Ireland’s Wild Youth might have been knocked out of the Eurovision Song Contest but one Irishman remains at the heart of tonight’s live television spectacular from Liverpool: former RTÉ boss Noel Curran.
“I get involved when there’s a problem,” said Mr Curran of his role, which since 2017 has been director general of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), organisers of the vastly popular, forever evolving competition.
This week, that meant clarifying why it would not be appropriate for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to address the event and its estimated television audience of 160 million, with British prime minister Rishi Sunak subsequently weighing in to say this should happen.
“That just wasn’t possible without completely politicising the show and setting a precedent,” said Mr Curran.
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The confirmation of the UK as hosts only came after the EBU investigated the logistics of holding Eurovision in Poland or Slovakia close to the border with 2022 winners Ukraine, having previously rejected the Ukrainian government’s insistence that it could stage it in the country.
“Time has proven that the decision was correct,” said Mr Curran, who has been in Liverpool since Wednesday.
Liverpudlians have visibly embraced the event – which generated “the quickest sell-out of tickets we have ever had” – while the BBC is “doing an extraordinary job” producing the shows, he said, praising the manner in which Ukrainian talent and themes have been integrated into the show.
“All of our people say it is just so smooth, one of the smoothest that they’ve seen,” he said, swiftly adding “so far” and his hope that this verdict would not prove “the kiss of death from the director general”.
While Eurovision is just one element of his job leading the Geneva-headquartered EBU, Mr Curran has a long history with the contest. He met his wife, the singer Eimear Quinn, when he was RTÉ's head of delegation to Eurovision 1996 in Oslo. Ms Quinn claimed the seventh of Ireland’s seven Eurovision wins, with Mr Curran then serving as RTÉ's executive producer for the 1997 contest in Dublin.
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“The biggest difference is the perception of the event and that isn’t just since 1997. It has changed even in the last five years,” said Mr Curran, citing an explosion of interest from major music labels and digital platforms such as TikTok, its official entertainment partner since 2022.
To date this year, Eurovision-related content has amassed 131 million video views on TikTok and 80 million on Instagram.
“The whole social media campaigning that goes into it now, before the artists step foot on stage, we have never seen anything like it. It is getting bigger every year,” he said.
“Eurovision defies all of what people would consider to be the logic of broadcasting and of public service media – it is growing.”
Part of the diversity ingrained in its brand happened “spontaneously” as a result of its LGBT+ fanbase and part of it has been “carefully managed”, Mr Curran said. “It is now part of the integral values of the production and that didn’t happen by chance.”
Although the visibility of LGBT+ performers in the song contest is one of the reasons why Turkey has not participated since 2012, the EBU hopes it will return at some point.
Despite the grander commercial and logistical scale, meanwhile, the “still fun, still a bit crazy” essence of Eurovision remains the same – even if semi-final exits are tough for countries to take.
“It’s a hard way to go out,” he admitted, “but we just can’t lengthen the final show.”
