Winning a battle to switch on viewers

They were told their shows would never work. But three 'reality TV' pioneers are now getting their due, writes Shane Hegarty.

Families didn't gather around their television sets for Cash Mountain, and the tabloids didn't go into a frenzy for the reality shows Survive and Project X. During the mid-1990s, television companies around the world rejected these three shows. It was a time when TV was stuck in a rut. Schedules were congealing under rehashed ideas and repetitive formats. The audience was fragmenting. The ideas were drying up. Yet, these three programmes, its creators were told time and time again, were not going to change the world.

They couldn't have been more wrong. Cash Mountain, Survive and Project X became Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Survivor and Big Brother. They colonised the television world, were adapted and shown in more than 100 countries. One, Millionaire, returned the quiz show to prime time, but Big Brother caused a constitutional crisis in Mali and earned itself a fatwa in the Middle East. And the three men behind the shows - an Ulsterman, an Englishman and a Dutchman - became very, very rich indeed.

A new book, Billion Dollar Game, tells the story of how Millionaire, Survivor and Big Brother were created by Paul Smith, Charlie Parsons and John de Mol respectively. It is written by Peter Bazelgette, the man responsible for bringing Big Brother to the UK, an achievement that earned him a place in the Daily Mail's "10 Worst Britons".

These ideas changed the face of television, insists Bazelgette. It wasn't just that they were pioneers in exploiting new media; they were web events too, underwriting their hefty budgets with phone lines.

While Millionaire revitalised the quiz show, Survivor and Big Brother went several steps further. "These shows were not just reviving a genre, but creating a new one," says Bazalgette from the London office of Endemol, the production company responsible for Big Brother. It is no surprise, then, that he is a cheerleader for reality television.

"Survivor came up with the simple but now all-pervading 'balloon' idea of people voting each other off and the group shrinking one by one.

"Big Brother provoked, shocked, outraged all around the world. In a sense, of all these ideas Big Brother rocked the foundations of what can and can't be done on television. It was shocking to an older generation that this one didn't mind being watched, and that others didn't mind watching them."

Only five years ago, these were radical ideas. Today, they are mainstream. Millionaire spawned a few look-alikes, such as The Weakest Link, but Survivor and Big Brother's imitators became mainstays of the schedule only a few years after being radical, challenging and even unwanted. These shows with either ordinary people or celebrities pretending to be ordinary people have provided fresh meat for broadcasters everywhere.

Even though Ireland didn't air a Big Brother, RTÉ has had Inside 252, Treasure Island, Cabin Fever and Celebrity Farm. TG4 tried it with local wilderness for SOS and even TV3, low on home-made programmes, adapted the formula for the quickly forgotten Haunted House. Of course, it's worth noting that the Gay Byrne radio show was doing a version of Survivor for years before the cameras came along.

"All three ideas eventually conquered the world, but at first they were told they were crap - they would never work," says Bazalgette. "So they took huge risks and kept going long after the rest of us would have put them into the bottom drawer and forgotten about them."

Originally from Northern Ireland, Paul Smith made his name with It'll Be Alright on the Night and such blooper shows, proving his tenacity by going to Hollywood and personally badgering Blake Edwards into giving him Peter Sellers's Pink Panther outtakes.

One morning in 1995 Smith took a call from David Briggs, who had the idea for a game show called Cash Mountain. The original idea involved answering 21 questions, with a final prize of £5 million. Its secret weapon would be the revenue from phone calls and there would be an old-fashioned musical interlude. ITV turned it down, believing that people weren't prepared to watch strangers win vast sums of money.

ITV's controller was finally persuaded several years later after playing the game with £100 of his own money. After a little tweaking, changing its name and dumping the musical interlude it became the most successful quiz in television history.

It may not have created so many headlines, being light on sex and social impact, but at a time when the atomisation of the family was having a deep effect on television, which was increasingly sliced into demographics, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was a simple show that threw viewers back to television's early years. Here was a programme watched by everyone from toddlers to grannies. The multiple-choice format encouraged risk-taking by the contestant, while encouraging the public to yell at the screen.

"It's still in 50 countries, but at its peak it was shown in more than 100. The format wasn't the problem, it was that it was done to death. It was a cash cow. In the US it ran so often on ABC, and relied on it so strongly, that it wore it out." But if Millionaire brought the generations together, Big Brother and Survivor widened the gap.

Billion Dollar Game tracks the sweep of Big Brother across the globe, and everywhere it is greeted with dismay by the press, and huge ratings by the public. The Middle East version was abandoned after a furore started when two contestants greeted each other with a kiss on the cheek, leading to fears of terrorist attack.

In Germany, the first series attracted 30,000 newspaper articles. It led to an advertising boycott in Mexico. "These were people for whom television should be, it seemed, a cross between an educational facility and an improving enema," says Bazalgette. Yet, each attracted enormous ratings, usually among under-30s. Interracial relationships, gay contestants and transsexual winners challenged orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, old-fashioned love stories and the straightforward novelty of public sex boosted many of the shows.

Whether it should be called "reality TV" is a moot point, of course.

"To some extent it is a contrived, completely false premise, but what flows from it is real," explains Bazalgette.

The reality formats reconstituted the idea of celebrity. The Germans coined the phrase "trash heroes" to describe unapologetically ignorant contestants, often working class and from damaged backgrounds, who caught a public mood.

In Britain, Jade Goody survived the taunts and abuse of the tabloids to emerge as its first trash hero. More than two years later she still regularly appears on magazine covers, because the game didn't end with the show. For each move Goody makes in her life - pregnancy, boob job, new love - there is the financial reward offered for her story.

The genre, however, has often drawn fire for its manipulation of contestants. Consistently rebuffed in the US and Britain, Survivor first aired in Sweden as Expedition Robinson.

When contestant Snisa Savija was the first voted off, he left with a jolly word to the other contestants. "Get on with your supper," he told them. A few weeks later he walked into the path of an oncoming train. An inquiry found that the show played no part in his suicide and when the show resumed it became the top-rating show.

Bazalgette offers a sterling defence of the genre. "Of the 900 housemates so far," he writes of Big Brother, "only one has been reported to be in serious mental difficulty."

The first Portuguese winner threatened suicide four years later.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes there has been an almighty battle over just who came up with the idea first. It had taken Charlie Parsons and his partners five years to sell Survivor to US television. One morning they opened a copy of Variety to see that Big Brother had begun on Dutch TV. The lawyers were called. While these programmes have made their way about the world, making millions for its creators, there was a five-year court battle between Parsons's Planet 24 and Endemol in which it was claimed that Big Brother was an idea nicked and adapted from Survivor.

Eventually, the Dutch supreme court decided not and John de Mol remains one of Europe's richest men.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon continues. Reality TV is massively popular across the globe, and Big Brother continues its march. Thailand and the Philippines will this year get their own versions. Neither is likely to arrive or leave quietly.

"There's a quote in the book," says Bazalgette, "that this is 'the generation without shame'. Before there was privacy and a dislike of nudity. Remember, people in their 60s and 70s, their parents were probably the first generation to see each other naked even when married. But Big Brother didn't create this young generation. It simply reflects what is going on."

Billion Dollar Game by Peter Bazalgette is published by TimeWarner, £12.99

Who wants to be a millionaire?

Big Brother

First shown: the Netherlands, 1999. First winner: Bart Spring in 't Veld. He was also in the first sexual coupling.

Success: Shown in more than 20 countries, but has spawned many, many imitators.

Creator: John de Mol, who has become one of Europe's richest men, worth almost $2 billion.

Survivor

First shown: Sweden, 1997 as Expedition Robinson.

First winner: Richard Hatch won original US Survivor. A devious contestant, he was naked for much of his time on the desert island.

Success: Shown in more than 50 countries, there have been many variations on it's theme.

Creator: Charlie Parsons's production company Planet 24 (including Bob Geldof) still earns £10 million a year from Survivor.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

First Shown: Britain's ITV, 1998.

First winner: John Carpenter in the US, who didn't use a lifeline until the last question.

Success: At one point, was being shown in over 100 countries.

Creator: David Briggs devised the format, Paul Smith was producer. Both became millionaires.