I'm posting this article so I'll have a copy of it. Not because I'm a scurvy copyright pirate. (Though that is more-or-less also true.)
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This one's for immunity!
Mike Sauve
National Post
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Ever wonder how they cook up challenges for hit reality television shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race?
While Jeff Probst is the one to yell "Survivors ready? Go!", it's a team of producers who spend months conceiving and producing challenges.
Victoria-native Alan Bishop is among the best in the business. He's produced challenges for several Survivor seasons (Vanuatu, Panama and Guatemala), and this fall he begins his first stint as a challenge producer for The Amazing Race.
"With Survivor, we set up somewhere for six months on a closed set. With The Amazing Race you're basically racing the contestants. We've got to be two days ahead of them."
Planning begins several months before a season of Survivor shoots, Bishop said, explaining that his team brainstorms a few hundred concepts for challenges.
"Once you get on location, you find out what works and what will really stand out."
Challenge producers collaborate with the art department to design the structures. Bishop tests the tasks himself. Then, while the show is being filmed, Probst explains the challenge to contestants, cameras are turned off and Bishop's team explains the rules and safety concerns in detail.
He's witnessed wild stuff on white sandy beaches with castaways plucked from their daily lives. Once, while explaining a challenge, he noticed a female contestant urinating right beside him.
Safety is a major concern, but so is creating riveting TV, so Bishop's job is a delicate balance.
"You can't hurt people just because they're playing for a million dollars," he says. Challenges he's particularly excited about are often nixed due to safety concerns. Fairness also comes into play. "If you have three really athletic people and three who aren't, but they're all good characters, we can't always do the athletic challenges. We walk a fine line."
But friendly castaways make for boring TV, so producers sometimes ask Bishop's team to add conflict by pumping extra drama and excitement into elimination and reward contests.
The father of two is sworn to Survivor secrecy by "massive" CBS confidentiality agreements, so all he can reveal to his sons about his work is which episodes they might not want to miss.
"Their friends ask for inside information, but they like saying, 'No, I can't tell you,' even though they don't know."
His family is used to Bishop being away up to nine months a year. Before his reality gig, he participated in international Eco-Challenge expeditions and was a paratrooper in the Canadian Armed Forces.
When he is at home, Bishop organizes corporate team-building exercises, which he's been doing since the early 90's.
Today Bishop is organizing an Amazing Race-style event in Toronto for Electronic Data Systems.
"When I take a corporate group to an island these days, they think I'm stealing the idea from Survivor, but I've been doing that for years."
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