The United Kingdom held a national preselection to choose the song that would go to the Eurovision Song Contest 1979. A Song for Europe 1979 was planned to take place at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 8 March.

After a day's rehearsals at the Royal Albert Hall a strike by BBC technicians stopped the show. Audio recordings of the songs were voted on by 14 regional juries: Bristol, Bangor, Leeds, Norwich, Newcastle, Aberdeen, Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff, Plymouth, Glasgow, Southampton and London. The jury in Manchester could not be contacted and since the winner had a more than 12 point winning margin, their scores were not included. This led to an immaterial tie for second place. The following day, the 12 songs were broadcast on Terry Wogan's Radio 2 show and a recap of the top places, plus an interview with the winners took place on the BBC TV Show Nationwide the same evening. The Manchester scores were eventually verified, with song 12 'Fantasy' being awarded 2nd place ahead of song 6 'Call My Name'.

Black Lace were the winners of A Song for Europe with "Mary Ann" and went on to place 7th at the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest in Jerusalem, Israel.

This was also the first Eurovision since 1972 in which Terry Wogan did not provide either the television or radio commentary. Wogan had originally been scheduled to provide the television commentary but opted out of going to Israel following comments he made of the 1978 winner "A-Ba-Ni-Bi" sounding like "I Wanna Be a Polar Bear". Instead his Radio 2 colleague John Dunn provided the television commentary. Ray Moore provided the radio commentary on both BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2.

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