Sir Peter Bazalgette has been an influential figure in the history of the global format industry. First as a creator of formats through his own company, then as the executive who brought Big Brother to the UK and finally he helped build Endemol into a worldwide powerhouse. He has seen the format business from every angle: as a producer, distributor, broadcaster, and industry architect. He was also one of the key figures behind the UK’s Communications Act of 2003, the legislation that gave independent producers the right to retain their IP and created the conditions for a generation of global format hits. In this conversation, he traces the institutional history that made the UK the world’s dominant format exporter and why he believes that ecosystem is now under serious threat.
Bazalgette’s explanation for British creative success starts not with television, but with music. In the 1960s, UK art schools gave a generation of creatively inclined, somewhat anarchic teenagers a place to go, young people who didn’t fit the conventional academic path but had something to say. The result was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and David Hockney.
“No art schools, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, and no Kinks because they didn’t fit in at school. They had this strange escape valve, which was the art schools. And that tells us: if you’ve got institutions that give creative people their head, sometimes you get extraordinary results in unexpected ways.”
There’s a parallel with television. What art schools were for music, the BBC and ITV were for format development: institutions that trained a generation of creative talent and then, crucially, were forced to liberalise. Channel 4, launched in 1982, could only commission from independent companies. The independent quota of 1988 required a quarter of all programmes to come from outside the broadcaster. And then came the Communications Act of 2003.
“What 2003 did was give value to production companies, because they owned their rights. These producers then had the incentive to hard-sell their own finished programmes and formats. Exports burgeoned. Subsequently quite a lot of people made quite a lot of money by selling companies that now had IP value, because they had a library, rights, and so on.”
“No art schools, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, and no Kinks because they didn’t fit in at school. They had this strange escape valve, which was the art schools. And that tells us: if you’ve got institutions that give creative people their head, sometimes you get extraordinary results in unexpected ways.”
– Sir Peter Bazalgette
Our reflections: Bazalgette’s institutional history of the UK ecosystem is the clearest account in this research of how policy creates the conditions for creative output. The Communications Act is often cited as a turning point, but Bazalgette locates it in a longer sequence: art schools, Channel 4, the independent quota, and finally the rights legislation. Each intervention opened a door that the previous generation could walk through. The UK’s dominance in format export is not a cultural accident. It is the cumulative result of deliberate, and some not so deliberate, interventions over four decades.
The most vivid illustration of how ecosystems shape creativity in this conversation is the story of Deal or No Deal. It begins with a rule that wasn’t supposed to be broken.
The Dutchman Dick de Rijk had invented a five-minute end-game mechanism, a deceptively simple prize structure, embedded in what Bazalgette describes frankly as a rather conventional quiz show. When the Endemol network spotted the potential of that final game, De Mol’s response was categorical: the format could not be changed. Not one element and to be fair, De Mol had had huge success by creatively sticking to his guns up to this point.
The British, Bazalgette admits, simply accepted this and moved on. But the Italians did not.
“Italians have never consciously obeyed a rule in their life. Marco (Bassetti, red.) and his colleagues took that five-minute end game and turned it into a half-hour show where it was simply the whole show. Within a year, on RAI, it was ripping the competition apart in prime time.”
In fact, it was the Italian Prime Minister’s channel, C5, that was suffering. The show became so dominant that Berlusconi personally intervened to try to get RAI to drop Deal or No Deal. When that failed, his team at Mediaset stole the presenter and launched an identical format with Greek statues instead of boxes. Endemol spent two years suing them.
But the story didn’t end there. The Endemol Spanish, looking to save production costs, housed participants in a hotel between shoots. By spending time together, contestants started forming bonds, cheering each other on, sharing personal stories. The show became something emotionally much richer than its original mechanics.
“It’s a very good story. It goes again to culture, and to the network effect.”
Our reflections: The Deal or No Deal story is a masterclass in how ecosystems produce innovation. The original format was locked down by its creator. But when it entered different cultural and institutional contexts such as Italian rule-breaking and Spanish cost-cutting, it was transformed into something better. The insight is structural: the network of independent producers, operating in different ecosystems with different constraints and freedoms, collectively improved what no single central authority could have designed. This is the network effect Bazalgette championed against the grain of too centralised a model. And it’s precisely the dynamic that the Format Innovation Model identifies as the engine of format export success.
Bazalgette is candid about his own failures at Endemol. When he was running the international operation, he gave resources to a central creative team tasked with developing formats that could be distributed across the network. The results were disappointing.
“Honestly, we didn’t come up with very much.”
What did work, he argues, was the opposite: a genuine network in which creative teams in different countries shared briefs, shared ideas, and challenged each other across borders. One country’s unsold concept became another’s commission. One market’s structural constraint became another’s creative opportunity.
“You had creatives in different countries sharing ideas, sharing challenges. You get more creatives thinking about more things, more challenges. That’s the network effect. And a network which is not controlled rigidly from the centre, but which is free to connect like this, is much more productive.”
He recalls making this argument directly to De Mol at an Endemol creative gathering. Given his extraordinary success up to this point with his own formats, De Mol looked a bit sceptical. But he’s deployed similar strategies in his various production companies since.
Our reflections: Bazalgette’s distinction between central creativity and the network effect maps directly onto the agency dimension of format innovation. Of course each company in a federated group needs a well-led creative team. But single central creative teams, however talented, on their own tend to produce ideas that reflect the assumptions and blind spots of the institution they sit inside. The network effect works differently: it multiplies the number of creative perspectives brought to bear on any given problem, and it allows ideas to travel between contexts where they can be transformed rather than simply replicated. And it’s all the stronger across borders as different cultural perspectives enrich outcomes. This is why the ecosystem matters. It’s not just a backdrop to creativity. It’s the mechanism through which creativity scales.
Bazalgette’s view of the current moment is stark. The ecosystem he spent decades championing, independent producers with rights, a competitive broadcaster landscape, public media willing to take creative risks, is under serious pressure from a single structural force: international streaming platforms.
“The ecosystem is almost dead. The real game in town, in terms of content investment now, is the streamers. And the American streamers keep nearly all the rights. So, everything we worked on and fought for looks as though it may be finished.”
His concern goes beyond the formats business. What worries him most is cultural: the risk that European countries lose the capacity to make programmes that are, as he puts it: “made for us, by us, about us”. The shows through which a society develops its shared values, processes its challenges, and ignites its national conversation.
“We don’t want our content dominated and dictated by mono-cultural companies. Particularly when they might be media companies increasingly aligned with Trump! My main concern is much broader than entertainment formats. It’s that each European country gets to a place where it still has at least one, possibly two, healthy home-grown creative funders and distributors of programmes.”
He draws a direct parallel with the French response to Hollywood’s post-war dominance: the invention of local cultural subsidy as a structural defence of national culture. He sees Europe facing a similar moment now.
“This is like round two of that phenomenon.”
Our reflections:
Bazalgette’s pessimism is not about creativity. He is optimistic about human creative capacity. His pessimism is structural: the institutional conditions that allowed independent producers to build durable, internationally exploitable IP are being dismantled by a new generation of gatekeepers: the international streaming platforms that operate on exactly the logic the Communications Act was designed to prevent. The rights that took decades of political effort to secure are being surrendered, contract by contract, without the collective resistance that would be needed to stop it. The industry is losing a battle which it doesn’t currently appear to have the means to fight effectively. French rules demanding 50% local productions, UK laws mandating platform prominence for local ‘public service’ media … these are a start. But they don’t tackle the rights issue.