The UK remains the world’s largest exporter of formats, but with the country’s economy in dire straits and commercial networks making safe bets on reboots as they worry about ad revenues, what lies ahead?

ITV’s version of The Masked Singer was renewed formats

It’s the economy, stupid. Or, at least it was, until the pressure built up in the UK by a combination of Brexit, Covid-19 lockdowns, a costly furlough scheme and the war in Ukraine, culminating in a Conservative Party leadership election won by a candidate promising energy bill bail-outs for all and tax cuts for the rich, all paid for with borrowing. The UK’s currency suffered immediately after the new prime minister’s controversial ‘mini-budget’ in September.

And last week, the whole rigmarole started again, with another resignation and another leadership election under way to find yet another resident for 10 Downing Street.

Kevin Lygo

For those in the UK, there have been enough times of economic strife recently for them to be fairly sure of what comes next. Embattled companies will cut advertising budgets, which in turn gives channels less to spend. In the formats world, that tends to see them gravitate towards reboots of shows with a proven track record.

The main terrestrial channels in the UK had already been going for reboots of classic IP in a big way in 2022, even before the pound began dropping faster than a contestant on a certain ill-fated celebrity diving show.

ITV’s 1990s Saturday night staple Gladiators is coming back on BBC One, which is also trying its hand with a UK version of Survivor. ITV itself is going around again with Big Brother (the third UK network to launch the classic Dutch format after Channels 4 and 5), while C4 has brought back Changing Rooms, Gamesmaster and The Big Breakfast. C5 is reviving Challenge Anneka, while Sky has brought back music quizshow Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Fantasy Football League. Truly, a good idea is a good idea forever.

Kevin Lygo, MD of media and entertainment at ITV, was quick to defend the reboots. “Big Brother is category-defining. I would honestly say it’s the most extraordinary programme we’ve ever witnessed and changed everything when it came along. We’d genuinely never seen anything like it. So it’s not like we’ve said, ‘shall we bring back Strike it Lucky’? It’s a special thing.

“We learnt from Love Island that when these shows work they are incredibly important to a commercial broadcaster like ITV. Love Island busted the myth that teenagers don’t watch TV. Every night, at 21.00, there they all were, watching ITV2. If we get Big Brother right, it could do a similar job for us and there’s clearly a desire for that sort of programming.”

90 Day Fiancé started out a decade ago on TLC in the US

Lygo admits ITV is “quite brutal” with new shows that fail to pull their weight. “If they don’t work in one series we’ll probably kill it,” he says. “In the old days you’d give everything a bit more time because everything was higher rating. Now I almost never do a new entertainment show without a fully funded, proper pilot – sometimes more than one. If you look at Masked Singer, Masked Dancer, One Per Cent Club, Starstruck, we have commissioned new shows that are coming back for a second season, so there is still new stuff out there.”

Big Brother’s return to UK screens marks the first major Banijay format commission for entertainment and format producers Natalka Znak and Claire O’Donohoe since they joined the group. Banijay UK acquired format specialist prodco Znak TV and appointed founder Znak, creator of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (which remains the UK’s biggest show for 16-34s, despite Love Island), as CEO of its Remarkable Entertainment and Initial labels to create a new unscripted group late last year.

“It’s a hard job to reboot such a popular show. TV has moved on from when Big Brother was first on TV and we used to love sitting there watching people eat their cornflakes,” Znak says.

Clare Laycock

“The trick is to keep the heart of it but make it feel modern. I’m having so many conversations with hardcore fans saying, ‘don’t touch it, don’t do this, you’ve got to keep everything,’ but I think the hardcore fans will watch it and I need the people who’ve never watched Big Brother to tune in. My 16-year-old daughter doesn’t even know what it is – that’s the person we’ve got to appeal to.”

Now embedded at Banijay, Znak these days has the benefit of a big catalogue of IP to potentially bring back and reboot. She admits her times at a smaller indie without that advantage could be tough in this climate.

“Happily, we’ve just got a second season of Starstruck on ITV and that’s selling internationally, but all producers know development is often a thankless and miserable task,” she says. “Ninety-nine percent of what you pitch is not going to get picked up and an awful lot of what you do make then doesn’t get picked up either. I’m now running a number of companies with more stuff to throw out there because it’s quite hard. Before that, I was running my own prodco and it’s quite brutal because that lack of pick-up means it’s constantly feast or famine.

“It’s really brutal in the US. At least Kevin [Lygo] will get to the end of the season. In the US, they will pull your show on the second episode if it’s not rating, and that is hard.”

At the newly merged Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) there’s another reboot in the works for the UK. Former senior VP and head of content and planning Clare Laycock is celebrating her promotion to head of editorial at WBD UK with a new version of dating format Beauty & the Geek.

WBD’s and Beauty & the Geek is set for a UK reboot

“That was last on Channel 4 in 2006, but it’s since been rebooted in Australia and it was that version that caught our eye,” Laycock says. “If you think what’s changed from 2006, one thing is the rise of the geek. They didn’t used to be cool but they are now. They’re paying all our salaries, they’re who you want to be with. The beauties in our version have successful careers, double degrees; it’s going to surprise you when you watch it because it’s about checking your stereotypes.”

Discovery has become better known for spin-offs than reboots, with female-skewing lifestyle cablenet TLC regularly producing up to half-a-dozen different versions of 90 Day Fiancé and shows like it.

“For us to be successful it has to work in all our key markets, both the original tape from the US, UK or wherever it’s from, and then the local versions,” Laycock says. “Something like 90 Day Fiancé for us is a brilliant example of that. It started life on TLC US 10 years ago and now has multiple spin-off series and a whole universe. We’ve made a local UK version that’s been massive.

“You have to look after your big, valuable brands. 90 Day Fiancé and Say Yes To The Dress have been around a long time and you need to keep refreshing them with new talent and, sometimes, a twist. Bringing back and rebooting a show is a different thing. We’re doing both of those things but we’re doing brand new things as well. We have a new show, Written In The Stars, in the dating space launching in December on Discovery+. That’s risky. They’re big swings, they’re expensive. You go into those with your heart in your mouth a bit and they’re hard to land.”

Gama Gbio (photo: Richard Kendal/RTS)

Gama Gbio, entertainment producer at Tim Hincks and Peter Fincham’s BBC Studios-backed prodco Expectation, agrees that bringing back old formats isn’t as “risk-free” as perhaps critics of reboots often like to paint, and the notion that it’s now all reboots and the creative community has run out of original ideas is unfair.

“When you bring back an old format you have two sets of viewers. You have the hardcore fans who are really excited about something like Big Brother, like myself, then you have the new gen,” Gbio says. “It’s about finding the middle ground, keeping the essence of the original format and what people loved about it, but also adding a layer on to make it a bit more current. It is quite risky bringing back old formats; it’ll be the same with Beauty & the Geek.

“For the whole time Love Island has been on there have been other dating shows that have succeeded – like Dating & Related, Love Is Blind and Too Hot To Handle. Even though you are bringing back old formats there is a hunger for viewers for another turn of the wheel looking at the same subject.”

Gbio is also part of that younger target audience for a lot of these shows herself, and adds: “I’m a massive 90 Day fan and what they’ve done well with it is it starts as a dating show and there’s 90 days to get a visa. But millennials and Gen Z are nosey fuckers, so we watch them in 90 Days but we want to know what they’re doing next. Are they having babies? How’s the rest of the family feel? You want the spin-offs because you can relate.”

Both Laycock and Lygo have new streaming products on the market, with Discovery+ coming up on two years old and ITVX due to launch by the year’s end. Both, naturally, skew younger and Lygo says it will also enable ITV to be a bit riskier and more niche in its commissioning than it is for the main channel.

“The younger demo is vitally important to Discovery+, mainly because our linear networks don’t reach that audience,” Laycock says. “It’s important to get our content seen by different groups of people and Discovery+ skews younger just because it’s digital and an SVoD. We have a lot of reality on there. We’re not, however, going down an 18-34 sinkhole because you go too narrow and you don’t have scale. You have to have broad appeal.”

WBD’s worldwide hit format Say Yes To The Dress

“With ITV, we have to be all things to all people and the truth is a lot of these shows we talk about, they’re great shows but they have very small audiences,” Lygo says. “To ITV, we really make our money out of mass audiences and these wouldn’t necessarily work. What we’re stepping into with ITVX is more niche shows, without broad appeal.

There is a reason Love Island goes on ITV2, not the main channel, and Big Brother will play on ITV2 as well. The way they work best is if you flood your channel with them. That’s not appropriate for ITV, which has to satisfy a lot of people. We’d scare the old ladies away.”

Despite the economic strife, the UK remains the biggest exporter of formats, and a UK or US TX is still a gold standard for formats, according to Lygo.

“It’s easier for lazy English broadcasters, who can then watch it in their own language. But I do think the rest of the world looks to the UK and US to see if it’s a success, and if it is then it tends to be in another,” he says. “It’s a great place to showcase and develop.”

Although drama has long been the buzzy industry genre, the expense of it and production times mean there are far fewer of them – 90% of the new commissions in the UK last year were unscripted programmes, which, of course, populate vast swathes of the networks lower down the EPG.

The UK also originated the largest volume of unscripted format sales in the world in 2021 – but will that continue as budgets are squeezed across the country?

Clare Laycock, Kevin Lygo, Gama Gbio and Natalka Znak were speaking at the RTS London Convention 2022 in September.