When the British entry scored nul points in the Eurovision Song Contest back in 2003 (remember Jemini ... no I couldn't either), bars in the land erupted in a kind of comic patriotism that it is hard to imagine in any other country. Indeed, the emotion of the time was enough to make you proud to be British - after all, who needs the votes of the Baltic states when you have The Beatles, Amy Winehouse and Bucks Fizz?

But that was then. Five years on, this year's disaster, in the form of Andy Abraham's miserable 14 points, sticks in the throat - and for more than the usual complaint about Eastern bloc votes.

An anonymous memo arrived in the post last week asking how well organised the voting systems are at Eurovision. It made the eye-catching, but hard to prove claim, that perhaps 2 to 4 million votes were not properly counted: 20 per cent to 50 per cent of the near 9 million votes cast across the 43 participating countries last year.

So, given all the phone-in voting scandals in the UK, just how robust is the phone-in system used, live, in Eurovision? It is an obvious question, and the answer provided on behalf of the rest of Europe does not inspire confidence - although the BBC says it is certain that viewers who missed the voting window were not be charged because of BT-supplied technology that it introduced last September.

Svante Stockselius, the executive supervisor of Eurovision, admits that it would “be unwise to assume” that “smaller or Eastern European” countries have technology that is comparable to that in the UK. But never mind if people vote early or late, because it is the Eurovision policy, “where technical[ly] possible, not to charge people for a vote that hasn't been counted”.

So that's all right: viewers, bathed in a happy Eurovision glow, must be delighted to spend their 52 cents (41p) - the average cost of a vote across Europe - on a vote that may not have been counted.

Viewers might feel better if some of that money went to charity. None of it does in the UK - the 15p cost of a call from a BT line goes only to cover the phone provider's costs.

In theory, viewers ought to be clever enough to work out when to vote. But matters are not always so simple: after all, the holier-than-thou BBC only discovered that it had failed to count £6,000 worth of votes (tens of thousands) in last year's UK heat because a presenter, possibly even Sir Terry Wogan, mistakenly called for votes early. This was unearthed only after a check on the voting several months later by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Mr Stockselius's admission isn't the only troubling issue concerning the way Eurovision is run. The contest's producers and the BBC set store on the role of PwC which, they say, acts as auditor for the voting process, doing, Mr Stockselius says, “elaborate checking of the numbers and results”.

Yet, according to PwC itself, its auditor checks the systems used and “does not audit, verify or count the actual votes”. The clarification might at first seem unimportant, but it is significant - systems can appear robust, but as events prove time and again, the best-audited processes are not always immune to problems.

There are other issues to cause concern, too. Although it is not possible to vote by text in the UK, it is in many continental European countries, and it is sometimes the only form of voting, even though (as anybody who has sent a text knows), texts do not always arrive on time. It is also suggested, by the writer of the anonmyous memo, that the rush to report votes to Cologne, where Eurovision's international phone provider, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, is based, creates other problems. After all, the lesson of a string of British phone-in scandals has been that the technology has not always been able to meet the demands of live broadcasting.

Add all this together and some interesting questions are raised. Is it possible to manipulate the results of the voting? Why do these regional bloc votes seem to exist when people spread across such a bloc may have diverse musical tastes? (Or to put it another way, is Russia that popular in Eastern Europe?) What is alleged by the anonymous memo writer - but not proven - is that as the voting information is “frantically collected” in Cologne, there is little option but “to take the word of what each local private company [which runs the phone voting] tells them”. Can that be right? It could create results that are not always accurate.

Ofcom is now checking to see if there should be an investigation - after being passed what landed at the door of The Times - although this is perhaps the only subject that would actually require a pan-European phone regulator. But there should be more: Sir Terry Wogan is threatening not to cover the annual sing-song nonsense again. He, or rather the BBC, should go further and demand a proper audit, or walk out. Viewers need to be told clearly where all the phone-in money goes, too. After all, it is one thing to end up with a Jemini-style nul points fair and square, but quite another if the whole system is so poorly governed that all sorts of problems can creep in. There have been too many phone-in scandals to simply hope for the best.

dan.sabbagh@thetimes.co.uk

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