Interview: Nigel Lythgoe

Nice work for Nasty Nigel Lythgoe

Interview: Nigel Lythgoe on successful TV formats and the brilliance of Simon Cowell
Nigel Lythgoe
Nigel Lythgoe, television and film director and producer and former dancer in the Young Generation. Photograph: Katherine Rose

When it comes to television you can blame Nigel Lythgoe for almost everything. Reality TV? He is the man behind the first UK series of Survivor, which came before Big Brother and begat I'm a Celebrity. Pop Idol? He brought its forerunner, Popstars, to our screens. Gladiators? Him too. The crop of dance shows spreading across our screens like a spandex fungus? Sort of.

Lythgoe co-created So You Think You Can Dance with 19's Simon Fuller in 2005 in the US and his new UK version for BBC1 is battling Sky 1's Got to Dance and ITV's new series of Dancing on Ice for the nation's sequined heart. He's enjoying the battle but is convinced he'll win because "after six seasons in the US I think we're about as close to the arts in a mainstream show as you can get."

We meet minutes after the news breaks that Jonathan Ross is to leave the BBC. Lythgoe says: "Michael McIntyre sounds like he's an up-and-coming guy. I'm sure they're looking at formats for him to replace Ross. He'd be good for a Generation Game format." He leans over and says: "Certain formats should never be forgotten, Blind Date for instance, because Britain's Got Talent is really New Faces or The Gong Show, whilst we're basically Opportunity Knocks."

Tanned but tired

He explains how So You Think You Can Dance came about: "Back in 2004 after American Idol had become the biggest TV show ever, Simon Fuller said: 'We should do this with dance.'

"I said it wouldn't work. I never thought it would be successful. But we went away for a weekend and I was sent off down the garden with a bottle of Jack Daniels, then came back with half a bottle and the format," Lythgoe explains, looking tanned but tired from his LA to London commute.

Lythgoe is on the panel, reprising his Nasty Nigel routine from the first series of Popstars, where he famously told Kym Marsh: "Christmas may be gone but I see the goose is still fat." So You Think's first episode pulled in an average of 6.44 million viewers, peaking at 8.07 million, not quite The X Factor but pretty close to the recent average audience of 8.4 million in the least successful Strictly Come Dancing series since 2005.

Could its lack of success have anything to do with the sacking of 66-year-old judge Arlene Phillips and her replacement by 30-year-old Alesha Dixon? Is that why Lythgoe recruited Phillips to join his panel?

"I don't know why they did that, I can't give you an answer," he says. "I guess they saw how successful Cheryl Cole was with The X Factor after they lost Sharon [Osbourne] and brought her in. Maybe they said: 'We need a pretty young face on our programme too'. Were they right? No, I don't think so. The jury on any programme should be of an age where it knows what it's talking about.

"I don't believe the poor ratings were because of the judge, I think it's that the stars weren't strong enough. It's always difficult isn't it? You start to run out of celebrities that people are interested in. Or you pay them a fortune to go into the Big Brother house."

He delivers his waspish comments in a dry, matter of fact tone. Having begun his career as a dancer, he worked his way into production as a choreographer, initially with the BBC's Young Generation troupe, and then with the Muppets ("It's all these guys with their hands up these little puppets' arses. You say 'Miss Piggy, will you go a little to your right?'") and up through LWT's booming light entertainment department until David Liddiment offered him the controller's job.

Popstars format

Once in charge at LWT, he launched a huge variety of hits from Gladiators to Spaced, which was created there but broadcast on Channel 4. The day after he started as controller Michael Barrymore came out. "It taught me how much of a controller's job is nothing to do with making programmes, but suddenly being a media expert on things that have nothing to do with you," he sighs. "Shortly after that I took Barrymore off to the US for a series of specials with his wife in tow." He shudders at the memory. "Nothing saw the screen."

On holiday in Australia he came across the Popstars format when his son was an assistant producer on the show. He brought it to the UK, cast Jonathan King as the nasty judge, had to rethink after King's prison sentence, tried the unknown Simon Cowell only to find his record company blocking the move, so he took the judge's chair himself. Fuller, the show's adviser, then created his own format, Pop Idol, and asked Lythgoe to be a judge.

"We took it to Fox and Rupert Murdoch told his team: 'You want Simon Cowell, he's tough. I want it to stay tough.'" Lythgoe wasn't allowed to do Idol because "they said it was too similar to Popstars," so he agreed to go back behind the camera. "Peter Waterman was utterly brilliant – he was better than Cowell for the first season because Simon put it on but Waterman was it. Simon learns very quickly though – that's his brilliance. He's a bit of a sponge. At first he didn't want to come to America. We twisted his arm, but he was worried they wouldn't like him. Amazing if you're going out to be nasty that you still want people to like you." He shrugs.

After so many years out, what is his view of British TV? Remarkably positive seems to be the answer. "It doesn't seem so tough when you look over from America. The UK seems to keep producing successes. Although we made sure we only did one season of American Idol a year – I think that in the UK once something's successful it's wrung out like a sponge and gets overdone. There were too many episodes of Strictly … there's burnout. I imagine Strictly will go off air, and come back in 10 or 12 years."

The one thing that has changed, he believes, is the hate flung at the BBC. "It has become the newspapers' whipping boy, which I don't understand." He shakes his head. "There appears to be a whole new level of what broadcasters are allowed to say and not allowed to say and I'm shocked at that in a nation of free speech. The press are the worst of the lot – I was shocked to read some of the crits for my own show where Phillips was likened to Adolf Hitler. Saying she's an overrated pensioner, well, that's fine, so am I. Both quotes are real quotes from two crits but the first is so wrong I would have looked at taking them to court. So the press needs to be careful about who it points its finger at. Let he without sin … "

And, as his face darkens in righteous anger, you remember how he won the name Nasty Nigel in the first place.


Age 60

Education Manor Road School and Wallasey Technical College, Merseyside; Hylton-Bromley School of Dance and Drama, Merseyside

Career 1968 dancer, national tour of The Merry Widow, Mr and Mrs, BBC's Young Generation 1971 choreographer, BBC 1980 choreographer, The Muppets, ATV 1981 associate producer, Bud 'n Ches, ATV 1982 associate producer, Dizzy Feet (1982 Golden Rose of Montreux winner) 1984 director, Summertime Special, Bobby Davro's TV Weekly, TVS 1985 producer, Blind Date 1992 producer/director, The Brian Conley Show, The Michael Barrymore Show, Gladiators 1995 head of entertainment and comedy, LWT (judge of Pop Stars, 2000) 2001 president of television, 19 Entertainment 2009 president, Big Red 2 Television

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