![]() I saw them as the engine, me as the carriage."īoyd's role was to supply the television talent and experience to turn an idea into a hit show. I thought, these two boys know what they are talking about. In the event, only one other former Bizarre editor, Piers Morgan, has enjoyed a role in the Got Talent spin-off.ĭespite the global success of the show Boyd, who had made his name with popular hits including Surprise Surprise, Blankety Blank, Blind Date and the Royal Variety Shows, recalls being only modestly interested. The details are fascinating and reveal, for example, that the backing of the Sun newspaper was seen as vital to the success of the show the team even considering approaching Dominic Mohan, the then editor of the paper's Bizarre column and now its editor, to be a judge. The original idea, which had been inspired by talent shows such as Popstars, included national auditions on a scale never before attempted, a panel of four judges, public voting, with the result declared live, big auditoriums, lavish production and state of the art sets and lighting.īoyd scribbled down the key points, now familiar to audiences around the world, on the memo paper we print here for the first time, which he usually keeps carefully squirrelled away in his desk drawer. Total profits are estimated to run into hundreds of millions of pounds. Fuller's 19 company, which controls two thirds of the Pop Idol format, also takes big cuts. ![]() Thames, now renamed Fremantle, and owned by RTL, still owns one third of the Pop Idol format, and oversees licensed productions including the Cowell formats. No one knows the combined monetary value of Pop Idol, American Idol and the other Cowell shows because the revenues are widely shared. The X Factor, Cowell's breakaway hit following his split with Fuller a year later, sells in 16 countries and his Got Talent format is made in 25 national versions. Pop Idol still runs in 44 countries nearly nine years on, while the American Idol version is sold on to 150 territories. Ranging from Strictly Come Dancing to Dancing on Ice, these shows have combined to give a massive financial and reputational boost to the British television production sector at home and abroad. It would also act as a template for a host of new shows set to transform Saturday night entertainment, with a mixture of live judging and public voting all in the initial pitch. Pop Idol, as it became, attracted mass family audiences, sold around the world, produced instant No 1 chart hits, and was so successful that it spawned derivatives including The X Factor, American Idol and Britain's Got Talent. ![]() On a piece of Pearson-headed notepaper (Pearson then owned Thames), Boyd sketched the original idea for Your Idol, the working title for a show that became a seminal reality/entertainment format once on air that autumn. As Mr Cowell and Mr Fuller rattled through their idea for an ambitious new show to identify an unknown British singing star, Boyd scribbled notes on two sides of jotting paper during the hour-long meeting. Nothing about the then head of Thames TV's meeting with two Simons suggested that television history was in the making, or that he and his production team were about to benefit from an enormous stroke of luck. On Tuesday 13 February 2001 TV veteran Alan Boyd saw two men he had never met before in his London office and the meeting changed the face of Saturday night entertainment. ![]()
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