As one of the biggest annual trade events in the television world kicks off in Cannes this month, the UK delegation will be hoping that in their luggage is the next big idea to hit American primetime. Successful makeovers of hit British shows for US audiences have helped turned the UK’s TV production business into an industry worth billions – in February, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp agreed to pay £415m (€490m) for his daughter Elisabeth’s Shine TV, which has become a mega player by gobbling up several other hot indies – and the stateside launch of The X Factor USA this autumn is already shaping up to be the media event of the year.

TV content has been shipped across the Atlantic for decades of course, with varying degrees of success, since the days of Monty Python and Steptoe and Son (remade as Sanford and Son) in the 1970s. And it seems a long time since Ricky Gervais and The Office cast walked up the red carpet for the 2004 Golden Globes, and American journalists had to ask who they all were. But in the past five years, a seemingly non-stop volley of ratings hits has put British programmes and ideas all over the US networks.

The international sale of British TV programming is now worth more than £1.3bn (€1.5bn) a year and, despite the economic downturn, it grew 9% in 2009. The US is the biggest market, accounting for 36% of British TV’s total export revenue, and while it’s not the fastest-growing – smaller markets such as Canada, Australasia and Scandinavia have an increasing appetite for UK fare – it is by the far the most lucrative, for everyone involved. The long- running legal feud over the profits from the US version of quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire underlines just how much is at stake; a Californian court last year ordered US rights owner Disney to pay British show creator Celador $270m in damages in the wrangling over profit share. For individuals, the rewards of US success are equally alluring. A comedy writer, say, can expect to make five to 10 times as much per episode in the US than in the UK and an American season demands 22 episodes rather than the usual six at home.

The moment UK producers’ fortunes truly began to turn in the US is tricky to pinpoint; there are several people who had big ideas or made bold decisions that helped change the course of TV history. Market forces and a legal shake-up affecting intellectual property rights in the UK did the rest, as British offerings evolved from game shows to talent shows and into other unscripted formats.

Millionaire, now in its ninth season in the US and having run in more than 180 other territories, was the creation of British production company Celador, led by Paul Smith, and hit US screens in 1999 on ABC. In a sense, it was just another game show, as was the BBC’s The Weakest Link, which took off shortly afterwards, but they put British formats in a new international light. In the case of The Weakest Link, the show’s host Anne Robinson regularly zipped across the Atlantic and back to host the US version as well.

The ‘whittle’ format – whittling down a bunch of contestants to one winner – can be traced back to Survivor, developed by British producer Charlie Parsons and UK émigré Mark Burnett, which premiered on NBC in 2000; Burnett later created The Apprentice, in which the prize is a high-flying job, and Are You Smarter Th an a 5th Grader?, both big hits in several markets. Meanwhile, drama was ratcheted up in real homes with Wife Swap, created by Stephen Lambert, and Supernanny, made by Ricochet, both for the UK’s Channel 4 and snapped up by ABC in the US. Lambert is also behind the life-changing shows Faking It and The Secret Millionaire.

Brits were also behind the talent-quest-as-blockbuster format which now dominates screens almost everywhere around the world. Pop Idol – which spawned American Idol, currently the most-watched show in the US – was the brainchild of music talent manager Simon Fuller, who, with Gladiators and Popstars creator Nigel Lythgoe, also came up with So You Think You Can Dance.

The undisputed face of talent shows on both sides of the water – and possibly now the most-recognised British person after Queen Elizabeth – is Simon Cowell, the acid-tongued music-industry executive who came to prominence as a judge on Pop Idol. His production company Syco later pumped out The X Factor and the international ... Got Talent franchise. The launch of the US version of The X Factor this September is already a phenomenon. Having spent millions on promoting the show, including £1.9m (€2.2m) on one ad during the Super Bowl, the Fox network is promising a record $5m (€3.6m) prize for its winner. There is now a flurry of speculation regarding the show’s twist – voting for its contestants via Facebook.

The burst of creativity in British television at the turn of the millennium chimed with a new terms-of-trade edict, shifting ownership of programmes from the commissioning broadcaster to the production house making them. Now British broadcasters financed the bulk of new productions, instead of all of them, in return for UK rights plus 15% of any overseas sales. The producer had to find the shortfall. This gave independent outfits the opportunity to tap an entirely new revenue stream. As Jamie Munro - the veteran producer and co-managing director of Shine (which owns the Masterchef format) – says, there’s no one better equipped to sell a programme than its producer: “Who’s going to be more passionate? Put me in a room and I’ll sell it. I love it, that’s why I’m doing it.”

Production companies suddenly went from being hired hands making money only on profit margin to masters of their own fortunes. Their annual export sales have shot up 39% since the new IP rules were introduced.

In the US, meanwhile, economic conditions grew ripe for a British invasion. Nick Southgate, chief executive of Shed Media, which produces Supernanny, Who Do You Think You Are? and The World’s Strictest Parents in the US, says there’s a ring of truth in the idea that programmes made for Brits are working better in the States because UK audiences have become more American in their tastes in recent years. But the bigger reason was money, he says. “American TV didn’t have a culture of reality or factual TV, apart from on the public broadcasters.

It was all drama and comedy.” Making a drama pilot costs about $4m (€3m), then $2.5m to $3m an episode. “When you can do a reality show for a million, there comes a financial imperative to free up a bit of real estate for slightly cheaper shows, and those hit in a big way. The Brits were quick to move in with the skills and ideas to make these shows.”

There was no shortage of great ideas. A series in Britain runs for just six episodes (in the US it’s more than 20), and it’s a rare show that gets commissioned for UK audiences beyond a couple of series. This means a production industry designed for fast turnover; a constant generation of new programmes.

While bright ideas were hatching in Britain, it took some forward- thinking Americans to commission them for US audiences. Ben Silverman, who executive-produced the US version of The Offi ce (which had two series in the UK but is in its seventh across the pond), was frequently in London and was seen as the go-to guy for export ideas. Indeed, Silverman did the deal that took Millionaire to the US.

Andrea Wong was a senior commissioning executive in LA in the mid-2000s and is credited with taking some high-profile punts that paid off. Munro recalls being in her office and pitching a US version of Strictly Come Dancing; the idea of TV ballroom dancing had fallen on so-far incredulous American ears on the trip, but as word filtered through that Strictly had outrated The X Factor that week back in Britain, BlackBerrys started buzzing and Wong bought in.

What followed in the UK was the birth of the superindies – huge production outfits that came to dominate the media landscape, driven by the suddenly lucrative incentives to develop a hit. Shine, launched in 2001 by Elisabeth Murdoch, embarked on an enormous acquisition programme,which saw it taking in Kudos, Dragonfly, Reveille (launched by Silverman) and Brown Eyed Boy. Munro says a third of Shine’s revenues in 2010 came from the US. All3Media, which has Undercover Boss in its stable, is another major player, as is RDF Television, the company behind Wife Swap, and Shed Media, which took Who Do You Th ink You Are? to the US for NBC Universal and which grossed more in the US last year in total than it did in the UK.

Independent production houses now contribute about £200m (€240m) towards the development and production of UK content and account for around 80% of format sales abroad. The British independent sector is the largest in Europe, turning over £2bn a year and employing more than 20,000 people.

But it’s not just the indies that are profiting. The UK’s public-service broadcaster, the BBC, has a unit focused entirely on exports. BBC Worldwide reported its best-ever ratings in 2009/10 for BBC America, a channel with distribution in 67 million homes and now also in HD, with Torchwood and Doctor Who proving huge draws. The channel generated a £6m profit in 2010, up from £4.3m the year before. Format sales for the BBC – shows like Dancing with the Stars and Top Gear have been huge hits, and What Not to Wear is in its eighth season in the US – have been additional money-spinners. The BBC also has wholly owned production bases: BBC Worldwide Productions, in New York and LA, as well as in India and France, and joint ventures in several other markets.

Commercial UK broadcaster ITV’s overseas arm generated £39m in the first half of 2010 from international productions, a figure hit by I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! not being recommissioned in 2010, though Ultimate Gamer was expected to reverse that later in the year. Sales of finished programming abroad were up 4% to £57m, driven by long-running soap opera Coronation Street, Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Hell’s Kitchen USA. And Pinewood Studios Group, whose studios have been used for The Weakest Link and The IT Crowd, opened a Los Angeles sales offi ce in January.

It’s no great surprise, then, to find that spaces on the stand run by PACT, which represents the independent TV and film industry in the UK, at the MIPTV trade fair in Cannes this month were in greater demand than they’ve ever been before. While usually there are a couple of slots still going at the last minute, this year the 32 slots were filled well ahead of time, with a waiting list of 15. Ahead of another industry shindig in New York in February – Kidscreen, for the children’s entertainment industry – PACT had 20 companies expressing interest within a couple of days of announcing that there would be a delegation, all hoping to be involved in the next global format sensation, though well aware that for every red-carpet moment there are hundreds of failures.

“The road of scrapped series is littered with bodies,” points out Southgate. Recent remakes that didn’t make it past a few episodes include Life on Mars, The IT Crowd and Spaced. In the 80s and 90s, numerous high-profile shows flopped in translation.

Yet the appeal to foreign networks of taking something that’s worked in another market persists. “Commissioning is arse- covering, most of the time,” says Southgate. “So why wouldn’t you commission something that’s been a success somewhere else? If your job is on the line, it makes a lot of sense.” It also makes sense to put money into these fast-growing production companies, which are proving magnetic investments to existing partners and those farther afield. The BBC has taken minority equity stakes in several production companies; in 2009/10, it generated £17m in distribution revenue for programmes including homegrown sitcom Gavin & Stacey and Canadian comedy-drama Being Erica. ITV took a 25% stake in Carbon Media, led by veteran producer Steven D Wright.

But it is global investment in the superindies that’s really hotted up. Tiger Aspect (producer of The Secret Diary of a Call Girl) was bought by US sports marketing and programming giant IMG in 2006 for a reported £25m, then sold on to Big Brother producer Endemol three years later. NBC Universal International last year bought UK-based Monkey Kingdom, maker of The Charlotte Church Show and My Kind of Town. Warner Bros bought a majority stake in Shed Media reportedly for £100m at roughly the same time. RDF Media Group was last year acquired by Zodiak Media, an UK-US company ultimately owned by Italy’s De Agostini Group. And now there’s the deal between Rupert and Elisabeth Murdoch.

Reflecting the optimism reverberating around the British television industry, a 200- acre development, MediaCityUK, will open this year in the north of England, housing much of the BBC and ITV’s production facilities as well as – it is hoped – acting as a magnet for other creative and technical firms. But can the growth of the UK TV industry in the US be sustained? Much of the content remade for the US has little or nothing British about it, from the viewers’ perspective. Americans largely don’t know – and don’t care – that their must-see shows came from elsewhere; there’s unlikely to be a falling out of love with all things British, because what they love isn’t Britishness. What may temper is the enthusiasm for reality or unscripted television, particularly contests that follow the whittle formula.

John Rose, a media analyst with the Boston Consulting Group, says that the growth in demand for good, fresh content isn’t going away. With so many ways to watch TV now, no one’s happy watching reruns; content providers need a steady stream of new stuff to show. Certain formats may, however, be running their course. There are only so many “I want to be a star”-type shows people will watch for so long, he says, although Dancing with the Stars is enjoying a surprise resurgence in the US, where it is currently the second-most watched show behind American Idol.

“That’s true of all formats: you pioneer something, consumers think it’s fantastic, you replicate it, and all of a sudden the programmes are getting overexposed and the cycle moves to something else,” Rose says. “I think there’s going to be a correction... whether that favours or harms British producers is purely a function of their ability to be compelling in new formats. It’s the idea that matters, not ‘gee, it’s British’.” That said though, television is a reputation business, and producers and companies with transatlantic hits will find willing ears for their next pitch.

It’s true that the latest programmes to transfer stateside are not reality but drama - Skins, Shameless (both by All3Media’s Company

Pictures) and Being Human; remakes of comedy and drama have had fewer successes than reality and gameshows. Where these differ from many of the flops is that the creators of the British series are closely involved in the new versions; US networks are seeing the value of having the team that made a success sticking with it. The controversy over the sex scenes in MTV’s Skins – a major component of the original show – has backfired somewhat, however. The publicity has probably helped boost ratings, but advertisers such as Subway, General Motors and Wrigley have pulled out.

Southgate insists that there is plenty of life left in unscripted programming. Won’t viewers tire of reality? “Why would they? People call the end of reality TV with monotonous regularity. We make Who Do You Think You Are? – it’s not the same as Deal or No Deal, or lots of the others. It will evolve.” Munro says changing viewer taste is why Shine is pushing projects such as The Magicians and Merlin, and working within a range of genres. The British way – very short seasons demanding new shows year-round – fosters development, and the BBC, with its reputation for experimenting, helps new ideas rise to prominence.

“There is a hunger here,” says Southgate, “a desire to create and always lots of ideas, much more so than in the US. They will need ideas, and the challenge for companies like ours is to exploit that. I don’t have the head of Warner Bros on the phone every day telling me what to do; if anything it’s the opposite. They’re investing in us is because they believe in not having everything homogeneous. They want local creativity.”