Peter Bazalgette, Sky News website

Monday, November 05, 2007

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Big Brother Producer Rounds On Critics: By James Silver, Media Writer

Updated:08:18, Tuesday November 06, 2007

Few British TV bosses can claim to have had an effigy of themselves torched on the streets of India.

But that is precisely what happened to Endemol chief Peter Bazalgette during this year's run of Celebrity Big Brother, when the furore over the alleged racist bullying of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty briefly engulfed the international news agenda.

"One of my friends rang up and said you should turn on the TV right now, they're burning you in north east India!" recalls the tall and faintly patrician producer, booming with laughter.

"I later learned that they have a tradition of burning effigies in that particular part of India so I probably shouldn't take it too personally."

While his critics at home have so far resisted the temptation to take similar measures, there is little doubt that Bazalgette - who steps down as chief creative officer of the group and chairman of its UK arm at the end of the year, but will stay on as advisor to the board next year - tends to polarize opinion.

To his many admirers, he is a TV visionary, who spawned a generation of imitators with shows ranging from Ready Steady Cook to Big Brother. But others are rather less charitable, branding him a purveyor of production-line entertainment, who is single-handedly responsible for swamping the schedules with 'reality' television formats, which can be sold on all over the world.

On meeting 'Baz', as he is widely known, you get the distinct impression he does not care a great deal either way. "It's all been tremendous fun," he says in his distinctive cut-glass accent. "It's been hugely enjoyable creating new formats and pushing back boundaries in a technical sense and in terms of taste. But in the end it's not been quite as radical as some people would make it appear."

His decision to leave follows events earlier this year, which saw John de Mol, Endemol's founder, regain control over the company from Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, as part of a consortium with Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset and Goldman Sachs. But why exactly is Bazalgette, who leaves a business in robust health, moving on?

"Well I think I've done my bit in the trenches," he replies.

"The best way to describe it is I've been on the set-menu for the last ten years and now I want to go a la carte. I'm quite influenced by the experience I've had as a non-executive director of the market-research company, YouGov. In the digital arena there are a large number of fantastically clever people who are inventing new business models all the time and my plan is to get involved with a few of those." He adds: "But I'm not in any particular hurry. I'm not starving."

While starvation is unlikely on a remuneration package worth over £400,000 a year, I wonder whether he might be tempted by the BBC One controllership post, currently vacant since Peter Fincham's resignation in the wake of the row over faked promotional footage from a documentary made by production company RDF about the Queen?

Bazalgette, who has previously ruled himself out and insists it is not some elaborate ruse, shakes his head. "I'm not interested in running BBC One, nor, might I add, have I been invited. Anyway, the last controller of BBC One was a former entertainment producer from the independent sector in his fifties and it didn't seem to end too well. So it would be a bit of a mistake for them to go for another, don't you think?"

Besides, he feels vehemently that Fincham should not have lost his job in the first place. "I think it was absolutely wrong that [Fincham] went. There are two sorts of mistakes you can make in your job. The first sort is of such a gargantuan nature it renders you unable to continue.

"The second is the sort we all make from which you learn and makes you able to do your job better in the future. I think Peter's mistake would have made him a better controller. Everyone thought he was doing a good job and I think they should have kept him."

Instead, he turns his ire on senior BBC management. "The other point about his going is that once [former BBC executive] Will Wyatt's report had delivered its verdict, Peter was un-saveable. The error was to have an external report - I think appointing external inquiries is the last refuge of a management scoundrel. It also means that when it reports back, its verdict is like a court of law, it is inescapable.

"[The BBC] did it to get the press of their back for 48 hours, but it's not the right way to run things, even in the middle of a maelstrom. There are set of BBC trustees, who were put there in the public interest, so let them bloody well get on with it, find out what happened and take whatever action they felt necessary."

When asked whether how badly damaged the industry has been this year by a slew of scandals ranging from charges of fakery to revelations concerning premium-rate phone lines and rigged competitions, Bazalgette, who is 54, is careful to draw a distinction between the row over the Queen footage and the other cases.

"The Queen incident was the most terrible example of chaos theory - one error by [RDF boss] Stephen Lambert, which was no more than the flap of a butterfly's wings, created a chain reaction of chaos. While it was clearly a particular error and it shouldn't have happened, it wasn't intended to misrepresent the Queen on air and I do not personally link it to some complete crisis in TV.

"The phone-in and participation-TV stuff on the other hand has been a crisis. A new source of funding for television and production companies was not properly managed, the people working in it weren't properly trained and the right systems were not in place. It was not done in the same meticulous way in which we make programmes.

"Whether we like it or not, interactivity in various forms is here to stay, people like doing it and it's an important source of revenue. Huge errors have been made and in future it's got to be done fairly and transparently. But let's remember that TV remains the most regulated and the most responsible medium in Britain. The excesses of the newspaper industry in a day are greater than the excesses of the TV industry in a year."

After landing a third-class degree in Law at Cambridge university, Bazalgette dismayed his father by choosing a career in the media over becoming a barrister - "he thought it was a depraved thing for middle-class boy to do" - and joined the BBC as a news trainee.

He went on to work on That's Life as a researcher before founding his company Bazal, which produced Ground Force and Changing Rooms - shows which revolutionized 'leisure' programming and were replicated across the main channels. However, despite his run of highly successful formats, he remains best known for two global hits he produced, rather than created - namely, Big Brother and Deal or No Deal.

So how does Bazlagette respond to those critics who say the Big Brother brand is finally on the wane? "Look, you're asking me about Big Brother UK but I'm on the board of Endemol, an international company, and we've got Big Brother running in 23 countries and it is actually much more resurgent this year than last year," he snaps, a touch irritated by the question. "Around the world it's in rude shape.

"In the UK, this summer's series got an average of 3.8 million a night over 13 weeks for Channel 4, when most nights almost nothing on the channel gets more than 2.5 million, so it's probably not too much of a failure from their point of view. I think Channel 4 probably also heaved a collective sigh of relief that - after the events of Celebrity Big Brother - it was a slightly tamer series and they weren't getting door-stepped by the press all the time."

He pauses. "You do realise that after Christmas, I won't be talking about Big Brother ever again?"

He laughs, but he isn't joking. After defending the show in public for the best part of a decade, the sense of relief that he won't have to do it anymore, once he has stepped down, is almost palpable. You can hear it in his voice. Perhaps the burning effigy got to him rather more that he'd care to admit.

www.jamessilver.net

Posted by James Silver - On Monday, November 05, 2007

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