Sony Pictures Television president of international production Wayne Garvie looks back on his career so far as he prepares to receive the Gold Award at the 2020 International Formats Awards this week. By Jonathan Webdale.
The first TV format Wayne Garvie ever worked on was The Krypton Factor, a physical gameshow that, after more than 15 years on ITV in the UK, was beginning to look, well, a little feeble alongside its new musclebound counterpart Gladiators.
Garvie was brought in as a budding producer in the mid-1990s by one Andy Harries, at the time controller of comedy and entertainment at producer Granada Television, to liven up the show.
“We managed to destroy The Krypton Factor,” he says now, reflecting on this formative experience in an interview conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic. “In our madness of trying to find a new way of doing it, we lost sight of all the essential elements that made it so successful.”
He recalls coming into work the morning after the revamped version aired and receiving a call from an angry pensioner who “harangued” him for 20 minutes for ruining her favourite programme before passing the phone to her husband to do the same. The complaints kept coming.
“I got an immediate understanding of how audiences love shows and you tamper with these things at your peril,” says Garvie. “I became very respectful of formats that have longevity, both for the audience and the businesses that make them. I learned a big lesson there.”
The business Garvie now makes formats for is Sony Pictures Television (SPT), where he is president of international production, while Harries, his former Granada employer, is CEO of Left Bank Pictures, the SPT-owned maker of Netflix’s The Crown, a prodco Garvie had a hand in financing while MD of content and production at BBC Worldwide (BBCWW).
It was at the latter’s public service parent, which he joined in 1998 as head of entertainment, that he brought his Krypton Factor experience to bear, taking flagging BBC quizshow A Question of Sport and tweaking it successfully, so that it remains on-air.
But it was through The Weakest Link, Strictly Come Dancing, the latter’s US version Dancing With the Stars, Dragons’ Den and Top Gear that Garvie cemented his reputation, at BBCWW (now BBC Studios), steering investment in the production outfit set up by the motoring show’s host Jeremy Clarkson and exec producer Andy Wilman.
“I love the fact that formats are really a team effort,” he says. “There’s never one person you can say created that show, or very, very rarely. That was certainly the case I felt with Strictly, which was the product of so many different people. And I suppose that also then opened me up to the international world of formats. It wasn’t something I’d ever been involved in.”
Garvie recalls how, at the time, BBCWW was unable to sell Strictly in the US, so he took his team out to LA – more as a reward for their success back home than in hopes of a sale – and ended up scoring a deal with ABC, with the show now destined for its 29th season this year.
“And then we had a similar experience with Dragons’ Den, which is something that I now have responsibility for in my role at Sony. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a number of really successful formats that either my teams have created or I’ve inherited.”
In the latter category is Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, which SPT acquired in 2008, prior to Garvie’s arrival in 2012, after he left the BBC in 2010 for a two-year stint overseeing international production at UK production group All3Media.
“Millionaire was off-air in the UK and I was thinking, ‘What would you do to bring it back?’ And I thought, ‘Well, who would I watch presenting Who Wants to be Millionaire?’ And I thought, Jeremy Clarkson.”
He rang up the former Top Gear frontman, went round to his house and found out he happened to be a huge fan of quizzes and was up for the challenge. ITV renewed Millionaire two years ago with Clarkson as host to mark the show’s 20th anniversary. “In this day and age, if you’re going to bring back some of these shows, the casting is so important,” says Garvie.
The exec’s SPT remit gives him oversight of both the company’s non-scripted and scripted activities spanning 21 wholly owned or joint-venture production outfits. Among these is Northern Ireland-based Stellify Media, which Garvie helped establish and was behind the Millionaire revival.
Stellify also brought back long-running ITV dating format Blind Date for Viacom-owned UK terrestrial Channel 5 and more recently created Netflix’s first British unscripted original in the shape of last year’s Fear Factor-esque comedy gameshow Flinch.
Curating flagship heritage formats is one part of Garvie’s job, but another is driving the creative development of new properties with a view to global recognition. Flinch isn’t there quite yet but the streamers have certainly boosted the sector as a whole.
“A few years ago we were all pretty depressed about formats. It seemed that there wasn’t anything new,” says Garvie. “There were so many successful long-running shows and there wasn’t room on terrestrial broadcasters for new ones to emerge. But the advent of the streaming services, and particularly Netflix’s investment in non-scripted content, has given a bit of an injection and people are definitely being more creative now.”
Aside from the Stellify commission for Flinch, Netflix also acquired the finished format My Million Pound Menu, made for the UK’s BBC2 by fellow SPT label Electric Ray. “Suddenly a lot of our formats have got a life they wouldn’t have had before,” says Garvie.
There are, of course, challenges in working with players who prefer global rights when formats have historically relied on territory-to-territory licensing fees. “The traditional model is you sell a format and then you make your money in the long run off the format sales. Now, of course, you receive a premium from the streaming service, which sometimes can be a big uplift, and you get cash in immediately. It’s all about what kind of deal you can strike with them,” says Garvie.
The ideal for SPT is a “mixed economy,” he adds. Unlike Disney, WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal, the company is focused on production and steering clear of launching its own streamer. This means working with a variety of partners, including the broadcast community, remains key.
But this mixed economy is becoming even more mixed as the world changes, notes Garvie, highlighting the popularity of SPT’s Dragons’ Den channel on YouTube and the way the company is now engaging with online talent to try out new ideas.
The exec set up the Future Formats Team within SPT two years ago, overseen by unscripted entertainment chief Sarah Edwards, with a view to securing the company’s position in a rapidly changing marketplace and drawing on resources across the Sony group, such as gaming and virtual reality, to devise new IP.
“We realised we were set up to sort of find the next Millionaire, but actually that world, that moment when Millionaire or any of those other shows happened, just doesn’t exist anymore. There are lots of formats now where you’ll get one season away and that will be it. People will go on to other things and there’ll be other shows that emerge,” says Garvie.
“But what’s interesting now is a faster turnaround of formatted ideas. The traditional model – where you create a format, sell it to a terrestrial broadcaster, it does well in one territory, then you sell it to 40 countries and it runs for years and years – that’s changing and that’s both the opportunity and, of course, the risk. But I’m actually much more positive about non-scripted formats than I was several years ago.”
SPT has high hopes for Latin America as a digitally-savvy, cost-effective production hub for incubating new ideas, and after decades of John de Mol dominating the Netherlands, Garvie sees a new generation of format creators coming through there also. Dragons’ Den came from Japan and, of course, the industry’s latest sensation has been The Masked Singer from neighbouring South Korea, adapted so successfully in the US by Fox.
“Buyers have realised what is going to attract the attention of the eye as its spins through so many channels and offerings is something like The Masked Singer. It’s bright, colourful, a spectacle. So, we’ll see a return to spectacular and slightly crazy programming,” says Garvie. “You get one idea that works and it can transform an entire channel. You see that around the world. Fox is resurgent because of The Masked Singer and before that The Voice rescued NBC, so these ideas can still have an enormous impact.”
