Who Is Philip Edgar-Jones? The TV Executive Behind Sky Arts, Big Brother And Britain's Got Talent

Philip Edgar-Jones is a senior British television executive who has spent more than two decades shaping mainstream UK entertainment. He has been director of Sky Arts since 2014 and head of entertainment at Sky since 2019, after a long run at Endemol working on some of the defining reality formats of the 2000s.

Endemol years

Edgar-Jones joined Endemol UK in the late 1990s and was central to the launch of Big Brother on Channel 4 in 2000. He worked across the franchise for most of its initial decade, including the Celebrity Big Brother spin-off, and eventually became Endemol UK's director of programmes. During that period he also worked on Britain's Got Talent, Pop Idol and a range of other major commissions.

The move to Sky

He joined Sky in 2014 as director of Sky Arts, the broadcaster's specialist arts channel. The channel had a relatively small audience but a clear creative remit, and under Edgar-Jones it commissioned the Portrait Artist of the Year and Landscape Artist of the Year competitions, both of which became multi-year fixtures and led to international format sales.

From 2019 he also took on the head-of-entertainment role across Sky, which gave him oversight of the broader entertainment slate including comedy, light entertainment and event television.

Public profile

Edgar-Jones is, by the standards of senior commissioners, unusually willing to be on the record. He is a regular speaker at the Edinburgh TV Festival and the RTS conferences, where he has spoken extensively about diversity in commissioning, the economics of arts television, and the way streaming has changed the business of British entertainment.

Why people search for him

Search interest in Edgar-Jones spikes around three things: every Big Brother revival cycle (because much of the original tape archive has his name on the credits), every Sky reorganisation (because he is one of the most senior figures named in trade-press coverage), and the annual Edinburgh TV Festival keynote round-up. For a senior executive he has an unusually consistent search profile.