes, Jamelia... The most exciting music coming out of the UK currently is not the myriad, here-today-gone-tomorrow, floppy-haired teenage pseudo-intellectuals of Razorlight and The Kooks. It's the sound of edgy, sassy, unashamed thumping dance floor fillers like The Show, Red Dress, Love Machine - the kind of stuff that will cruise to the top of the scoreboard in Helsinki, and to the top of every iTunes playlist in Europe. So let's not overshoot the mark for 2007 - unless we want to languish in the bottom half of the results board for another year.