Jedward mania resulted in last Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest achieving its highest Irish audience figure in 15 years. The three and a half hour final of the competition, which was broadcast live on RTÉ One, was watched in its entirety by an average of 1,174,300 Irish viewers, the highest viewing figure since the 1997 Contest. Dublin post house, Tangerine was behind the graphics used for the twin’s performance on the night.
Bringing in a global audience of approximately 120 million viewers, the Irish audience numbers peaked from 10.30pm to 10.45pm when an average of 1,456,360 people watched the voting scores come from around Europe. Overall, the programme reached a total of 2,244,600 viewers in Ireland, Nielsen figures report.
The Irish coverage was presented by Marty Whelan (Winning Streak) and produced by Julian Vignoles (The Rose of Tralee). It saw 71% of 15-24 year olds watching the show in its entirety, the highest audience share for this age group of any programme on any channel in Ireland since 2002.
Dublin post house, Tangerine was selected to produce and design the 18 x 60 metre background graphics for Jedward’s ‘Lipstick’ Eurovision performance. Senior Motion Graphics at Tangerine, Marc Sherwin was responsible for the project from start to finish; ”We managed to source footage from a previous shoot Jedward had done for ‘All the small things’,”he tells us. “The twins really deliver when they are on set so there were tonnes of shots that never made it into the music video, which we were able to adapt for 'Lipstick'. The shots were keyed, re-timed and rendered ready for use on the new background.”Following this, Marc broke the track up into verse, chorus, middle eight etc, and planned what type of animation would feature in each section.
Jedward came 8th in the contest, the highest result for Ireland in 11 years, with Azerbaijan’s Ell/Nikki clinching a win with ‘Running Scared’. Jedward did not leave empty handed though, taking the event’s Marcel Bezencon Artistic Award as voted for by the commentators.
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