Big bonuses for BB bosses

Shows like Big Brother are raking in the profits for Endemol

Jonathan Prynn, Business Editor @JonPrynn|Evening Standard

11 April 2012

Pay rises totalling £8 million are being shared out by the team behind Big Brother.

Production company Endemol UK paid out almost £14 million in salaries, bonuses and pension contributions to its staff last year - a total rise of more than £8million, according to latest documents filed at Companies House.

The disclosure of the payments comes on the eve of the latest eviction from the Big Brother house and in the week that this year's winner will be revealed. The lucky contestant currently stands to win £85,000.

The pay bonanza follows the astonishing success of the company since it burst on to the broadcasting scene in the mid-Nineties.

As well as making Britain's biggest reality TV show, Endemol has a roster of some of the best-known programme names in broadcasting - including Fame Academy, Changing Rooms, Ready Steady Cook and Ground Force.

The shows' stars, including Davina McCall, Ainsley Harriot, Carol Smillie and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen are all paid separately from the Endemol staff - making the pay rise all the more astonishing.

The accounts show that the company's 146 staff were rewarded with a near doubling of their pay last year, with the average salary rising f rom £ 47,000 to £92,000. But the bulk of the payments went to directors and senior executives at the firm, which is headed by its controversial chairman Peter Bazalgette.

Total boardroom pay rose more than 320 per cent from £1.74million to £5.68 million, including £4.41 million under a "long-term incentive scheme".

The highest-paid director got almost £1.5 million, comparable to the pay in the boardrooms of some of Britain's biggest companies and more than treble the previous year's figure.

Although the accounts do not disclose who the highest-paid director was, it is almost certain to be either Mr Bazalgette or his long-serving chief executive Tom Barnicoat.

Other senior executives thought to have done well include creative director-Tim Hincks, finance director Richard Johnston, the head of Endemol UK Productions Nikki Cheetham and head of leisure programming Linda Clifford.

The accounts show that the company had another barnstorming year in 2003, with turnover rising 35 per cent to £89 million and gross profits up more than 60 per cent to £15.8 million.

As well as its well-known series formats it also produced one-off specials such as the Bafta awards and the Fashion Rocks charity fundraising event at the Royal Albert Hall. It also produced the BBC's popular heritage show Restoration.

The company refused to comment further on the results, other than to say that "the directors believe that the group is well positioned to deliver further growth in 2004".

A spokesman said the bonus system was "a company-wide scheme that benefits permanent staff at all levels of the company".

The success of Endemol has seen it grow rapidly.

It is credited in the television industry with popularising two of the most distinctive and influential television formats of the past decade - reality TV and "lifestyle" shows such as Changing Rooms.

And it has also cashed in on the success of phone and text voting, which generate extra revenue for shows such as Big Brother, and on new technology such as paid-for live internet feeds.

Other areas include compilation DVDs and videos of shows such as Big Brother - meaning every opportunity for revenue is exploited.

But Mr Bazalgette, the public school and Cambridge educated son of a stockbroker, has also been accused of dragging British TV down to unprecedented depths of lowbrow tackiness and vulgarity.

This year's series of Big Brother, which has included a stand-up fight and the first reality TV sex, has been singled out for attack over voyeurism and encouraging violence. It has also hit record ratings levels - suggesting next year's Endemol results may be even more lucrative.

Victor Lewis-Smith, the Evening Standard's TV critic, has likened Endemol to "the battery chicken industry, churning out bland and flavourless produce at the lowest possible price, irrespective of quality".

He has also compared the output of Mr Bazalgette's company with that of the crowning achievement of his great grandfather, civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who built London's sewerage system.

Mr Bazalgette started his career as a BBC news trainee before being snapped up as a researcher for Esther Rantzen's long-running show That's Life. He went on to produce the Food

And Drink show before setting up his own produc t ion company Bazal in the late Eighties.

The company was first sold to the Guardian Media Group and later to the Dutch TV company Endemol in 1998.

Endemol had already launched Big Brother in Holland and the first UK series ran in 2000. Endemol UK is now Britain's second-biggest independent production house.

The Dutch parent company Endemol Entertainment was sold to Telefonica of Spain in 2000, making a billionaire of its co-founder John de Mol.

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