Peter Bazalgette
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Bazalgette (born on 22 May 1953) is a British media expert who helped create the independent TV production sector in the UK and went on to be the leading creative figure in the global TV company Endemol.
He is widely known as Baz.
He started with BBC News and produced and presented programs before founding his own company, Bazal, which created a series of hits for British TV including Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and Ground Force.
In January 2005 Bazalgette became Chairman of Endemol UK and Creative Director of Endemol Group worldwide. He was responsible for shows like Big Brother and Deal or No Deal which were hits around the world, and led Endemol's digital entertainment strategy. During his time on the global board Endemol grew strongly and in 2005 it was launched on the Dutch stock exchange. Over the next eighteen months it trebled in value and was sold in 2007 for €3.2 billion.
Bazalgette took a third class degree in Law at Cambridge University where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society. He started in BBC News and then worked on That's Life! as a researcher in the seventies. He later reported for several programmes and ran Epic, a corporate video company, and then Bazal which made shows for TV. In 1990, Bazal was acquired by Broadcast Communications which itself was absorbed by Endemol. In September 2007 it was announced that he was standing down from this position to assume the role of advisor.[1]
He co-wrote four books including The Food Revolution and You Don’t Have to Diet, is author of a study of the international TV formats business, Billion Dollar Game and is a regular speaker at global media events.
He is a former board member of Channel 4 and is a non-executive director of the market research company, YouGov. He is a board member of English National Opera and is deputy chairman of the UK's National Film and Television School. He lectures on media convergence and creativity.
Peter Bazalgette is the great-great-grandson of 19th century civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette.
A distant cousin of Peter's, Edward Bazalgette, was the lead guitarist in the 1980s rock group the Vapors, whose hit "Turning Japanese" remains a popular one-hit wonder. Ed now works as a producer at the BBC, making history documentaries. In 2003, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) commissioned a seven part series of documentaries called The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. Edward Bazalgette directed and produced the documentary The Sewer King which charted Sir Joseph Bazalgette's design and engineering of the London sewers. Peter Bazalgette presented a later show for five (formerly Channel 5) called The Great Stink. Referring to his famous ancestor and contemporary reality TV programmes like Big Brother, QI host Stephen Fry remarked that Peter Bazalgette was undoing his great-grandfather's works by "pumping shit back into our homes."
He is married to intellectual property rights lawyer and bioethicist, Hilary Newiss, with whom he has two children.
His nephew, Jimmy Floyd, has been known to curse his uncle whenever Big Brother is mentioned and calls him "That tiresome cunt"
To contact Peter, you can email his assistant: vikki@newbaz.com
[edit] References
- ^ Chris Tryhorn "Bazalgette to leave Endemol", The Guardian, 27 September 2007. Retrieved on 27 September 2007.
