Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.
• You won’t know James Bevan, but you should know what he did to this country
• Boris Johnson wrecked Britain. But this man left even deeper scars
• Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions
• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury
• Steven Bartlett: the glorified PR man quietly making Britain worse
• The Tory who sold off Britain’s greatest assets – then told us to take back control
• Dua Lipa: the ‘magical thinker’ unwittingly making Britain’s young women miserable
• The podcast bro whose toxic slurry of sexism targets impressionable young men
One spring day at an ice rink in New York’s Central Park, a former British paratrooper from Essex spotted a famous figure in the crowd – and the world changed direction.
Mark Burnett, who had come to America on a tourist visa and fashioned a shining career in television, was there on location, filming the finale of his hit show, . Sitting in the front row of the audience was the man whose company operated the ice rink, Donald J Trump. In that moment, in May 2002, Burnett – impressed by the brash TRUMP branding plastered over the venue – had the notion that the flamboyant property magnate should be the star of his next TV experiment.
had held the American public spellbound. The show marooned 16 strangers in remote spaces, starved of resources, and made them vote each other out until only the winner remained. Burnett now wanted to create an equally cut-throat format “set in a different kind of jungle, made of asphalt”. Two weeks later, he went to Trump Tower and pitched the idea for , offering the tycoon a role as “judge, jury and executioner”. Against the advice of his agent, who noted the poor track record of business-based TV formats, a flattered Trump accepted the part.
That encounter between Burnett and Trump was a monumental watershed, albeit little understood at the time.
Burnett unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would upturn global politics for decades to come. He transformed Trump’s public persona as a gaudy and reckless real estate developer with a track record of corporate bankruptcie,s and catapulted him into American living rooms as an oracle of capitalist success. He created the TV equivalent of Trump’s self-serving memoir The Art of the Deal. In so doing, the son of a production line worker at the Ford motor plant in Dagenham created the pathway for Trump to become the leader of the free world.
More than that, Burnett, as one of the pioneers of reality formats, revolutionised TV in the early 21st century, leading a shift away from costly scripted programmes towards a cheaper form of mass entertainment that relied on crude producer manipulation and strategic gameplay. The palates of audiences, and thereby voters, became accustomed to content that was intrusive and highly charged.
As social media grew alongside reality TV, online content creators adopted similar production values, packaging their lives for public consumption and expressing extreme views to generate engagement. Today social media users routinely disregard calls to respect privacy or moderate their language. Through his founding role in reality TV, Burnett has corroded the way that society interacts.
In Britain, the impact of these changes has been profound. Trump’s political formula of marrying televisual skills with prolific use of social media has been a blueprint for Nigel Farage, who now uses TikTok and GB News to rally his electoral base and inject hate into our political discourse. Katie Hopkins, one of Farage’s noisier supporters, built her public profile and media career on a spiteful and ruthless appearance in the UK edition of and now deploys similarly nasty and divisive language as an online political commentator.
Burnett’s zero-sum formats, such as and , inspired a gamut of winner-takes-all reality hits, including I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, and . While nice guys do not always come last in these shows, mendacity, backstabbing and toxic social interaction are rife.
Some might say this is not Burnett’s fault. A working-class lad who served in the Falklands War before heading to California, aged 22, and finding work as a nanny for a family in Beverly Hills, he is possessed of remarkable talents. He made it in TV after working without a green card, selling T-shirts on Venice Beach, then filming himself on extreme travel challenges. It can be argued that he should be celebrated as a genius of our creative industries who, like Simon Cowell (The X Factor, Got Talent) and Simon Fuller (), crossed the Atlantic and changed the face of entertainment. Millions still love watching his shows.
But as a prime architect of the Age of Trump, Burnett has a case to answer. His shaping of the now-President’s reputation was immeasurably damaging. A fake corporate boardroom was created to give an aura of success, in contrast to the cramped office in Trump Tower, that garish 58-storey monument of personal branding on Fifth Avenue, masquerading as a corporate HQ. Across 14 series, thousands of hours of raw footage were edited to present the host as an unfailingly astute businessman, coherent and decisive. When, in the wake of the debacle, calls were made for the tapes to be released to address claims by producers and contestants that Trump had made offensive remarks, Burnett said he did “not have the ability nor the right” to do so.
In the decade since Trump first entered the White House, former colleagues on have expressed regret over the show’s political repercussions. “I helped create a monster,” said one. Burnett, though he criticised the “hatred, division and misogyny” of Trump’s first presidential campaign, appears to sleep easily and remains friends with the President. In 2024, Trump – normally fiercely hostile to immigration – named Burnett as the White House’s Special Envoy to the UK. Burnett said he was “deeply honoured” but stepped away from the role within a year. creator is perhaps the one Trump hire who would not fear being told: “You’re fired.”
Rather than being a British success story, Burnett – who became a naturalised American citizen in 1990 – has inflicted great harm on the country of his birth. The omnipotent character he created has assailed the UK with trade tariffs and naked diplomatic interference, while publicly ridiculing its leaders and even its military, in which Burnett once proudly served.
The circus that Trump has gone on to create in Washington brought down Keir Starmer, who supplicated himself before the President as if one of his apprentices. Starmer disastrously introduced Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador, in the mould of a scheming contestant arriving on the set of a ruthless reality show. And latterly Trump has sought to dictate UK energy policy, demanding new drilling in the North Sea, while undermining our oil supplies and our economy by his reckless and failed war on Iran. So, Mr Burnett, thanks a bunch.