Endemol’s Peter Bazalgette

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

Some of television’s most
successful reality formats, including Changing Rooms, were the fruit of Peter
Bazalgette’s imagination. He joined the Endemol group in 1998 and was appointed
chief creative officer in 2005. He also serves as the chairman of Endemol U.K.
and heads up the company’s Global Creative Team, making sure a constant flow of
fresh format ideas keeps feeding Endemol’s production pipeline. As Bazalgette
explains, Endemol’s success depends on its ability to come up with formats that
not only will work in one territory, but that will become hits in many
countries, like Big Brother or Deal or No Deal.

TV FORMATS: How does the Global Creative Team work?

BAZALGETTE: The Global Creative Team (GCT) is not really there
to sit around and create shows. It coordinates the whole creative effort of the
group and is made up of the creative bosses of our larger territories. We meet
in person six times a year, and we talk on the telephone every week. We
sometimes brainstorm particular ideas, but most of the time we are watching
tapes and looking at the latest creative ideas from the different territories,
and deciding who’s going to pilot what show.

One of the key things
about the Endemol group that I find of enormous value is that because we have
[offices] in about 30 territories on five continents, we’ve got more chances to
get new shows on air. If you were just one company in one market, you would
only get ideas from that one territory. Equally, I don’t know whether you are
familiar with a book called The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. It’s an interesting book. The
main thesis of the book is that crowds are wiser than individuals because they
disagree with each other. From that disagreement and those different
perspectives you get different results.

In Endemol we have that
quality of the wisdom of the crowd. For instance, at the moment we have a
couple of new game shows we are working on from the creator of Deal or No Deal,
Dick de Rijk. Those shows are being simultaneously piloted in Italy, the U.K.
and the U.S. The producers of those shows are making their show one day and
phoning their colleagues in another country the next, looking at the way they
did the graphics, borrowing that idea and taking another, and so on.

TV FORMATS: How
do you see reality TV evolving, and what formats work best internationally?

BAZALGETTE:
There are new trends in the reality field, but the first point to make is that
reality is stronger than ever. Reality formats are strongly in demand, as
evidenced by ratings for Big Brother this year in Italy, which is airing season six; in Australia, which
is also in its sixth season; and the U.K., which is airing season seven.

Secondly, celebrity
reality shows are hugely in demand, and our latest hit along those lines is Circus
of the Celebrities, which has been
a major hit in Portugal and is about to go on air in Italy. In the show,
celebrities have to live together and learn circus tricks and perform every Friday
in front of a live circus audience. It’s a toughie.

A third trend is sports
reality, which has been a major money earner for Endemol U.K., where they have
had hits like The Games, which
is a sort of celebrity Olympiad, and The Match, which is celebrity football. Another is a
football reality format called Soccer Aid, which raised money for a telethon. And the latest one is Stars on
Horseback, with celebrities show
jumping against the clock. Sports reality is going very well—if a
broadcaster doesn’t want to buy an expensive sports event, why doesn’t it
create its own?!

And then our creative
teams are working very strongly on creating new reality situations. What is a
reality show if not taking members of the public and challenging them one way
or another? We’re working on new scenarios. There is one show we’re investing
$300,000 on at the moment and we’re shooting our first test of it. It’s very
complex and involves all sorts of skills.

TV FORMATS:
What new formats are you offering?

BAZALGETTE: There
are two shows and they’ve got working titles because their titles may change
from country to country. Both are game shows and both come from Dick de Rijk,
who is on exclusive contract to us. By the way, that is one of the things the
GCT does. We hired him on exclusive contract to Endemol and we pay him at the
center, as it were, and he is a resource for the different production companies
around the world. One of the game shows is Show Me What You’ve Got, and the other is For the Rest of Your Life. They are being shot for ABC in the States, which
has commissioned between seven and ten episodes of each to see how they go this
autumn. In the U.K., the two shows are being piloted and at least one will go
to series for ITV. Show Me What You’ve Got has been sold to RAI Uno in Italy. It’s currently on air and doing
well. There, it’s called Tutto per tutto.

It’s interesting, one of
Endemol’s assets is an archive of 1,000 formats, and we have to bring formats
out of that archive and reinterpret them from time to time. Fear Factor
was one of those, by the way. The show in the U.S. was a re-working of an old
Dutch format.

And a show called 1 vs.
100 has been on the air in Holland
as a lottery show for four or five years. It has recently been sold to NBC in
the U.S. and to the BBC as a lottery show in the U.K. That’s a show we will be
re-presenting because of the new interest in the U.S. and the U.K.

We’ll also be making
further presentations of our comedy panel shows; [they are] a really promising
new genre for us. We’ve brought a particular show called Eight Out of Ten
Cats to market before, but it’s
doing even better than before. It recently achieved record ratings in both the
U.K. and in Denmark. This semi-scripted comedy show consists of two panels, one
of comedians and the other of special guests, and a host. The show’s particular
angle is based on polls and market research. Every week special research is
done to find out what the country is talking about and that is a get-off point
for the comedians to unleash their spell around those themes. That show is
doing better than ever.

TV FORMATS: Do you think of all the new distribution outlets
when you are creating a format?

BAZALGETTE: We are a company that is all about multiple revenue
streams. And the creative guys these days are likely to come up with an idea
that involves a television channel, a website and a mobile phone, but they don’t
think technology, they think entertainment. We are creating an emotional
experience, but immediately their minds will switch into how could people enjoy
this across how many media—what are the exciting possibilities? Big
Brother is always the classic
example of this because it is a single entertainment idea that you can enjoy in
a 24-hour period on about six different media, whether you’re in a chat room on
the website, or you’re voting online, or sending an SMS message and taking part
in a competition, or watching video streaming on a digital channel, or whether
you are watching the [analog] TV channel—these are all different experiences.
Big Brother is really the
archetype for us and it has formed our creative thinking for several years now.

TV FORMATS: And
what about mobile applications?

BAZALGETTE:
There’s one recent mobile product that we have done in the U.K. with O2 as our
partner. We launched a format exclusively for mobile called Get Close To…, in which fans can get closer to their particular
favorite band. We launched it with The Sugababes, who are an English lady
combo. It involves them shooting their own video footage backstage, packaging
that stuff up, and it’s a chance for fans to send their own material in as
well. It’s a user-generated opportunity and has, to some extent, redefined some
of the possibilities with the O2 platform. That’s an example of a format we can
now bring to MIPCOM. Let’s not pretend these things are raising revenue on a
scale that our TV formats do, but they are harbingers of the future.

TV FORMATS: Are
you building up your scripted formats?

BAZALGETTE: Endemol
has a leading position in scripted formats in Italy, Holland and Spain, but
when my colleagues and I on the management board took over at the beginning of
last year, we discovered we had this good position in scripted but it was being
ignored and not organized. So we’ve appointed Caroline Torrance as head of
scripted programming and distribution. She’s working hard on trying to create
the network synergies between the scripted producers that we already have [and] our entertainment format producers. We are now getting our scripted producers
together twice a year for a scripted exchange, and swapping their latest ideas
with each other.

We want to do some
co-productions and we are happy to invest in some future productions. An
example is a telenovela in Argentina, Doble Vida—Caroline has made the decision to invest in
the second series of that. And then we will be distributing that to non-Endemol
territories.