Dealmakers
PHILIPMORROW Managing director, Wild Rover Productions
CAREER
2009-2010 Hits the paydirt with Secret Fortune and Take The Money And Run 2006 Elected to Northern Ireland Pact and plays a key role in encouraging the BBC to invest in out-of- London companies 1999 Forms Wild Rover Previously Head of comedy at Thames TV before going on to work at Channel 4, Mentorn and UTV. During his time as a C4 commissioning editor, he introduces shows including Drop The Dead Donkey and Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Secret Fortune I
t’s a reasonable bet that when looking for ‘the next big thing’, most US network execs don’t
pause the PVR to check what’s coming out of Belfast – but that might be about to change. ABC in the US has just aired a
six-part series based on Take The Money And Run (below), a format created by Matthew Worthy, Kieran Doherty and Wild Rover productions managing director Philip Morrow. If that’s not surreal enough, the US version was made by The Amazing Race dream team Jerry Bruckheimer and Bertram van Munster. And just to show that lightning can
strike twice, Wild Rover again crossed the pond in August to deliver a pilot of hit BBC1 show Secret Fortune to CBS. It is now waiting for a decision on whether the format (created by Worthy and Doherty) will hit national primetime in the US. Morrow, a canny veteran of the TV
entertainment business, describes the approach to the US market as “quite deliberate”. “We waited until Secret Fortune – which debuted on BBC1 in February – had been a success before we approached the US networks. We used that time to line up Nigel Lythgoe as producer. Nigel is, in my opinion, the best studio entertainment producer in the world so it was great to have such a talent on board.”
44 | Broadcast | 30 September 2011
‘We waited until Secret Fortune was a success before we approached
the US networks’ Philip Morrow
This is a sentiment shared by
Jeremy Fox, chief executive of DRG, which invested in the UK pilot and is now distributing the format world- wide. Recalling the process leading to CBS commissioning the pilot, Fox says: “Nigel was our first and only choice, not just because he is the producer of the two top shows in America, but also because he is an old colleague from LWT.” According to Morrow, once it had
established itself as a hit on BBC1 and been recommissioned, Greg Lipstone
from ICM set up meetings with all four US networks in just a single, gru- elling day. At the end of it, two offers were on the table but, says Morrow, “there was a consensus that CBS was the better fit”.
American tastes Morrow describes the pitch as “pretty much the same as we gave to the BBC,” although he does acknowl- edge that “we had, of course, to con- vince them that we were aware of American sensibilities and tastes, and this is reflected in both the selec- tion of questions, and the choice of Donny Osmond as host. His personal style is very different from that of Nick Knowles.” Wild Rover was intimately involved
in the production of the pilot, which Morrow describes as a “hugely collab- orative” process. “I was in constant communication with Nigel and, when it was being shot, I was on the studio floor making decisions all the time”. The format has, since its February
debut in the UK, also been sold to 16 territories, including Italy, France, The Netherlands, Turkey and Scan- dinavia. Meanwhile, Morrow has turned Emmy-winning Japanese maths quiz University Of Mathematics into a format for UKTV channel Dave. Looks like Belfast really is on the global map now.
www.broadcastnow.co.uk
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