Company behind ceremonies in Athens booked for Glasgow 2014

Jack Morton Worldwide, the events firm which also co-ordinated the celebrated opening pageant for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, has vowed to capture the “true spirit” of Scotland’s biggest city in the two flagship shows which will have a potential global television audience of more than a billion people.

The opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games will be held on 23 July before a crowd of 60,000 at Celtic Park, while the showpiece closing event will be staged 11 days later at the home of Scottish football, Hampden Park.

With a budget of £14 million to conceive and produce both ceremonies, the Boston-based company said it was “thrilled” to land the contract, and promised to “make Scotland proud and inspire the watching world.”

Jack Morton was widely praised for its ceremonies at the Athens Games eight years ago, which combined a pageant of traditional Greek culture and history with complex technical feats, including the creation of a vast lake in the heart of the Olympic Stadium.

It was also responsible for the ceremonies at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006 and Manchester four years previously, while it organised celebrations in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square during the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge which were attended by over 200,000 people.

Organisers of Glasgow 2014 said the company had been appointed after an “exhaustive procurement process” to ensure the “extraordinary and complex” events prove a success.

David Grevemberg, chief executive of Glasgow 2014’s organising committee, said: “The opening and closing ceremonies of Glasgow 2014 represent a unique and unprecedented opportunity to inspire national and international audience with a dynamic and vibrant experience of Scotland.”

Jack Morton has said it intends to hire both “established and emerging” talents in Scotland to help realise its vision.

While the company will handle the production of the ceremonies, Glasgow 2014 will also call on television executive, Eileen Gallagher, to drive forward the creative vision. The co-founder of Shed Productions, the firm behind shows such as Footballers’ Wives and Waterloo Road, she is an independent director on the board of the organising committee.

The opening ceremony, which will herald the arrival of the Queen, will also see thousands of athletes from around the world enter the stadium. The closing ceremony, meanwhile, will see the flag handed over to Australia’s Gold Coast, hosts of the Commonwealth Games in 2018.