John de Mol: Big Brother’s daddy

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of CFOAM motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!

Oh, watch your step.

Wow, your attic is so dark.

Dark.

I know, right?

It's the perfect place to stream horror movies.

What movie is that?

I haven't pressed play yet.

AT ⁇ T fiber with Al-Fi covers your whole house.

Even your really, really creepy attic turned home theater.

Jimmy, what have I told you about scaring our guests?

Get ATT fiber with all five and live like a gagillionaire.

Limited availability coverage may require extenders at additional charge.

It's a dark, drizzly Thursday night in Amsterdam, late September 1997.

Four men sit around a table in a smoke-filled room.

It's their office, and they're still working, even though it's well past midnight.

Three of them are trying to help their boss, the fourth man, come up with an idea.

The boss is seated at the head of the table.

He's been taking notes on a yellow pad in front of him and chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette, stubbing them out, half-smoked, in the now overflowing ashtray by his pad.

These men have been there for hours.

They are ready to go home.

They've talked about the world's first internet camgo, the growing presence of security cameras on the streets.

Now they're talking about a failed experiment in the US that tried to see if a group of people could survive for a year in an isolated plastic dome.

The conversation is going nowhere.

Or is it?

The boss has stopped taking notes and and started grinning.

He's had an idea.

What if you put a bunch of strangers in a closed environment and filmed them 24 hours a day, set them tasks and give them prizes?

Could that be a TV show?

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Singh.

I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And that man with the idea was John DeMoll.

And that idea became Big Brother.

And that is a TV show that really did change the face of television and celebrity, I think.

Yeah, it's run for over 550 seasons across more than 70 territories, has been watched by billions.

In 2020, Big Brother Brazil set a world record for the most public votes for a TV show when 1.5 1.5 billion votes were cast.

Incredible.

Now, John DeMoll has had other hits, including Deal or No Deal and The Voice.

But he is a divisive figure, especially in his homeland, where he's been called the king of trash TV.

He says he couldn't care less what people call him, and why should he?

His shows have made him very rich indeed.

He's now worth around 1.7 billion US dollars.

So let's go right back to the beginning of John DeMoe's story.

Johannes Hendrikus Hubert de Moll Jr., known as John, was born in The Hague in the Netherlands in April 1955.

Now, that junior part is important back in his homeland because his father is also called John DeMoe and he's also famous.

He was a crooner, you know, he got sometimes referred to as the Dutch Frank Sinatra.

And his grandfather, John DeMolle Sr., was another famous musician.

He'd been a band leader.

So let's put it this way: Showbiz is definitely in the family.

John's younger sister Linda would also become famous as a TV presenter but John and Linda's dad didn't actually want his kids to follow him into show business and he was always critical of his son.

He said that he actually wanted an intellectual in the family but that John never was a reader and that in his words he still isn't.

We've come across that before not being able to please your parents feeling that you were never quite good enough for them.

Maybe that's an important ingredient.

In his teens young John himself wanted to be a soccer player.

He even trained with the legendary Amsterdam team Ajax.

But even then, he was never good enough for his dad.

When his son scored a goal, he would say, why not two?

To be honest, John wasn't good enough for Ajax either, and he was never going to make it professional.

But John did excel in economics at school.

One of his teachers apparently explained this was because John understood this.

The basic ground rule of business, how to achieve the most with minimal effort.

That's quite an interesting philosophy.

I don't think that is a basic ground rule of business.

But I mean, everyone wants to do as well as they can whilst expending as little effort as possible.

But I don't think you could say that most of our billionaires have expended minimal effort.

Yeah, it's not something you pick up at Stanford Business School.

But having said that, there is a great example of this from his youth.

After John got his granddad to pay him to wash his car, he rang the doorbell, showed the shining, gleaming car, and took the money.

But he had crucially only washed one side of it.

That truth is going to come out at some point, isn't it?

I wonder.

I mean, minimal effort, but the point is, if you do that, you're only getting that job once, aren't you?

Yeah, but it does also seem to suggest someone who's really happy with playing on the shiny surface level of things.

Maybe let's see how the story progresses.

By the time John was 15, his father had retired from singing and was managing a pirate radio station.

He gave John his first real job, tidying away records that DJs had played.

John loved the immediacy of live radio.

He became a full-timer there.

He did various jobs.

And to be honest, he might have had this whole other career in radio.

But in 1974 the Dutch government shut down the pirate stations and John moved into TV.

And he was still a teenager when he started at one of Holland's public broadcasters as in his words the assistant of the assistant of the assistant producer.

At first he hated working in television but before a big national broadcast he started feeling a strange tingling nervousness butterflies in his stomach and he realized that in 10 minutes time five million people would be watching and that's when the fever started he says i can relate to that i remember the first time I was on breakfast TV, and you know that millions of people are going to be watching it as they're making their sandwiches or getting their kids ready for school, and you think, oh my goodness, me.

You can only see the cameras there, but you do have a little bit of butterflies because you know that you're going to be beamed into people's homes.

So, I relate to that a bit.

So, John obviously found his niche, as you have, Simon, because by the time he was 23, he became the producer of the country's big weekly pop charts show.

Colleagues described him as shy but determined.

He thought they were all old.

They were in their 40s and 50s, and he wasn't hanging around to become one of them.

So in 1979, he started his own TV production company, John DeMolle Producteese, with investment from a DJ and entrepreneur he'd known since his teens.

Now, he definitely already had a lot of connections, but maybe the most important of them all was his wife.

So John had started dating a singer and an actress called Wilkie Oberty when he was 19, and they'd gotten married two years later.

Now, Wilkie was already a big celebrity in the Netherlands, and she was 10 years older than him.

So she broadened his contacts book but also gave him a drive to succeed.

Having expected John to become a kept man living off Wilkie's wealth, his father noticed him immediately trying to prove that he could be the breadwinner.

But in the early 80s John really struggled.

He couldn't get commissions with his new company because independent TV productions were quite rare in the Netherlands at the time.

Most channels were just using their own in-house production teams.

So John would take literally any job he could to keep the company afloat.

He was filming kickboxing, commercials.

He was even doing weddings.

And he got the occasional one-off commission, but even then he'd have to do things on the cheap.

In his book, Billion Dollar Game, the TV executive Peter Basiljet claims that John DeMoll would sometimes sneak into the unguarded editing suites of the public broadcasters, edit his programmes on their expensive kit, and then sneak out again without paying a thing.

But still, John was soon pretty near bankruptcy.

What he really needed was a big series commission.

Worth looking at the business model model for TV production.

That's where the money is in getting those commissions.

You really start to make a profit as a TV producer when you start making lots of episodes of the same thing.

You get those economies of scale.

And there was about to be a new commissioner who would need independent productions to fill their schedules, a name that might be familiar to people in the UK.

That is Sky TV.

Yeah, owned by one Rupert Murdoch.

By the way, he's another of our billionaires.

In the 1980s, Rupert Murdoch was launching Sky TV channels across Europe.

You used to have to get a satellite dish to tune into them, and John DeMolle was soon getting commissions because they had to fill up these new channels with content.

All this airtime and nothing to fill them with.

But importantly, John DeMoll didn't have any money to actually make these programs.

So he turned to yet another contact, a famous Dutch DJ who now ran a successful music publishing company.

And he sold him 50% of his production company for around half a million dollars.

So that means the half he had left was also, by that measure, worth half a million.

So he's on his way to our first milestone a million one of his first shows was a daily music show presented by a cat puppet and yet another of his contacts his sister Linda de Molle so if this all sounds a little bit too much like nepotism it should be said that when John first hired Linda he was worried it would seem that way too so he sent tapes of three auditions to commissioners without mentioning that one of them was of his sister and he only told them after she got the job and Linda has since gone on to great success so sort of nepotism but not quite i wonder what would happen if they hadn't picked her.

History does not relate.

But John's next big idea was buying the licenses to make Dutch and Belgian versions of successful American formats like Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune.

So he would pay the US creators of those TV shows to make local versions of their formats.

They would have the same setup, be made in studios that look the same with similar hosts and questions, the same number of contestants, things like that.

The restrictions when licensing formats are really strict.

Once you buy the program, you have to stick to exactly the same style and rules of the original.

And this is interesting.

So he'd been on the other end of the whole licensing show business.

So he knew what the rules of the road were.

But when John DeMo got the license to make the prices right for Dutch audiences, he thought the format was quite tired.

He decided to add new games.

The American producers refused to let him, but he just did it anyway.

And once the show was a hit, the US producers just had to agree to accept the changes.

So he's definitely a break things

apologize later.

Well, also, that's very interesting.

This will come up later in the story.

This format is a bit tired.

It's not quite working.

Let's make a few changes.

Let's make it better.

Let's make it more engaging for audiences.

And we'll see that come up later.

Yeah, let's give it a quick refresh.

So DeMore was making money from doing US formats, but he realised the real cash would come from creating his own formats from scratch.

His first original format allowed members of the public to ask questions of celebrities.

Its name translated as the shirt from your body, a Dutch phrase about being interrogated.

Interesting that right at the start, he was using members of the public in his shows, something we'll see him return to again and again.

But unusually, his first really successful show was actually a drama.

He started producing a medical soap opera called Medical Centre West in 1988.

It was actually filmed really cheaply on the empty floor of a working hospital, and it went out on the public service channel DeMolle used to work for.

But cheap though it may have been, the show was considered pretty groundbreaking in its day.

De Molle purposely covered controversial topics like abortion, euthanasia, as he knew that would generate press coverage.

The euthanasia storyline sparked national debate in the Netherlands and the country later became the first to legalize assisted suicide.

So really not a guy afraid of controversy.

And the show was a massive hit.

It got up to 4 million viewers in a country where the population was less than 15 million.

So that's quite a lot.

And also it sold in other territories like Germany and South Africa.

He followed this up with another hit.

This one went out on the first Dutch commercial network, which launched in 1989.

So, adverts, etc.

And this show was much more like what we'd come to know as John DeMoe's later hits.

So, it was called All You Need Is Love, and it featured members of the public declaring their love for each other in different, extravagant ways.

But again, sharing DeMoll's ability to court controversy for publicity, the first episode saw a gay man serenading and kissing his partner.

Even in the liberal Netherlands, this was sure to generate press coverage in the 1980s, and it did.

But sure enough, the show was another hit.

So, with two big hits under his belt, it's safe to say John DeMoll was a millionaire by the end of the 80s.

So, in TV terms, he's made it, but he's nowhere near finished.

And he's about to start one of the biggest companies in TV history.

So, let's follow John DeMoll from a million to a billion.

In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.

What if you could have all three at the same time?

That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high-availability, consistently high-performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds.

How is it faster?

OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Cheaper?

OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Better?

In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Head to oracle.com slash strategic.

That's oracle.com slash strategic.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with Seafoam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam.

With a Wealthfront cash account, your uninvested cash earns 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks with free instant withdrawals, even on weekends and holidays.

4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn.

Wealthfront, money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member Fenra SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless.

And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should.

One, it's $15 a month.

Two, seriously, it's $15 a month.

Three, no big contracts.

Four, I use it.

Five, my mom uses it.

Are you playing me off?

That's what's happening, right?

Okay, give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.

Upfront payment of $45 for three months plan, $15 per month equivalent required.

New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available.

Taxes and fees extra.

See mintmobile.com.

At the start of the 90s, John DeMo was the right guy in the right place at the right time.

So the EU had just introduced laws to open member states to shows from other countries.

Like a lot of things in the EU, they had to allow free trade.

So companies from any member state had to be allowed to compete in the TV market in any other member state.

But this only applied to other members, so it reserved the majority of airtime in Europe for European production companies.

And John de Mo was running one of the few independent production companies in Europe, so he really was cashing in.

So the taps of cash have been turned on, and he's getting some.

The revenue for his TV company quadrupled from $18 million in 1988 to 74 million in 1993, just five years.

And in the Netherlands, he had only one big rival, a man called Joop van der Ender.

Now, in many ways, Joop and John were opposites.

Joop was much older than John and had started out in the refined world of opera compared to John's brash beginnings in pirate radio.

And while Joop was willing to provide luxuries because he thought his employees would do their best work if they felt comfortable and happy in the office, John thought workers only needed a table and a chair to get to work.

So really, a clash of two different personalities.

But they got along.

In fact, they met for coffee every week to discuss their industry.

They were both annoyed at how broadcasters played them off against each other to keep their prices low.

So in 1993 they decided to fight back.

They made a plan to merge their two companies, made sense of both of them because while Yoop's company was much bigger and more established, John's was four times as profitable.

Yoop opposes expansion, John offered bigger profit margins on that bigger business.

It's a win-win for both.

So Yoop van der Ender and John Demo combined their businesses into a new company, which is now very famous, one that you might have heard of called Endemol.

Now, I think that's a happy accident that those two names go together so well.

Endemol is a brilliant name for a TV company, and it just happens to be the synthesis of their two names, Ender and DeMol.

Do you think it would have worked as well if they'd done Molende?

No,

I don't think so.

It's hard to know because it's such a hugely famous company now.

You can't imagine a time before it really existed.

But combining the two companies meant Endemol now had a total of 500 full-time staff, more than 1,000 freelancers producing 2,500 hours of television every year.

Endemol was immediately the biggest independent TV production company in Europe.

So when Endermol floated on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange a few years later, their IPO was 18 times oversubscribed.

Now that meant they could have sold 18 times more shares than there were available, and the price shot up.

And it also meant that Demol and Vander Ender made $40 million each.

And the company was valued at $240 million.

That is a big company for a media company at that stage.

Now, in the next few years, that price fluctuated a bit.

They had some missteps, not least their attempt to put the Dutch soccer league behind the paywall, meaning you have to pay to watch.

That led to an outcry from the public and reportedly lost them $60 million.

But they kept at it.

They kept making hit soap operas and game shows along with a new kind of format that John DeMore would later call emotainment.

He said these shows were putting real people on television, just like game shows have been doing for years, but just, in his words, pushing it a little further.

Now, one example was a show called Love Letters, where three engaged couples competed to get married in a lavish, extravagant ceremony that was part of the show, which actually sounds quite a lot like something that might run on television channels right now, actually.

These emotainment shows led to Endemol expanding, but what they really wanted was a foothold in the UK market.

That was the biggest prize in Europe at the time.

UK broadcasters weren't actually that keen on Endemo shows.

They thought they were exploitative.

They said they wouldn't work on British TV.

One British executive even caught an Endemo show featuring children dressing up as pop stars.

Child pornography, so not mincing any words there.

No, but the company had plenty of money, so they simply bought their way into the British market.

They took a 50% share of broadcast communications.

That's a company that made popular British shows like Changing Rooms, Ready, Steady, Cook, both of which, again, featured members of the public, key common denominator.

And this is the moment when John DeMoll is about to unleash the show that changes everything.

So we're back in that meeting room, September 1997.

DeMo actually kept the three other guys in the room another four hours after he had this idea.

And when he finally sent them home at around 4.30 a.m., he'd sworn them all to secrecy and was calling their plan Project X.

And DeMo was convinced he had something special.

He kept working on it over the next week.

The first version was called the Golden Cage and would involve six people staying in a luxury house for a year, constantly being given tests to try to get them to leave.

And whoever stayed the longest would win $1 million.

They planned a one-hour programme every day with unedited footage streamed online.

Endermo colleagues worried it was a bad, unethical idea, with many, including, by the way, his sister Linda, warning it was too risky.

But John plowed on regardless, pitching it to European broadcasters in 1998.

Unfortunately, they all turned him down.

Even Endemore's own British production company said the show was far too cruel and woefully so for the UK market.

But massively underestimate the appetite we have for cruel television.

I mean, put it this way.

That was a big misjudgment of the British public.

Yeah, but it seems obvious now, but probably we should put a bit of context about how bold, how audacious this idea seemed at the time.

So watching real people live their lives on TV wasn't new.

There had been long-running documentaries like The American Family and The Family in the UK in the 70s that had followed normal families' everyday lives.

And don't forget, MTV's The Real World had started putting groups of young people in a house together, sort of manufacturing their lives and filming them all the way back in 1992.

But De Moll's idea of isolating the house from the outside world and filming and streaming participants live to the world 24 hours a day, that was new, and making it all into a competition with one winner left at the end, that was pretty new.

So, there had been this Swedish reality TV show in 1997 called Robinson Crusoe, that was actually quite similar.

So, that show had put 16 people on an island, with the contestants themselves voting off one member of their group at the end of every week.

But the first person voted off that programme had taken his own life just a month after leaving the show, which was before it had even been shown on TV.

So, the contestants' widow campaigned for the programme to be cancelled, but an internal inquiry inquiry at the channel concluded there was no proof that the suicide was due to the man's participation in the show, and they went ahead with the broadcast anyway.

Now, this caused uproar in the press.

The show was likened to Lord of the Flies, but it got high ratings, so it was deemed a success.

And later on, the format was bought by an American network and renamed Survivor, a show that was a smash hit and is still running today.

But when John DeMont was pitching his new reality show, that controversy was still very fresh.

And remember, we know that he's somebody who thinks that courting controversy is good for ratings.

So he kept reworking his idea, pitching it to different channels in different countries.

All the commissioners were wary.

By 1999, the format had reduced down from a year to 100 days, and he had renamed it Big Brother, after, of course, the totalitarian leader in George Orwell's famous dystopian book 1984.

Big Brother Who Is Always Watching You.

It's a much better name than the Gordon Cage.

Oh, it's so, I mean, again, I think that, you you know, End DeMole's a good name.

Big Brother, genius.

It's all about branding and TV, baby.

Unfortunately, DeMolle was still finding the same opposition from commissioners, so he gave himself a deadline.

He wanted to link the show to the upcoming turn of the millennium.

The winner would come out of the Big Brother house at midnight on the 31st of December, right at the start of 2000.

Why 2K?

Working backwards for that timing to work, for that 100 days to work.

This meant the show had to start in September 1999.

So he had just nine months to sell Big Brother and get it on air.

Now in March he thought he had made a deal with a German channel but then that collapsed and then DeMoll was desperate.

He still, however, had total belief in this idea so he decided to try a new strategy, one that had a lot more risk for Endemo, but a lot more potential reward too.

He went to a new youth channel in the Netherlands called Veronica.

They'd already turned him down once, but this time he offered to share the financial risk with the broadcaster.

So basically what he was saying was instead of the usual fee for the production company to make the show with the TV station making their money back by selling adverts, Endermole would share the costs but crucially also share the profits from the advertising.

So that meant if Big Brother flopped, both Endermole and the channel would lose money.

But if it was a success, Endermol could make way more than they usually would just by selling the format.

So this was a pretty unprecedented deal in television.

It was a big risk for DeMol.

If Big Brother flopped, Endermoll's share price was sure to go down.

But with Endermore taking more risk, that meant there was less risk for Veronica, and that clearly sold them.

The channel took the bait.

They agreed to buy the show.

So in May, DeMoll had a deal.

Endermo would put up half the $6 million budget for half the ad revenue, but he also had four months now to get the show on air.

So 1999, busy year then for John DeMoll.

Endermo auditions around 3,000 people to be big brother contestants.

They have to sort the logistics of filming the show.

They've got to sort the live stream.

And meanwhile, the newspapers are already full of speculation.

Some are denouncing the format as voyeurism, psychologists are warning that people will go off the rails, the Dutch Institute of Psychology officially warning people against being contestants.

Nothing like being warned to not do something to make you interested and why shouldn't I do it?

You would think that psychologists would know that, but you can imagine John DeMoll looking at all this free publicity, chain smoking away, rubbing his hands of glee.

I mean, he's in the show business, you know, he knows how it all works.

But not everyone at Endermole felt the same way.

That summer, their head of press, doubted the show would ever even make it on air.

And all the speculation puts even more pressure on the show and on DeMoll.

And just weeks before Big Brother is due to air, hardly any advertising slots have been sold.

That's a big problem.

And this matters not just for the channel, but for Endermole, because their deal depends on ad sales.

And even DeMoll at this point starts having doubts.

He's worrying about the deal he's done.

Then, just two weeks before launch, a test run with 10 contestants in a makeshift house with 24 cameras, 59 microphones was a disaster.

The footage was boring.

Who would have thought?

The crew thought DeMole would explode, but he didn't.

I think this is such a key moment here in his story.

Instead, he calmly diagnosed what was wrong and tried to help the team fix it.

He added a voiceover to give the show a narrative, and he made the diary room, which is where contestants would go and talk about their feelings, into even more of a big feature of the show.

Now, both these things would go on to become iconic parts of the program.

Dear five and the Big Brother house and tempers are beginning to frear.

Exactly.

For those of you who did not watch British Big Brother, that is a very accurate impression of the Geordie voiceover artist who is the narrator of the show.

And with these additions to the show, DeMol is once again sure this time he's got a hit on his hands.

In an address to staff, he says, Big Brother will be for Endermolt, what Mickey Mouse was for Disney.

Wow, bold words.

He predicts in 20 years, people will talk about two eras of television, before Big Brother and after Big Brother.

And maybe he's right.

You know what?

I actually do think he's right.

We will come to discuss this later, but I do genuinely think that this is a real turning point for television because there was reality TV before Big Brother, but you know, that format really changed the landscape.

It really wouldn't be the way it is today without that show existing.

I remember, I mean, people would talk about it the whole time.

There were people who were addicted to it.

Some of the characters in it became, well, they became celebrities.

And their lives were chronicled even after they got out of the Big Brother house.

It was, of course, as we now know, a huge hit.

When it launched, it had a 20% share of the Dutch audience on a channel that only usually got 3%.

Soon that was up to 40%, with another 7 million visiting the web stream.

And when the finale screened on New Year's Eve, 1999, two-thirds of the country's population were watching.

Big Brother was more than just a hit, it was a smash.

So now John DeMoll could really start making money.

Just a month after the show had launched, TV execs from all over the world had already been queuing at End DeMoll's stand at an industry sales conference to buy the franchise.

Just months after the Dutch version had finished, new versions of the show were on screens all around the world and DeMolle was getting offers from networks in the USA, which was and still is the biggest, richest marketplace in television.

That's right, after 20 years of licensing US formats, he was finally going to sell something back to the Americans.

And he feels like flexing his muscles.

He said the US execs would have to fly to Europe for meetings with him, something that was unheard of.

Usually, he'd be the one flying to the US to pitch his wares.

Well, the shoe is on the other foot here because guess what?

They all did exactly what John DeMoe demanded.

One Endemo staffer said, I've never seen American TV executives jump on a plane so quickly.

So soon a deal was done with the US network CBS, who agreed to pay $20 million for the first season of the US version of Big Brother.

And the incredible success of that show meant Endemo's share price tripled by February 2000.

So John Demo and his partner Van Den Ender decided it was time to sell up and cash in.

Two big companies were interested in buying them out.

One offered more money, but the other was more international.

So they owned companies across Latin America.

And that meant they could open doors for Endemo in new territories.

Interesting timing, you know, cash in a bit at the moment of maximum hype and publicity.

You're never going to probably ever make another TV show as impactful as that, so maybe this is the time to do it.

All the senior management of Endermore met at John's house to consider these bids.

He'd laid on an enormous vat of caviar and there were expensive bottles of chills, wine, but the decision was really all down to John and Yoop.

And as John was going to stay on as creative director while Yoop was getting out of the TV business, Yoop told John he could do whatever he wanted.

It's up to you, mate.

So John picked the company that would open doors, Telefonica.

He knew it was only a matter of time before companies across the world would be copying Endermore's ideas, so he figured they'd be there first to copy themselves.

Plus, Telefonica were going to take Endemol off the stock market, like buy all the shares, take it private, with no obligation to shareholders.

John liked that idea too.

When you've got shareholders as a public company, there's a lot of transparency.

You have to answer to those shareholders.

If it's a private company, you can kind of be left to your own devices.

Plus, it's not like this deal wasn't still enormous, right?

Exactly.

Telefonica was offering $5.3 billion for Endermole, three times more than any production company had ever been valued at before.

It meant that John and Yoop were going to pocket over a billion dollars each.

I feel like if anybody who works on TV is listening to this episode now, their eyes are going as big as saucers at the amount of money they talked about.

The last of the good old days.

When the executives put on a vat of caviar rather than pizzas.

So even so, right, when he announced his choice to sell to Telefonica, colleagues noticed tears in John DeMoe's eyes.

Give me a break.

But, you know, actually, on the day the deal was going to be signed, he actually threatened to cancel the whole thing because the papers were late arriving.

But when they finally did, him and Yoop signed.

And just to sort of put this in context, it was March 2000.

This was the height of the dot-com boom.

The NASDAQ would peak just seven days after the sale, and soon after that, it would crash.

But none of that mattered to John DeMoll because Big Brother had just made him a billionaire.

So, where's he's gone from there?

He's a billionaire.

Now, what?

So, the early 2000s saw Big Brothers spread across the world like wildfire.

And also, don't forget, Endermore also had more hits of its own.

Yeah, Deal on No Deal sold to 84 different countries or territories.

Fear Factor actually started in the Netherlands before Big Brother, but only sold internationally after the success of Big Brother.

It actually became really big in the US, where it boosted the celebrity of one contestant called Joe Rogan, who has since gone on to have quite a successful podcast.

Fear Factor challenged members of the public to perform tasks that disgusted them or scared them.

You know, things like eating pizza made of cow bile crust, coagulated blood paste, rotten cheese and fish eyes, being buried in a coffin of live worms.

I remember watching that.

And alongside Big Brother, it really cemented John DeMore's reputation as the king of trash TV.

And like Big Brother, it can be seen as a precursor to a lot of today's reality TV.

There was, though, another company that claimed claimed they started it all.

In the year 2000, a British television company, part-owned by the singer Bob Galdoff, started a legal battle with John DeMoe, claiming that Big Brother stole its concept from Survivor.

Remember, that kind of shipwrecked contestant show that was originally called Robinson Crusoe.

So they sued John DeMoe in an Amsterdam court for theft of format.

But after five years, the courts ruled in Endemo's favour, but the case was considered groundbreaking because it established that TV formats can be creative works protected by copyright law.

So it sort of confirmed this idea that IP, intellectual property, is all important in the TV industry.

And it also made his format ideas, I think, seem even more valuable.

Yeah, there's an old thing, you can't copyright an idea.

But if you actually sort of turn that idea into something that you can put on paper, like a format, and say it does this and this and this and this, that is more than an idea.

That's a thing.

That's a problem.

That's kind of property like a house.

Exactly.

So once you turn it into a thing, it does have some legal protection.

So this was like a double win for John DeMoll, right?

Yeah, exactly.

He understood that his ideas were more important than the company that sold them.

He left Endermoll in 2004 and set up another production company called Talpa.

And it was at Talpa that John DeMoll came up with another huge hit, which you also probably have heard of.

The voice.

Now, that premiered on Dutch TV and has since sold all over the world.

I mean, he is very good at television.

And he's made some big deals since, including buying back part of Endemol and selling Talpa to ITV in the UK for $500 million.

In 2015, DeMoll revealed that extortion attempts were behind the selling of his company, Talpa Media.

He said, issues in my personal life, including extortion that went on for more than a year, absolutely had an impact.

You have to realize this was the fifth time this had happened to me and my family.

But DeMoll's main focus as he enters his 70s is still actually on the creative side of the TV business.

Yeah, he recently said that developing and producing formats is something that, in his words, he'll never grow tired of.

So let's get on with our format and judge John DeMoe.

Is he good, bad or just another billionaire?

This is where we judge them on a number of categories from naught to ten and we start with just their wealth.

John DeMoe's wealth has hovered between 1 billion and 2 billion since becoming a billionaire.

So he's entry-level billionaire between 1 and 2.

But we also look at sometimes how they spend it.

And after he became a billionaire, or soon after, he paid $20 million for a private jet, mostly apparently, so he could smoke on his flights.

After smoking was fully banned on commercial airlines in 2000.

Now, smoking is expensive enough as it is, but $20 million so you can smoke, that's a big price ticket.

I have to say, I'm not a fan of private jets, but I do think that if you're going to buy one just to smoke in, that is quite a baller move.

That's quite a billionaire boller move.

And in 2003, he bought a 130, 3.4 percent share in manchester united football club which he has since sold buying part of a sports team also a very billionaire behavior certainly we've certainly come across that before on this show but i will say i think you know as you point out he is just an entry-level billionaire yeah and his investments have been quite private in 2000 he created something called certie investments to manage his finances which invested in guess what television companies but also the dutch sports car company spiker cars they make kind of these uh limited edition supercars I'm sure he's got a supercar or two in his garage.

So what do we give him for wealth?

Not just about absolute, but how he spends it.

So one to two billion is entry level.

That's about a two.

But private jet, football team, sports car company, I'm going to give him a five.

Oh, I think I'm going to go lower than that.

I feel like a private jet is just path of course when you're a billionaire these days.

Okay, so maybe you've talked me down to four.

What are you going to give him?

I'm going to give him a three out of ten.

Okay, four and three.

Villainy.

What has he done to get to the top?

And one of the key criticisms, of course, of reality television is the impact it has on the people who take part.

And John DeMoll's view on this, he said in 2003, if I created a show with 10 people in a plane and nine parachutes and I stalled the plane out at 20,000 feet, I would get thousands of people to volunteer for that show tomorrow.

I would never do that.

There is a line in my head, but let's face it, there's a big difference between where that line is today and where it was 25 years ago.

Basically, the line for what is trash has definitely moved a little bit.

Right, okay.

Now, I think it's important to say, though, that while some former Big Brother contestants have had struggles with their mental health and been hospitalised following their appearance on the show, there have been no deaths linked directly to Big Brother appearances to date.

In 2022, the Dutch version of The Voice was taken off air while sexual abuse allegations against a coach and a band leader were investigated.

DeMol apologised on behalf of the company, but was thought to suggest that women as well as men had lessons to learn.

But a group of female employees took out a full-page advert in a Dutch newspaper castigating him, saying, Dear John, it's not the women who are the problem.

Now, DeMoll said he wasn't aware of the abuse allegations and only aware of one complaint during his time as executive producer on the show.

One coach so far has been sentenced to two years in jail for rape.

Another case has since been dropped.

And DeMoll has long been a contentious figure in Holland.

There's a culture of distrust of billionaires in Holland.

I think so much of how you feel about how villainous he is depends on how you feel about the formats he's created and the impact they've had on society.

Yeah.

I go back and forth on how I feel about reality TV.

I think if you'd talked to me about this 10 years ago, I'd have gone terrible, absolutely awful for society, just a bad development for human morality.

It's a 10 out of 10 for me on the villainy scale.

But actually, I think I've kind of moderated my condemnation of reality TV so far just because I think it just fed this this impulse in humans to watch other people doing things.

And even if you look at shows on reality TV now, they brought a lot of entertainment and joy to people's lives.

Yeah, I think in terms of villainy, he's a TV exec who hit upon a great idea, proved controversial, got lots of publicity.

There it is.

So I'm going to say for villainy, I'm going to give him, you know, not very much.

I mean, two or a three.

Yeah, I mean, controversial as the show was in its heyday, and it was very controversial, it wouldn't have been controversial if people weren't watching it.

So yeah, I would give him a two out of 10.

Yeah, I'm going to give him a two for villainy.

Two out of ten for both of us.

Now, what about philanthropy giving back?

Not much to go on.

Not much to go on, you know.

There actually isn't that much information about the kind of money John DeMoe has given to charity.

I mean, he often promotes schemes to help TV producers develop and sell ideas, but that's about it.

Giving back.

Listen to him, it's got a question mark, probably zero.

Yeah, I would give him a zero for this.

He really hasn't done, he hasn't redeemed himself here.

Power.

Two ways of looking at this.

This is sort of, you know, big picture, politics, how they change the world, whatever.

And there's power within their own industry.

Within their own industry, you know, power and legacy certainly left an indelible imprint on television forever, but doesn't dabble that much in politics.

He's not a, you know, he's not like kind of Rupert Murdoch-type character.

No, he hasn't publicly talked about politics nowhere that we can see.

He's not made any donations to political candidates or parties.

So he's really kept himself out of that sphere.

So scores low on that one, but I mean, in terms of TV, an absolute colossus.

Yeah, I mean, if you worked in TV and you got a call and someone said, it's John DeMoll for you, you would pick up.

You certainly would.

100% pick up.

He'd be 10 in terms of legacy in the TV industry, almost zero in terms of big picture politics.

So I'm going to go straight down the middle and give him a five.

Oh, I see.

I would give him more than that, just because I think the legacy of Big Brother is...

enormous, right?

This idea that ordinary people can become celebrities.

Andy Warhol thought about that 40, 50 years ago.

But he didn't gamify it.

He didn't turn it into a content.

He didn't turn it into a format.

Yeah, he didn't turn it into a format.

And I think really when you think about it, that whole idea that TV just runs on formats these days.

Yeah.

I actually think you could attribute that to John DeMoll.

Okay.

But he makes him into

our darkest urges or our most positive ones.

Okay.

Sometimes Big Brother could be uplifting.

Okay, five for me.

What's it for you?

I'm going to give him a six out of ten.

Okay.

And then we have to decide whether he's good, bad, or just another billionaire.

This is where we should dig into,

you know, whether this has had a corrosive impact on society and people's mental health.

Look, he's not a drug dealer, which we've done on this program.

So he's definitely not in that category.

But what I do think he's a participant in is when I sometimes go and interview young kids and whatever, when we're talking about what you want to do as a job in my job as a financial journalist, the idea that they want to be just on TV or an influencer, I do think that I've got problems with that.

Right.

I don't know.

Maybe I look back on the golden age of Big Brother with rose-tinted glasses, and I think there have been so many moments now that are just part of British cultural life that have come from Big Brother that I can't help but feel a little bit more fondly than I should towards John DeMoll.

It depends whether you consider those golden moments of TV history or really embarrassing ones.

Maybe I just have very low standards.

I think that I'm going to just say, I can't make my mind up about this, so I'm going to say he's just another billionaire.

I think maybe for once you may have swayed me because I think that image that you've just put out there of a young child telling me that they just want to be famous and on television

maybe makes me feel a little bit icky about Big Brother more than I should.

Okay, so you're going to go watch.

I was going to go good billionaire for all the golden moments of television that John DeMoll has given us, but maybe I'm going to downgrade that to just another billionaire.

I think that's the first time you've convinced me.

What?

Second.

Second.

You've convinced me about four or five times and I've convinced you only twice now.

I like how you're keeping scrolling.

I am keeping tabs on it.

So John DeMoll, thank you for the memories.

You are just another billionaire.

You've got to do the big brother voice now.

The end of a podcast, John DeMoll, you have to leave Good Bad Billionaire.

Simon, did you know this is our 50th episode?

You are kidding me.

Oh gosh, 50 episodes.

Bly me, it's gone in a flash.

Yeah, unfortunately, 50 episodes later, neither of us are any close to being billionaires.

That's too bad, but we've had some incredible stories along the way, and hopefully we'll do 50 more.

And we want to thank all our listeners.

You guys have been with us from the very start, and now you know exactly how to make a billion, and hopefully, you'll be much better at it than me and Simon have been.

And we're not finished yet.

Who have we got next episode?

For the first time, we're talking about a video game designer.

Yep, we're talking about Markus Person, the Swedish coding king who programmed the world's most successful game, Minecraft, all by himself.

He made a billion, but is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Good, Bad, Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast.

It's produced by Mark Ward with additional production by Tams and Curry.

Paul Smith is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins, and the commissioning editor is John Minnell.

And if you enjoyed it, do tell a friend.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of CFOA motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!