Exclusive Interview: Stephen Lambert

PREMIUM: Stephen Lambert has been the creative force behind groundbreaking shows in the U.K. and in the U.S. After working at RDF Media Group for nine years, and shepherding such series as Wife Swap, The Secret Millionaire and Faking It, he set up his own company, Studio Lambert, which created the hit format Undercover Boss. He talks about his strategy for developing and launching shows on both sides of the Atlantic.

WS: What was your mission when you started Studio Lambert?
LAMBERT: Studio Lambert is two-and-a-half years old and we started the company with the idea that we could be a British and an American company, pretty much from the beginning. We actually made that infrastructure investment of having a British office and an L.A. office. They opened within six months of each other. It was a risk. We lost quite a lot of money in the first year as a start up but it has paid off. The whole idea of the company was that we would make shows in Britain—formats—and then we could also make American versions of them. It doesn’t mean that we don’t also do American development; we’re making shows in America that have just come about through American development. But the real heart of the company is that Britain is the best place in the world to pitch and sell and produce paper ideas—just the way the market is regulated here in Britain means that it’s a particularly good place to sell format ideas from paper. And having the British episodes to show to the American buyers is a fantastic competitive advantage. Obviously in the past I had success with shows like Wife Swap, with Studio Lambert we’ve been lucky that so quickly we’ve had a big breakout hit with Undercover Boss.
We made the pilot last year and CBS liked it a lot. They ordered a season and they liked it so much that they decided to launch the first episode immediately after the Super Bowl in February, which meant that we inherited an enormous [audience] and premiered with an extraordinary 38 million viewers. This gave us a fantastic launch for Undercover Boss, so that when it moved to its Sunday 9 p.m. slot, it just consistently rated well. We were averaging 17 million viewers. We were the most popular new show in America last season. And now we are back on at Sundays at 9 p.m. and it’s looking good. 

WS: The American networks for a long time were quite skeptical about anything they didn’t develop themselves. Has that attitude changed?
LAMBERT: I think that the explosion in reality television in the last ten years on the American networks has meant that they have looked for more and more ideas from elsewhere. Nothing is more compelling for an American buyer than seeing the idea already executed. So for us to come a few years back with a pitch tape showing what Wife Swap was like as a [show] that we’d already made in Britain, or more recently for me to show what Undercover Boss was like as a show we had already made in Britain, means that the American buyers who might otherwise be skeptical about a paper idea, because they can see it, are willing to buy it.
And so we are doing the same with other shows. Last month Lifetime launched a show called The Fairy Jobmother, which we made for Channel 4 first. Again, we were able to show Lifetime what the show looked like. They liked it so much that they went straight to series and they even liked the British host, Hayley Taylor, and she’s doing the show in the States. She’s never been to America before, but now she is living in America, traveling all over the country, helping people to get back to work. Like Undercover Boss, I think The Fairy Jobmother is a show for its time. We are living through difficult economic times and engaging, entertaining, but also emotionally intelligent programs that speak to people’s anxiety in the workplace, or their worry about how they might get a job if they lost their job, seem to resonate with an audience, if you can get the format right.

WS: How have you been able to keep your finger on the pulse of what is timely and where do you get your ideas for shows?
LAMBERT: I have a journalistic background. I spent 16 years at the BBC making documentaries. My wife is a journalist. She is a well-known social commentator in the British papers, so I am quite aware of what’s going on in terms of political and social trends. I’m always thinking about ways in which we can make an entertaining television program that speaks to what is happening right now in the world.

WS: What other shows has Studio Lambert produced?
LAMBERT: We’ve just launched a new show in the U.K. called Seven Days. It’s very unusual; it’s quite groundbreaking. We film and edit and broadcast the program within seven days. We’re following the lives of people in an area of London—they are a wide range of diverse people—and the viewers are seeing those lives as they are happening.

There is a big website connected to the program and viewers are encouraged to send in messages and give advice and it’s beginning to have a big effect on the characters. The people in the program are starting to change their lives as a result of the things that the viewers are saying to them: Why did you do this? or Why didn’t you do that? The idea of the show is that it brings together that massive interest in social networking with a television program.

WS: Social media are becoming increasingly important, not only in enhancing but also in promoting shows.
LAMBERT: Definitely, and I think that people, funnily enough, look to social media and to the Internet as a way of making the television-viewing experience feel almost like a live event. The fact that you can share with your friends your opinions about a show, in real time, is somehow helping make the act of watching television a more live and visceral thing than it was before social media happened. That is quite a profound change. People are all the time looking for a collective live type of experience to have with their friends. Look at the way the music industry has completely changed. The live event is the big thing in music; it used to be the other way around. It used to be the recorded music was the big thing and the live event was merely promotional; now it’s the other way around. Social media is beginning to find a way of making watching live television something you share with your friends and talk about in a way that actually goes against the trend of recording the show and watching it at any other time.

WS: What shows do have on the air in the U.S.?
LAMBERT: We’ve got a number of shows that are happening in the States. One is a show we make for truTV called Southern Fried Stings; it recently came back for a second season. We’ve currently got a show on Style called Mel B: It’s a Scary World. It’s a docu-soap following Mel B [former Spice Girl]. We’ve just made an American version of a show we make in Britain called Three in a Bed, where owners of small hotels and B&Bs [bed & breakfast inns] stay with each other and give peer review.
We are doing a big show in Britain that we will soon pitch in America called The Village, where families are competing to win a house that we are giving [away] in a beautiful village. All they have to do is persuade the villagers to let them stay in the village. Each week, two families go and live there and at the end of the week the village votes on who they would like to see come back. At the end, all the winning families return and there is a final vote off and someone wins a £300,000 [$483,000] house. It’s a big prize—the largest guaranteed prize, I think, on British television because one of those families is guaranteed to win the house. It’s in a very pretty village so it’s a very aspirational prize—not only to have the house but to live in that village, because the people who win have to undertake to stay there, they can’t just sell their house. They have to commit [to being there] so it means the villagers care about who is moving into their village.

WS: So despite launching a company in the worst economy since the Great Depression, things have worked out and you are finding opportunities to sell your shows?
LAMBERT: We launched two and a half years ago. The first year and a half we were getting underway. It was a tough time but in the last year things have really turned around. We’ve just finished our financial year. Our revenues were £17 million [$27 million], which for a company that is only two-and-a-half years old seems pretty good to me. We’ve got a very good year ahead of us and I think if you have the right ideas and if you’ve got a way of making shows in Britain and taking them to America, that is a particularly sweet spot.

WS: And then ALL3MEDIA sells those shows internationally?
LAMBERT: Yes ALL3MEDIA sells the formats and the finished shows to the rest of the world and they do a very good job.