Episode 3 The Bottom Line

across the Atlantic in several days' time. That's it for me from tonight.

Now on BBC News - The Bottom Line with Evan Davis.

How does a show like the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire become known all

around the world? This market has exploded in the last 15 years. We

are going to hear all about it today. How to hit upon a winning

formula. The legal wrangles. Each week, influential business leaders

gather in London for the BBC programme, the Bottom Line. And you

can see it as well is hear it. To talk us through the strange world of

TV formats, I have three very qualified guests. Charlie Parsons

created a television series Survivor. Castaway Productions

controls all aspects of that franchise. Six people live on

islands, they play a number of games in to survive. It's a sort of mix

between documentary, live reality soap and drama. You struggled to

sell it initially because it has been very successful but it was a

slow start. It was a slow start. I came for a production background,

I'm a producer. I had this idea for doing the show that didn't fit into

any natural categories. In the end they couldn't actually sell it to

the UK in the initial stages so I had to sell it internationally. The

first mention of this show when I was a British TV producer making a

British programme went on in Sweden, a long time ago, 1997. It was an

instant hit. Then I managed to roll it out into different places around

the world. You've got to have one successful demonstration market.

Exactly, and this was a very ambitious show. It wasn't very cheap

to make. It broke all the rules in terms of what categorise formats.

Difficult to remember in the days before Big Brother. But in those

days there wasn't such a thing as reality television. The kind of

people who bought programmes were very specialist in doing

entertainment studio shows a documentary shows or drama shows.

There wasn't anybody who crossed over between all those things.

Effectively that's what reality television is. Usually you would

expect a show to be very good in a home market and then to go

international. I desperately tried to sell it in the UK, nobody wanted

to buy. Later, when it was a big success in America, it got bigger in

the UK. And there were legal dispute about the format, we will talk about

that later. My next guest, Louise Pedersen, is managing director of

all3media international, which sells TV formats around the world. You're

not a producer. No, we acquire the distribution rights and then sell

them internationally to producers. Some of the shows we do, the one

that speak at the moment is global books, which is a show with a family

sitting in front of the television and watching television, it's not an

obvious candidate for a format, but the way in which it is produced,

very quickly, so the show was very relevance. Cash cab is probably our

widest selling show to date. It said in the back of a cab. The taxi pulls

over, picks a passenger, then lights go on and the taxi driver gives them

the opportunity to answer some questions and win lots of money.

This is just a pointer on the street. They get picked up by the

Cash cab. And undercover Boss, which is a sort of business-related

format, really, but it's about bosses from companies going

undercover within their own corporation and finding out what

it's like to do the day job. That's being aired on Channel 4 here and

it's been really successful on CBS. Do you buy the format? You have any

production on that actually makes the programme? We work with

producers. They had the idea, we come along to sell the format

internationally. We won't take show until it's been on air somewhere,

it's important that there is something you can show

internationally. And what is the skill set? Is it sporting a

successful format? Was it just the logistics? Part of it is spotting

one, but I'm not going to claim a huge amount of credit for that. A

lot of it is relationships, understanding, who's got the right

slots for this show, be able to pitch it properly, having enough

understanding that you can explain to people how to make it. My third

guest work for a very large broadcaster. Ricardo Pereira is

director for Europe at TV Globo, based in Lisbon in Portugal. In

Brazil we tend to produce 90% of programming in house, so we buy very

little. Now we are showing homeland at 11 o'clock on Sunday nights over

the summer. Very specific. We've been broadcasting for 14 years. The

Voice Brazil. A few others. On the other hand, we sell formats. For

many years we sold our telly novellas. Long form from us. --

dramas. This story created for that slot, like a film, each chapter

costs around ?400,000. But you can sell these things? Yes, but more and

more, TV stations want to produce their own stuff, with their own

people, their own actors. So we are selling scripts and supervising

production in some territories. In the US and in Portugal. Formats

don't have to be reality shows. Take me back to the 1980s. How did it

work before this format market became the format market that we

know and recognise? There was a format market, it wasn't as big as

it is now. There were fully fund programmes, and that would be your

primary interest as a producer. People hadn't at that stage spotted

the value in those brands to be sold internationally. Gradually what

happened towards the end of the 80s is that people started to look at

ways of doing it, eventually creating especially for those

markets. People realised there was something more entertaining than the

basic question of format. -- quiz show. I remember living in London in

the 80s and about one o'clock in the evening and night, God save the

Queen, that was what was on the BBC. Along with the rest of

globalisation, you see Starbucks on every street corner, you see Who

Wants To Be A Millionaire on every channel. How do you go about out and

a format? You use the word bible. I buy this Bible... You're basically

told how to make the format. You're buying the expertise and how to make

the show, it could be the lighting design, the sat, the title sequence.

We are talking about a great big document. And access to information

and personnel. We are not producing it, we are licensing it. Like you

could decide to buy the franchise for fast food, they teach you how to

make the handovers. -- hamburgers. Louise, take us through the typical

story. It starts on the domestic market, who originated? Who then,

what do they do with it? So let's take a show commissioned by ITV.

It's been there for six or seven years now. The show is a physical

game show, there is a glass cube and a family member goes into the glass

cube and tries to win various challenges for money. Quite an

expensive show to make. The scale of production is quite ambitious. It

looks quite glossy. Typically, we will start talking to people about

self markets just before the show goes to air to train get people

excited about it. And then when the show airs we go back to everybody

with the ratings information. We will then start the conversation. It

is there no doubt to whom you will Phichit and where you will slot it

if you are a broadcaster and beginner negotiation about how much

they will pay. We will talk now about the money side of it. How do

you pay? I want to purchase a quiz show, how do do this? What is the

basis? It easy percentage of the Budget. If you are making it big,

expensive prime-time show in the United States, the percentage that

is the format C will be higher than if you are making a prime-time show

in Vietnam's. Just because budgets are smaller. Isn't that stupid? Did

you pay for the number of viewers it gets...? Broadcasters wouldn't be

able to make it. It have to have a relevance to the cost of production

in their market in terms of what they pay us. If we demanded the same

fee from India as we did from the US, it is not going to happen. The

price you would pay for something globally and the price for which you

would sell something, is very significant price? Is this like

pocket money? Again, yes. With a big show like survivor or Big Brother,

the production Budget is high. -- Survivor. Whoever sells, get their

part. Getting the Bible, they are teaching you to do that.

(CROSSTALK). It is a recipe. The thing is, different markets have

different prices they can pay. We did do Survivor in Bulgaria and the

US but the Bulgarian production is obviously much tighter with budgets.

It is good to sell to Bulgaria and Sebi is sold to 70 countries because

television executives nowadays prefer to go to a certain purchase.

I will purchase this format because it has been proven by the record

instead of creating a show... The weird side effect. I don't know if

you would agree but television executives are almost more cautious

because of these formats. If you think of these formats, they are

really competition with native ideas. The sad thing is it that

there are a few ideas coming on to television. What makes a good

format? I think what you are doing is creating a framework and the

framework is something which can be applied in lots of places. It is a

franchise model. There are building blocks to your programme which make

it unique and make it possible to adapt to different territories.

You're selling framework and you're selling of the expertise with those

of our framework. Some domestic programmes don't have that because

they are a documentary about a particular subject. My big fat gypsy

wedding sold as a programme that you can't translate it because it

doesn't have building blocks in that way. It tells a great story that

doesn't have building blocks in that way. We have got the hang of the

market now for television format. One interesting feature is that we

think of the world is becoming more globalised but this is actually a

very interesting case study of a market which merits that ghastly

word, globalisation. It is also about localising it. The technology

has made it more possible. If you look at the scheduled for all

countries, prime-time, you rarely find a foreign programme. Not even

an important series like CSI which is the most successful franchise.

Everybody produces their own shows because it is a local thing. We are

talking about... I think also the reality television brought in a

thing where people want to be seen on television. Take some of yours.

How might do they change? How do they adapt? Alp have changed

fundamentally but with a show, it is very scalable. You can do it in New

York with a yellow cab or in a motorised rickshaw in the or India.

We need to move on. -- Vietnam's. This industry is about intellectual

property and we know that that raises difficult questions around

protecting its because I can steal it. Once you tell me what it is, I

have it and I can run off with it. At this point, Charlie, we should

get from you, the man in the studio with the most experienced in this

department. Tell us the story of Survivor and Big Brother. When I

first went out and sold Survivor in the TV market, there were two people

who licensed it with a view to selling it. There were two Russian

companies, one who made Big Brother and the Swedish who eventually made

Survivor. A little later, and after the programme had been a success,

Big Brother had sold in Holland but Survivor had not. In a very early

days, possibly wouldn't do it then but we took the view then that they

had stolen our intellectual property because we had licensed it to them

and it was essentially a similar idea only it took place in a house,

basically the same structure to the show, rather than an island. We lost

that in court. We were obviously are spending a lot of money and time on

it. It went up quite a long way. Who knows? You have to put it in the

context of it being the beginning of reality television. If I look back,

in hindsight, perhaps what I was trained to do was protect a genre

rather than a programme. This was in 1999, I think. It sounded like the

final judgement of the Dutch Supreme Court had a certain logic to it.

They said, " Format will typically have a number of elements and it is

very clear that if you only have one of those elements, it is not a copy

and if you have all of them, it is a copy." In between... It was a long

time ago. At that time, it was very early days of this whole thing. I

would genuinely say that that eight or nine of the elements were the

same but obviously, the crucial one especially for a non- TV making

audience, would be that it isn't on an island so how can you say that it

same. I understand that. They famously went on to make Big Brother

around the world, will be one of the biggest format producers in the

world. They make Big Brother with you, Ricardo, in Brazil. You found

yourself getting into the case defending them because they wanted

to take other people to court. This was before the first big brother.

They made a company to produce it. It took a few months. I think, in

the meantime, another broadcaster had a great idea where they decided

to put 20 people in the house. LAUGHTER. The only difference was

that instead of regular people, they had actors and actresses. They

actually broadcast it and it did well. Globo suit them and won. The

problem with TV formats is that in law, you can't protect an idea.

Effectively, it is a set of building blocks but also an idea. Have you

had problems with this? We try to head off if we get wind of someone

doing it. Someone can go into production with your show without

paying you and you can remedy that easily and you can say that this is

based on our format so have a format E, can we, please? That can get

sorted out. There are other cases where shows in the market are

similar to ours and we have decided not to take it to court. That you

copy as well, sometimes? We don't because we aren't producers, we just

sell. We do come across shows the vows which look similar to something

else. You have a discussion that says we can't get away with it? We

have the discussion that says, what makes it different? Can you talk

through the creative process that gets us to your idea that helps us

to pitch the show and to defend the show against allegations of it being

a rip-off. I want to get at the idea of how close something has to be to

be a rip-off and also to build on the success of something. If you

take Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and I can remember sitting in a

hotel with lots of international stations in another country and

flipping through anything about five different versions with the same

diamond shaped graphic with the answer options and the same music.

If I make a quiz show with increasing gradient in the prizes as

you go through and a single contestant, is that a rip-off of Who

Wants To Be A Millionaire? It was tightly branded. It was a big

success in controlling that which they did very carefully. It was a

huge success. It was well worth it. (CROSSTALK). I have the Millionaire

show in my territory. You would rather buy the success...

One guy, three gas, in a radio studio. I can go back to Brazil and

do it. I find it very perplexing. If some jurisdictions improve your

format, taking it and improving on it and then you that sell their

version to other people. You sell their ideas on. Absolutely. In

conjunction, they will come up with a brilliant idea and the community

will benefit. It works both ways. We had a lot of problems with a show

which is quite similar to Survivor called Get Out Of here. -- get me

out of here. It encourage us to sell a celebrity version in territories

we had sold it in before. How much do we get to these insurance? How

much did the US pay for an episode of Survivor? Every deal is

different. Generally speaking, the format he is between 1%- 10% of the

Budget. There may be additional things such as merchandising or

licensing which you do in conjunction with broadcasters that

every deal is different and territory dependent. Survivor is an

expensive show to make. Production costs of the American chill are

probably $600,000 or more per episode. It obviously doesn't sound

like it is that much money. I just try to get a rough idea if you get,

I don't know, $50,000 per episode, it isn't bad. It isn't as much as

people think. In mid-range format E for a mid range European territory

such as Sweden Poland could be around 3000 euros per episode. That

little? Think of it in terms of volume, of course. If you have a

successful daytime television show and you play it 40 weeks out of the

year, that is five times 40, whatever that is. You have longevity

and it could run for years and years. We better end it there. My

guests, Charlie Parsons, the Wii is Peterson, and Ricardo Pereira. If

any of you want to purchase this format, I will entertain offers and

I will write the two bible. My thanks to our guest. I will be back

with more guest next week. Don't forget the downloads are

available on the website. You can always listen to it on the radio. We

also like to get your e-mails. The weather is taking its toll on

many parts of the UK at the moment. Attention has turned to the strength

of the wind in the south with an ample warning from the Met Office in

the southern counties. Just up to 70 mph inland or 80 mph along the coast

as we go into the morning. The storm will crawl northwards. We will see