Peter Bazalgette
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Peter Bazalgette is the founder of the television production company Bazal, which produced the popular BBC2 'Food and Drink' programme from 1983 to 2000.
Bazalgette took a third class degree in Law at Cambridge University where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society. He started in BBC News and then worked on 'That’s Life' as a researcher in the seventies. He later reported for several programmes and ran a corporate video company. He is the co-author of four books including The Food Revolution and You Don’t Have to Diet, and author of the book Billion Dollar Game.
In 1990, Bazal was acquired by Broadcast Communications (now Endemol UK - of which Bazalgette became Creative Director and then, in 2002, Chairman) and went on to pioneer light day-time ’leisure entertainment’ shows such as Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms and then Ground Force. He is probably best known for introducing the reality TV show Big Brother to British TV.
In January 2005 Bazalgette joined Endemol's executive board as Chief Creative Officer, overseeing the creation of content across the international group while retaining his role as Chairman of Endemol UK.
He is the great-great-grandson of 19th century civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette.
A distant cousin of Peter's, Edward Bazalgette, was the lead guitarist in the 1980s rock group the Vapors, whose hit "Turning Japanese" remains a popular one-hit wonder. Ed now works as a producer at the BBC, making history documentaries. In 2003, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) commissioned a seven part series of documentaries called The Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. Edward Bazalgette directed and produced the documentary "The Sewer King" which charted Sir Joseph Bazalgette's design and engineering of the London sewers.
Referring to his famous ancestor and contemporary reality TV programmes, QI host Stephen Fry made the amusing remark that Peter Bazalgette was undoing his great-grandfather's works by "pumping shit back into our homes."
