ABSTRACT
It is now 10 years since the Big Brother TV programme format was devised in the Netherlands by producer John de Mol for his production company Endemol. As Bazalgette (2005) has shown, the programme was groundbreaking in terms of its premise of bringing together a group of young people and having them live in a confined space where they were filmed by a battery of hidden cameras. Beginning in the Netherlands, and soon giving rise to a string of franchised productions around the world, Big Brother has become the most watched programme in world television history. The accumulated global audience for its various national versions regularly produced up to 2005 was estimated at 740 million viewers. It has also proved to be an extremely valuable franchise around the world, generating more than US$4.7 billion in profits for its owner in the same period (Bazalgette 2005). But the phenomenal success of the programme also heralded the maturation
of TV formats. This way of doing television is now a highly significant component of industry and cultural practice in modern television, at both the national and international levels. Whether in the form of reality, game show, infotainment programming, makeover, talent show, sitcom or drama, the advent of the television programme format seems to signal the triumph of media globalization, even while asserting the continued importance of local or domestic programming (Moran and Malbon 2006). What does this paradox imply? How can the TV programme format best be understood in the rapidly changing mediascape of present-day international television? This chapter explores the practice and meaning of TV format program-
ming. It is divided into six sections. The first sketches the notion of a global television system. In the next two sections, I outline the main features of format programming, including its evolution as an industry practice. The following two sections develop an understanding of adaptation, drawing on semiotics and translation theory. In the concluding section, I consider this customizing of formats for home audiences under the label of nationalization.
