Charlie Parsons: The Godfather of Reality TV on Creating The Word, The Big Breakfast, and Survivor

Charlie Parsons turned a real East London lock-keeper's cottage into a pop culture laboratory, invented a show watched by a billion people, and spent years watching imitators make money from it. Now he's doing it all again — in theatre.

Charlie Parsons is a British television producer and format innovator, co-founder of Planet 24, and the creator of The Word, The Big Breakfast, and Survivor. Today, he produces theatre, including Girl from the North Country and upcoming stage adaptations of The Hunger Games and A Knight's Tale.

• The wild, chaotic origins of The Big Breakfast — and how a real lock-keeper's cottage in East London became one of TV's most iconic sets
• How Survivor evolved from a strange idea into a worldwide phenomenon
• The court battles and imitators that came with inventing a genre — and how Charlie fought back
• Why the entertainment landscape shifted from daring commissioners to algorithms — and what was lost in the process
• What drives him now, and why the immediacy and unpredictability of theatre feels like the closest thing to what he loved about television

Charlie keeps a low profile online, so why not check out his IMDb page instead:

• IMDb

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