Mea culpa (13/05/2014) – Having sat down with a pen and paper, I now realise that I’m wrong on the below. The fact that the televote is used to decide between entries with a tied ranking means there are extreme results in which a country placed bottom with the jury can still score. I regret my mathematical error.

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In 2008, the BBC had to dramatically halt the voting in the semifinal of Strictly Come Dancing. They realised that the judges’ scores meant that Tom Chambers’s position in the competition could not be affected by the phone vote. No matter how many votes he received, he’d still be in the dance off. They stopped the vote as it was deemed to be unfair.

Last weekend, the BBC repeated the error on a much larger scale. The judges’ scores in the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final meant that Poland could not receive points from the UK, no matter how many votes they received from the public.

Asking people to vote when they have no chance of affecting the outcome is clearly wrong. Will they be issuing refunds to the thousands who voted for Poland – the UK public’s top choice?