Monday 23 May 2011

Viewing figures on the up!

It seems that viewing figures in the UK are on the rise.  9,68 MILLION viewers on average saw the Eurovision - up from 5,5 million last year.  This represents the first time since 1973 that the ESC was the most watched show of the week in the UK and the first time that Britains Got Talent was not a number one rated show on a Saturday Night.  - BARB also state that there were 15 million unique viewers to the Eurovision in the UK, surely some sort of record!

I Bet the BBC are laughing up their sleaves, and rightly so ;)

5 comments:

  1. Whether you agree or not with the Beeb's decision to select (internally) the UK act this year it produced a reasonable outcome and definitely spurred people on to watch the show. The viewing figures are brilliant and I sensed that lots of people re-engaged with the contest (my student nephew, for example, had a big party and loved it this year). Eurovision could easily become an anachronism (what with all the other national singing contests, X Factor, Idol etc etc) but if we send credible artists it will stay modern and fun. Of course, the UK probably won't win again. But that's not the point really, is it?

    PS: The BBC, as we know, are a bunch of rotten ******* for not giving OnEurope the accreditation they deserved in Dusseldorf. I've just checked the cost of flights to Baku. Believe me, OnEurope, you don't want accreditation in 2012!

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  2. I don't wish to denigrate the BBC's decision to choose Blue, it was an interesting one and paid some dividends on the scoreboard (apparently, if you tot up the number of countries that awarded any points at all, the UK comes 4th on 25).

    Having said that, the BBC rode on RTE's coattails this year and I think they know it. Say what you like about Jedward, but they were the ratings magnet far more than Blue were.

    I'm sure it'd need more than a year in the planning, but it'd be fascinating to see what would happen if the BBC booked Simon Cowell, RTE booked Louis Walsh, and the pair of them were just given free rein to get out there and win their own private comedy bet. It'd be event TV like never before, it'd guarantee chart hits, and it would probably push the pair of them way up the scoreboard into the bargain. :-)

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  3. You know, I had a whole diatribe ready for Nick's proposal. But the Cowell/Walsh challenge might be very entertaining. It will never happen, of course, and I'm not sure about 'the BBC rode on RTE's coattails this year'. Really?

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  4. Did the BBC ride on RTE's coattails? Well, not deliberately, obviously! In actual fact, looking closely at the Irish national final, RTE did everything in their power to avoid having to bring Jedward to the party - 66% weighting to the juries, putting the Jeds on in the Draw of Doom and giving Nikki Kavanagh the plum slot... I'm pretty sure that RTE execs were a bit cross and glum at the end of that evening and expecting another Dustin The Turkey moment.

    I wouldn't have predicted them to be wrong about that.

    If the good ratings were ultimately generated by the press publicity though in the UK tabloids though, it was pretty clearly the Jedward machine that was doing most of the heavy lifting. :-)

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  5. No , I don't get this. Blue, presumably with the BBC's support, did lots of pre-contest promotion around Europe. I reckon this paid off brilliantly, given that televoters put the song/act in 5th place. Ireland, on the other hand, did little promotion - Jedward wowed the journos in Dusseldorf but it's easy to impress a bored audience with loads of camp nonsense.

    The juries said that Blue's 'I Can' was almost the worst song in the contest (22nd out of 25).

    That's weird. They weren't watching the show I saw on May 14th. It begs the question, what exactly DID they see that made such a bad impression?

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