The arrival of Strictly Come Dancing on television nearly eight years ago and its extraordinary popularity since owe much to the director, Richard Hopkins.
Once millions of viewers here were hooked, he took the format to America and more than 30 other countries, where the show is known as Dancing with the Stars. He also produced the first series of Big Brother, which had started out as a Dutch reality television show.
After graduating in English literature, Hopkins, the son of a scrap metal merchant, became a reporter on Kiss FM radio station. The production company, Planet 24, hired him first as a researcher and then as an associate producer on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, fronted by Chris Evans and Gaby Roslin.
In 2000, Hopkins joined Talkback to produce the 11 O’Clock Show for Channel 4, a satirical programme written and produced on the day of transmission by such up-and-coming comics as Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen. In the same year, he began work on Big Brother and returned to The Big Breakfast, this time as executive producer.
He took charge of the competition to find new musical talent, Fame Academy (2003) for the BBC. But the Corporation then appointed him head of its format entertainment department, overseeing Mastermind, The Weakest Link, A Question of Sport, as well as Strictly. This show was, in fact, a radically updated version of Come Dancing, which had been axed in 1998 after nearly 50 years.
Hopkins was initially uncertain about the show, but then realised that the mixture of professionals and celebrities, plus drama, tension and perhaps even a touch of romance amounted to an award-winning format. He sold the show to the United States himself as executives with BBC Worldwide dismissed it as peculiarly British.
Together with the BBC’s head of factual entertainment, David Mortimer, he left the BBC six years ago to launch an independent production company, Fever Media, in conjunction with Sony. Its first successes were the National Lottery game show, The People’s Quiz (2007), and Move Like Michael Jackson (2009).
Richard Hopkins, who was born in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, on December 15, 1964, died of a brain tumour in London on January 7 at the age of 47.
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