Like many a reality show hit, Survivor was created by Brits. Peter Fincham welcomes its return to our screens

Survivor is back (BBC One, Saturday and Sunday evenings.) For those of you who don’t follow the show, it’s one of the original reality formats and has been a staple of American network TV for over 20 years.

It was created by an Englishman, Charlie Parsons, and initially launched in Sweden under the name Operation Robinson. I was at school with Charlie in the early 1970s, though he was in the year below me so I don’t really remember him. My older brother Anthony was a friend of his brother Gerald.

Charlie started a production company, Planet 24, with his partner Waheed Alli. They produced The Big Breakfast for Channel 4. When Operation Robinson was rebranded as Survivor and bought by CBS, they got their big break. It’s now on its – wait for it – 44th series, and it’s on in lots of other countries too.

In the UK Survivor ran for a couple of seasons on ITV and then was dropped. The timing wasn’t good – Big Brother had recently launched on Channel 4 and quickly became the gold standard for live, unpredictable, newsworthy reality TV. The glossy, heavily edited Survivor seemed a bit staid by comparison.

Around this time Carlton TV – remember them? – bought Planet 24 and made Charlie and Waheed rich. Their weekend house parties at their country house in Kent, near to the school Charlie and I had attended, became legendary. (Full disclosure: I was never invited.)

But Carlton had made a fatal mistake. With their UK-centric view of the world, they failed to acquire the rights to the most valuable thing Planet 24 owned, Survivor. So Charlie and Waheed became richer still. Waheed joined the House of Lords, becoming Baron Alli of Norbury, and Charlie never needed to work in TV again.

Fast forward 20 years or so and, only a few weeks after the revived Big Brother turns up on ITV, here comes the revived Survivor on the BBC. Truly, what goes around comes around.

I discussed Survivor on my podcast Have You Seen? with Mariella Frostrup and Daisy Goodwin. I enjoyed it – they weren’t so sure.

Presumably the BBC thought: it’s been running for ever in the US, so there must be something in it. Which I thought was sound.

The first episode is always heavy on set up, but the casting seemed excellent and it all looked lovely, set in the Dominican Republic. I could imagine settling down with it as the autumn nights draw in.

Daisy and Mariella thought it was very old-fashioned, and they were particularly troubled by the use of the word “tribe” to describe the teams. It’s true that “tribe” is a bit of meaningless jargon to distinguish Survivor from other reality shows. When contestants – or tribe members – are evicted at the end of an episode, they have to extinguish their torches like characters in an anthropological documentary in the Amazon. This certainly has a whiff of cultural appropriation but I can only say it didn’t bother me as much as my fellow podcasters.

What’s remarkable, and I’d never really thought about this before, is how many of the super-formats that still dominate non-scripted TV date from the same period, and how many of them were created by Brits. Survivor launched on CBS in May 2000. In 2001 Pop Idol launched on ITV, though it only ran for a couple of series before being replaced by The X Factor in 2004. (It did however spawn Fox’s American Idol and almost as many other “Idols” as there are countries.) I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! launched on ITV in 2002. Then came Strictly Come Dancing which premiered in 2004 and, as I’m sure you’re aware, is still going strong. The Apprentice launched in the US in 2004 and in the UK in 2005. (Question: which presenter of The Apprentice went on to become head of state in the country where it was broadcast? Answer: not Lord Sugar.)

Of all the above long-running, world-beating formats, only Big Brother (created by the Dutchman John de Mol) doesn’t have British origins. Even the The Apprentice, although originally an American hit, was created by an Englishman – Mark Burnett, who was brought up in Dagenham.

There’s one more super-format worth mentioning. It was at roughly at this time that Daisy Goodwin and I hopped into a taxi and went to Channel 4 to pitch an idea for a new factual series, to which the commissioning editor responded by saying it wasn’t much of a format, he didn’t like the title and the presenter didn’t seem spiky enough for Channel 4. Stop me if I’d told this story before – it was Grand Designs, which launched in 1999. It’s still running.

On Have You Seen? Daisy made the point that Grand Designs is a “plain” format – no twists and turns, no producer-led set-ups and surprises. You start with a hole in the ground and end up with a house.

This raises the question: what is a format? The cynical answer is that it’s a format if the lawyers decide it is. Simon Fuller (creator of Pop Idol) and Simon Cowell (The X Factor) battled this out in court. Was The X Factor just Pop Idol with a couple of twists, or a completely separate piece of intellectual property? I can’t remember who won; the lawyers, certainly.

It’s a good business to be in. Somebody once pointed out to me that John De Mol, who created Big Brother (and later The Voice) is apparently worth more than Paul McCartney. That’s two reality formats versus the soundtrack of our lives.

Charlie Parsons was the beneficiary of an expensive boarding school education in Kent, but the couple of hours – I’m guessing – he spent knocking out the basic idea for Operation Robinson will have given him a better return on his investment than anything his parents and teachers could have planned for him.

Will the new Survivor survive? Time will tell. If it does, maybe I’ll finally get invited to one of those parties.

Peter Fincham is co-founder of Expectation TV. Previously he was Managing Director of Talkback, Controller of BBC One and Director of Television at ITV.

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