EVER LOOKED at the audience ratings for Irish television programmes and thought: “That can’t be right. Where did all these people watching Don’t Tell the Bride/Prime Time/insert as appropriate come from? Surely, they don’t represent the nation?”

If you have thought this, then you are wrong, as the panel of homes used to measure TV viewing in Ireland is proportionately bigger here than it is in many of our European neighbours.

Industry body TAM Ireland has announced that the size of the panel is now 1,050 homes, up from 800 two years ago. Two years ago, the research

company that compiles the ratings, Nielsen, extended its contract with TAM to 2017 on the condition that it increase the size of the panel.

This has now been completed, with the result that there is now one TAM home for every 1,500 in Ireland.

This compares to one in 4,500 in the UK, one in 4,400 in Italy and one in 3,037 in Sweden.

TAM homes are selected with reference to both general demographics and the television landscape – in crude terms, the panel reflects the proportion of people nationwide who have access to digital channels, and those who don’t. Establishment surveys are conducted three times a year to ensure that any changes in the television-owning population are reflected.

In TAM homes where live viewing and PVR habits are recorded on a meter, there’s also a guest registration system so that Nielsen knows if it’s you or your teenage son watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians, or both.

“The feeling in the industry would be that the panel is incredibly representative,” says TAM Ireland chief executive Jill McGrath.

So the bad news is that Mrs Brown’s Boys really is that popular.