What Nasty Nigel did next

The Popstars judge we love to hate has teamed up with the Spice Girls' former manager. Nigel Lythgoe tells Meg Carter what's in store

As an entertainment double act, it's certainly intriguing. But when the publicity-shy pop Svengali Simon Fuller met "Nasty Nigel" Lythgoe, the doyen of TV light-entertainment who achieved cult status on Popstars as king of the withering put-down, a new force in light entertainment was born. In July, after months of gentle wooing, Fuller eventually prised Lythgoe from his role as entertainment controller of LWT to head up a new venture, 19TV. Pop Idol, its first project, started a 20-week run on Saturday on ITV. Lythgoe is relishing the freedom of working outside ITV and the chance to get back to full-time production, having spent much of the past six years stuck behind a desk.

"Simon and I met on An Audience with the Spice Girls, the weekend he and the Spices split," Lythgoe says. The pair got on well, and Fuller subsequently let Lythgoe make an S Club 7 special for ITV – even though the band, created and handled by 19 Management, have an ongoing relationship with BBC 1. "He then made me an offer I refused, then thought about while in Borneo shooting Survivor, and I realised how much I missed production." The opportunity to form a company with Fuller – and earn as much as £2m over the next five years, a recent estimate suggests – was irresistible.

With a free hand to invent 19TV from scratch, Lythgoe is eager to develop a range of programmes that stretches the current definition of "TV entertainment" – spanning family, children's, music, drama and even animation formats. However, the first project he inherited, Pop Idol, a co-production between 19 and Pearson Television, was Fuller's idea. Unashamedly inspired by Popstars, a New Zealand format discovered by Lythgoe while he was on holiday, Pop Idol charts the efforts of 10,000 wannabes, who, in coming weeks, will be whittled down by a panel of experts, before public voting on which of the final 10 should win a lucrative recording-contract.

"I always worry about the danger of carving so close to the bone and ending up with nothing," Lythgoe admits. "But Pop Idol offers real feedback from the people in the business and genuinely moves Popstars on with a new, interactive element." He says he is only too aware of the growing ranks of Popstars lookalikes now scrambling into the schedules – ITV's Soapstars; Model Behaviour on Channel 4 – but remains confident the idea still has legs. Which is why 19TV is also developing Big Band (for pop music, substitute 1940s swing) and an idea based around auditions for the new face (er, bust) behind a leading brand of bra.

It is emotion rather than real people that is – and should be – the common factor in TV entertainment success, Lythgoe believes: "Pop Idol is emotion-charged, which you need to capture an audience nowadays. What is 'entertainment', other than something that makes you laugh or cry?"

Although Lythgoe made his name with such early-Nineties success stories as Gladiators, An Audience with... and Moment of Truth, he's had his failures. Remember Ice Warriors? That ill-fated Gladiators/Holiday on Ice hybrid hosted by a wobbly Dani Behr was big on spectacle but low on content. "I didn't take ice in my whisky for six months after that," Lythgoe grimaces. And then there was Survivor. But despite poor ratings and a critical pasting, Lythgoe, who executive-produced the show, still maintains the format is one of the best he has seen. "Where we went wrong was over-hyping it," he says. "Then there were misleading straplines and mixed messages. My idea was: 'Trust no one' – I saw it as a Ten Little Indians kind of thing. It was silly saying, 'No one wins. They survive.' Someone won a million."

Survivor's audience of seven million hardly constituted a flop, Lythgoe insists. Which is why he believes there is scope for a second series, although with more live content – and without him. He does not rule out, however, a return to the spotlight to reprise his Popstars Nasty Nigel role, should ITV commission series two. Lythgoe undoubtedly still relishes the "Nasty" tag awarded him by a Network Centre executive eager to devise a catchy promotional line. "I'm not in Pop Idol, as I didn't want to confuse the two shows," he explains, then adds with a smile: "But I can't say I don't enjoy the whole thing of being on camera. I love it."