N4bn In Four Years,Tinsel

On May 23, 2013, Nigeria’s longest running soap opera, Tinsel aired its one thousandth episode, a landmark achievement never before accomplished by any other TV soap in Nigeria.Producers of the show MNET Africa celebrated their milestone success by staging a ‘Tinsel 1000th premiere’ event at Eko Hotels and Suites with its cast and a large number of other actors and entertainers attending.

Aside the whole glitz and glamour Tinsel brought out that night, the 1000th episode also marked a record financial feat: during the four years the soap has aired on TV, costs have exceeded a whooping N4bn, yes you read that right. N4,000,000,000. And this, according to NET findings, is a conservative estimate. BACKGROUND INFORMATION Tinsel was originally created by acclaimed screenwriter Yinka Ogun (who also created Tajudeen Adepetu‘s ‘Everyday People‘) and produced by the trio of Femi Odugbemi (Content Producer), Jaiye Ojo (Executive Producer) and Lemmy Adebule (Associate Producer). With its success, Tinsel has surpassed other MNET soaps like Doctors Quarters and Edge of Paradise which both failed to muster a punch on Nigerian Television.

WHAT’S THE FUSS ABOUT TINSEL’S SUCCESS? What has made Tinsel’s success so monumental is that it’s ousted any other soap, drama or sitcom that has ever run on Nigerian Television in terms of budget and number of episodes.

Older soaps that ran in the 80s and nineties such as ‘Checkmate’, ‘New Masquerade’, ‘Village Headmaster’, ‘Ripples’ ‘Third eye’, ‘Cock Crow at Dawn‘ don’t come close. The maths is pretty simple, while the older soaps (which we are still fond of by the way) ran weekly, Tinsel runs five days a week, about 260 days a year, over four times what a 52-week soap would achieve in a year. And of course spending a huge budget to achieve this The soap also runs on terrestrial TV in Nigeria, making it accessible to over 100m Nigerians. (Something MNET failed to achieve with the now defunct talent show Naija Sings, which only ran on cable TV).

PRODUCTION COST Experts told Nigerian Entertainment Today last week, that Tinsel’s production cost per minute is $900. The end result of 24 minutes of excitement viewers cuddle up on their couches to watch every evening totals to about $21,600. (N3.4m).

It’s however a far difference from another MNET Africa production, the South African Soap ‘Jacob’s Cross‘ which cost about $2000 per minute to shoot (Jacob’s Cross ran for seven seasons, ending in November 2012).

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