John de Mol: Big Brother’s daddy

23:24But DeMole's idea of isolating the house from the outside world and filming and streaming participants live to the world 24 hours a day, that was new. And making it all into a competition with one winner left at the end, that was pretty new. So there had been this Swedish reality TV show in 1997 called Robinson Crusoe that was actually quite similar. So that show had put 16 people on an island with the contestants themselves voting off one member of their group at the end of every week. But the first person voted off that programme had taken his own life just a month after leaving the show, which was before it had even been shown on TV.

24:02So the contestant's widow campaigned for the programme to be cancelled, but an internal inquiry at the channel concluded there was no proof that the suicide was due to the man's participation in the show, and they went ahead with the broadcast anyway. Now, this caused uproar in the press. The show was likened to Lord of the Flies, but it got high ratings, so it was deemed a success. And later on, the format was bought by an American network and renamed Survivor, a show that was a smash hit and is still running today. But when John Dumont was pitching his new reality show, that controversy was still very fresh.

24:36And remember, we know that he's somebody who thinks that courting controversy is good for ratings. So he kept reworking his idea, pitching it to different channels in different countries. all the commissioners were wary. By 1999, the format had reduced down from a year to 100 days and he had renamed it Big Brother after, of course, the totalitarian leader in George Orwell's famous dystopian book 1984, Big Brother, who was always watching you. It's a much better name than The Golden Cage. Oh, it's so... I mean, again, I think that, you know, Endemol's a good name. Big Brother, genius. It's all about branding and TV, baby.

25:12Unfortunately, Demol was still finding the same opposition from commissioners. So he gave himself a deadline. He wanted to link the show to the upcoming turn of the millennium. The winner would come out of the Big Brother house at midnight on the 31st of December, right at the start of 2000. Y2K. Working backwards for that timing to work, for that 100 days to work. This meant the show had to start in September 1999. So he had just nine months to sell Big Brother and get it on air. Now in March, he thought he had made a deal with the German channel, but then that collapsed. and then Damol was desperate.

25:45He still, however, had total belief in this idea, so he decided to try a new strategy, one that had a lot more risk for Damol, but a lot more potential reward too. He went to a new youth channel in the Netherlands called Veronica. They'd already turned him down once, but this time he offered to share the financial risk with the broadcaster. So basically what he was saying was instead of the usual fee for the production company to make the show with the TV station making their money back by selling adverts, Endemol would share the costs, but crucially also share the profits from the advertising.

26:17So that meant if Big Brother flopped, both Endemol and the channel would lose money. But if it was a success, Endemol could make way more than they usually would just by selling the format. So this was a pretty unprecedented deal in television. It was a big risk for Demol. If Big Brother flopped, Endemol's share price was sure to go down. But with Endemol taking more risk, that meant there was less risk for Veronica and that clearly sold them. The channel took the bait. they agreed to buy the show. So in May, DeMole had a deal. Endemole would put up half the$6 million budget for half the ad revenue.

26:49But he also had four months now to get the show on air. So 1999, busy year then for John DeMole. Endemole auditions around 3 ,000 people to be Big Brother contestants. They have to sort the logistics of filming the show. They've got to sort the live stream. And meanwhile, the newspapers are already full of speculation. Some are denouncing the format as voyeurism. Psychologists are warning that people will get off the rails. The Dutch Institute of Psychology officially warning people against being contestants. Nothing like being warned to not do something to make you interested in why shouldn't I do it.

27:23You would think that psychologists would know that. But you can imagine John DeMole looking at all this free publicity, chain smoking away, rubbing his hands of glee. I mean, he's in the show business, you know, he knows how it all works. But not everyone at Endemol felt the same way. That summer their head of press doubted the show would ever even make it on air. And all the speculation puts even more pressure on the show and on Demol. And just weeks before Big Brother is due to air, hardly any advertising slots have been sold. That's a big problem. And this matters not just for the channel but for Endemol because their deal depends on ad sales.

27:55And even Demol at this point starts having doubts. He's worrying about the deal he's done. Then just two weeks before launch, a test run with 10 contestants in a makeshift house with 24 cameras, 59 microphones was a disaster. The footage was boring. Who would have thought? The crew thought Damol would explode, but he didn't. I think this is such a key moment here in his story. Instead, he calmly diagnosed what was wrong and tried to help the team fix it. He added a voiceover to give the show a narrative and he made the diary room, which is where contestants would go and talk about their feelings, into even more of a big feature of the show.

28:32Now, both these things would go on to become iconic parts of the programme. Dear five in the Big Brother house, and tempers are beginning to fray. Exactly. For those of you who did not watch British Big Brother, that is a very accurate impression of the Geordie voiceover artist who is the narrator of the show. And with these additions to the show, Damol is once again sure this time he's got a hit on his hands. In an address to staff, he says, Big Brother will be for Endemol what Mickey Mouse was for Disney. Wow, bold words. He predicts in 20 years, people will talk about two eras of television, before Big Brother and after Big Brother.

29:10And maybe he's right. You know what, I actually do think he's right. We will come to discuss this later, but I do genuinely think that this is a real turning point for television. Because there was reality TV before Big Brother, but that format really changed the landscape. It really wouldn't be the way it is today without that show existing. I remember, I mean, people would talk about it the whole time. There were people who were addicted to it. Some of the characters in it became, well, they became celebrities. and their lives were chronicled even after they got out of the Big Brother house.

29:39It was, of course, as we now know, a huge hit. When it launched, it had a 20 % share of the Dutch audience on a channel that only usually got 3%. Soon that was up to 40 % with another 7 million visiting the web stream. And when the finale screened on New Year's Eve 1999, two-thirds of the country's population were watching. Big Brother was more than just a hit. It was a smash. So now John DeMoll could really start making money. Just a month after the show had launched, TV execs from all over the world had already been queuing at Ndemoll's stand at an industry sales conference to buy the franchise.

30:14Just months after the Dutch version had finished, new versions of the show were on screens all around the world. And DeMoll was getting offers from networks in the USA, which was and still is the biggest, richest marketplace in television. That's right. After 20 years of licensing US formats, he was finally going to sell something back to the Americans. And he feels like flexing his muscles. He said the US execs would have to fly to Europe for meetings with him, something that was unheard of. Usually he'd be the one flying to the US to pitch his wares. Well, the shoe was on the other foot here, because guess what?

30:46They all did exactly what John DeMo demanded. One Ender Moe staffer said, I've never seen American TV executives jump on a plane so quickly. So soon a deal was done with the US network CBS who agreed to pay$20 million for the first season of the US version of Big Brother. And the incredible success of that show meant Endermore's share price tripled by February 2000. So John de Moe and his partner Joop van den Ender decided it was time to sell up and cash in. Two big companies were interested in buying them out. One offered more money, but the other was more international. So they owned companies across Latin America.

31:24And that meant they could open doors for Endemol in new territories. Interesting timing. You know, cash in a bit at the moment of maximum hype and publicity. You're never going to probably ever make another TV show as impactful as that. So maybe this is the time to do it. All the senior management of Endemol met at John's house to consider these bids. He laid on an enormous vat of caviar and their expensive bottles of chills, wine. But the decision was really all down to John and Youp. And as John was going to stay on as creative director while Youp was getting out of the TV business, Youp told John he could do whatever he wanted.

31:57It's up to you, mate. So John picked the company that would open doors, Telefonica. He knew it was only a matter of time before companies across the world would be copying Endermore's ideas. So he figured they'd be there first to copy themselves. Plus, Telefonica were going to take Endermore off the stock market, buy all the shares, take it private, with no obligation to shareholders. John liked that idea too. When you've got shareholders as a public company, there's a lot of transparency. You have to answer to those shareholders. If it's a private company, you can kind of be left to your own devices.

32:27Plus, it's not like this deal wasn't still enormous, right? Exactly. Telefonica was offering$5.3 billion for Endemol, three times more than any production company had ever been valued at before. It meant that John and Youp were going to pocket over a billion dollars each. I feel like if anybody who works in TV is listening to this episode now, their eyes are going as big as sources at the amount of money being talked about. The last of the good old days. When the executives were put on a vat of caviar rather than pizzas. Yeah. So even so, right, when he announced his choice to sell to Telefonica, colleagues noticed tears in John De Moe's eyes.

33:00Give me a break. But, you know, actually on the day the deal was going to be signed, he actually threatened to cancel the whole thing because the papers were late arriving. But when they finally did, him and Youp signed. And just to sort of put this in context, it was March 2000. This was the height of the dot-com boom. The Nasdaq would peak just seven days after the sale, and soon after that, it would crash. But none of that mattered to John DeMole, because Big Brother had just made him a billionaire.

33:40So where has he gone from there? He's a billionaire. Now what? So the early 2000s saw Big Brother spread across the world like wildfire. And also, don't forget, Endermore also had more hits of its own. Yeah, Deal or No Deal sold to 84 different countries or territories. Fear Factor actually started in the Netherlands before Big Brother, but only sold internationally after the success of Big Brother. It actually became really big in the US, where it boosted the celebrity of one contestant called Joe Rogan, who has since gone on to have quite a successful podcast. Fear Factor challenged members of the public to perform tasks that disgusted them or scared them.

34:14You know, things like eating pizza made of cow bile crust, coagulated blood paste, rotten cheese and fish eyes, being buried in a coffin with live worms. I remember watching that. And alongside Big Brother, it really cemented John DeMoe's reputation as the king of trash TV. And like Big Brother, it can be seen as a precursor to a lot of today's reality TV. There was, though, another company that claimed they started it all. In the year 2000, a British television company, part-owned by the singer Bob Geldof, started a legal battle with John De Moe, claiming that Big Brother stole its concept from Survivor.

34:48Remember, that kind of shipwrecked contestant show that was originally called Robinson Crusoe. So they sued John De Moe in an Amsterdam court for theft of format. But after five years, the courts ruled in Endemol's favour. But the case was considered groundbreaking because it established that TV formats can be creative works protected by copyright law. So it sort of confirmed this idea that IP, intellectual property, is all important in the TV industry. And it also made his former ideas, I think, seem even more valuable. Yeah, there's an old thing, you can't copyright an idea. But if you actually sort of turn that idea into something that you can put on paper, like a format and say it does this and this and this and this, that is more than an idea.

35:33That's a thing. Kind of property like a house. Exactly. So once you turn it into a thing, it does have some legal protection. So this was like a double win for John DeMole, right? Yeah, exactly. He understood that his ideas were more important than the company that sold them. He left Endemole in 2004 and set up another production company called Talpa. And it was at Taupa that John DeMole came up with another huge hit, which you also probably have heard of, The Voice. Now that premiered on Dutch TV and has since sold all over the world. I mean, he is very good at television. And he's made some big deals since, including buying back part of Endemol and selling Talpa to ITV in the UK for$500 million.

36:14In 2015, DeMol revealed that extortion attempts were behind the selling of his company, Talpa Media. He said, issues in my personal life, including extortion that went on for more than a year, absolutely had an impact. You have to realise this was the fifth time this had happened to me and my family. But DeMol's main focus as he enters his 70s is still actually on the creative side of the TV business. Yeah, he recently said that developing and producing formats is something that, in his words, he'll never grow tired of. So let's get on with our format and judge John DeMoore.

36:50Is he good, bad or just another billion? This is where we judge them on a number of categories from 0 to 10. And we start with just their wealth. John DeMoore's wealth has hovered between 1 billion and 2 billion since becoming a billionaire. So he's an entry-level billionaire between one and two. But we also look at sometimes how they spend it. And after he became a billionaire, or soon after, he paid$20 million for a private jet. Mostly, apparently, so he could smoke on his flights after smoking was fully banned on commercial airlines in 2000. Now, smoking is expensive enough as it is, but$20 million so you can smoke, that's a big price ticket.

37:26I have to say, I'm not a fan of private jets. But I do think that if you're going to buy one just to smoke in, that is quite a baller move. That's quite a billionaire baller move. And in 2003, he bought a 130, a 3.4 % share in Manchester United Football Club, which he has since sold. Buying part of a sports team, also very billionaire behaviour. We've certainly come across that before on this show. But I will say, I think, you know, as you point out, he is just an entry-level billionaire. Yeah, and his investments have been quite private. In 2000, he created something called Certi Investments to manage his finances, which invested in, guess what?

38:00television companies but also the Dutch sports car company Spiker Cars they make kind of these limited edition supercars. I'm sure he's got a supercar or two in his garage. So what do we give him for wealth not just about absolute but how he spends it so one to two billion is entry level that's about a two but private jet football team sports car company I'm going to give him a five. I think I'm going to go lower than that I feel like a private jet is just par for course when you're a bailiard these days. OK, so maybe you've talked me down to four. What are you going to give him? I'm going to give him a three out of ten.

38:34OK, four and three. Villainy, what has he done to get to the top? And one of the key criticisms, of course, of reality television is the impact it has on the people who take part. And John DeMole's view on this, he said in 2003, if I created a show with ten people in a plane and nine parachutes and I stalled the plane out at 20 ,000 feet, I would get thousands of people to volunteer for that show tomorrow. I would never do that. There is a line in my head. But let's face it, there's a big difference between where that line is today and where it was 25 years ago. Basically, the line for what is trash has definitely moved a little bit.

39:10Right. OK. Now, I think it's important to say, though, that while some former Big Brother contestants have had struggles with their mental health and been hospitalized following their appearance on the show, there have been no deaths linked directly to Big Brother appearances to date. In 2022, the Dutch version of The Voice was taken off air, while sexual abuse allegations against a coach and a band leader were investigated. De Moor apologised on behalf of the company, but was thought to suggest that women as well as men had lessons to learn. But a group of female employees took out a full page advert in a Dutch newspaper, castigating him, saying, dear John, it's not the women who are the problem.

39:46Now, DeMond said he wasn't aware of the abuse allegations and only aware of one complaint during his time as executive producer on the show. One coach so far has been sentenced to two years in jail for rape. Another case has since been dropped. And DeMond has long been a contentious figure in Holland. There's a culture of distrust of billionaires in Holland. I think so much of how you feel about how villainous he is depends on how you feel about the formats he's created and the impact they've had on society. Yeah. I go back and forth on how I feel about reality TV. I think if you talked to me about this 10 years ago, I'd have gone terrible, absolutely awful for society, just a bad development for human morality.

40:27It's a 10 out of 10 for me on the villainy scale. But actually, I think I've kind of moderated my condemnation of reality TV so far just because I think it just fed its impulse in humans to watch other people doing things. And even if you look at shows on reality TV now, they brought a lot of entertainment and joy to people's lives. Yeah, I think in terms of villainy, he's a TV exec who hit upon a great idea, proved controversial, got lots of publicity. There it is. So I'm going to say for villainy, I'm going to give him, you know, not very much. I mean, two or three. Yeah, I mean, controversial as the show was in its heyday, and it was very controversial.

41:05It wouldn't have been controversial if people weren't watching it. So, yeah, I would give him a two out of ten. Yeah, I'm going to give him a two out of 10 for villainy. Two out of 10 for both of us. Now, what about philanthropy, giving back? Not much to go on. Not much to go on. You know, there actually isn't that much information about the kind of money John DeMole's given to charity. I mean, he often promotes schemes to help TV producers develop and sell ideas, but that's about it. Giving back. Listen, it's got a question mark, probably zero. Yeah, I would give him a zero for this. He really hasn't done, he hasn't redeemed himself here.

41:36Power. Two ways of looking at this. This is sort of, you know, big picture politics, how they changed the world, whatever, and there's power within their own industry. Within their own industry, you know, power and legacy certainly left an indelible imprint on television forever, but doesn't dabble that much in politics. He's not a, you know, he's not a kind of Rupert Murdoch type character. No, he hasn't publicly talked about politics, nowhere that we can see. He's not made any donations to political candidates or parties, so he's really kept himself out of that sphere. So score's low on that one, but I mean, in terms of TV, an absolute colossus.

42:08Yeah, I mean, if you worked in TV and you got a call and someone said, it's John DeMole for you, you would pick up. You would 100 % pick up. He'd be 10 in terms of legacy in the TV industry, almost zero in terms of big picture politics. So I'm going to go straight down the middle and give him a five. Oh, I see. I would give him more than that, just because I think the legacy of Big Brother is enormous, right? This idea that ordinary people can become celebrities. Andy Warhol thought about that 40, 50 years ago. But he didn't gamify it. He didn't turn it into a contest. He didn't turn it into a format.

42:42Yeah, he didn't turn it into a format. And I think really when you think about it, that whole idea that TV just runs on formats these days, I actually think you could attribute that to John DeMole. OK. But he makes them into a game. Our darkest urges. Our darkest urges. Oh, our most positive ones, Simon. OK, OK. Sometimes Big Brother could be uplifting. OK, five for me. What's it for you? I'm going to give him a six out of ten. Okay. And then we have to decide whether he's good, bad, or just another billionaire. This is where we should dig into, you know, whether this has had a corrosive impact on society and people's mental health.

43:15Look, he's not a drug dealer, which we've done on this program. So he's definitely not in that category. But what I do think he's a participant in is when I sometimes go and interview young kids and whatever, when we're talking about what you want to do as a job, as a financial journalist, the idea they want to be just on TV or an influencer. I do think that I've got problems with that. Right. I don't know. Maybe I look back on the golden age of Big Brother with rose-tinted glasses and I think there have been so many moments now that are just part of British cultural life that have come from Big Brother that I can't help but feel a little bit more fondly than I should towards John DeMole.

43:51It depends whether you consider those golden moments of TV history or really embarrassing ones. Maybe I just have very low standards. I think that I'm going to just say I can't make my mind up about this. So I'm going to say he's just another billionaire. I think maybe for once you may have swayed me because I think that image that you've just put out there of a young child telling you that they just want to be famous on television. Yeah. Maybe makes me feel a little bit icky about Big Brother. OK. More than I should. OK. So you're going to go on. I was going to go good billionaire for all the golden moments of television that John DeMoore has given us.

44:23But maybe I'm going to downgrade that to just another billionaire. I think that's the first time you've convinced me. Second. Second. You've convinced me about four or five times and I've convinced you only twice now. I like how you're keeping score. I am keeping tabs on it. So, John DeMole, thank you for the memories. You are just another billionaire. You've got to do the Big Brother voice now. At the end of the podcast, John DeMole, you have to leave good bad billionaire.

44:53Simon, did you know this is our 50th episode? You are kidding me. Oh, gosh, 50 episodes. Blimey, it's gone in a flash. Yeah, unfortunately, 50 episodes later, neither of us are any close to being billionaires. That's too bad. But we've had some incredible stories along the way, and hopefully we'll do 50 more. And we want to thank all our listeners. You guys have been with us from the very start, and now you know exactly how to make a billion, and hopefully you'll be much better at it than me and Simon have been. And we're not finished yet. Who have we got next episode? For the first time, we're talking about a video game designer.

45:25Yep, we're talking about Markus Persson, the Swedish coding king who programmed the world's most successful game, Minecraft, all by himself. He made a billion, but is he good, bad, or just another billionaire? Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast. It's produced by Mark Ward with additional production by Tamsin Curry. Paul Smith is the editor and it's a BBC Studios audio production. For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the commissioning editor is John Manel. And if you enjoyed it, do tell a friend.

46:05This is the story of The One. As head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the HVAC is humming, and his facility shines. With Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces, plus 24-7 customer support, his venue never misses a beat. Call QuickGrainger.com or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.