It was Agatha Christie who persuaded Lord Waheed Alli to join the British entertainment company Chorion.

One day in 2002, in the corridor of the House of Lords, Alli bumped into William, Viscount Astor, then chairman of the London-based Chorion. William wondered whether Alli might be interested in joining its board of directors. At first, Alli demurred. He was worried that he didn’t have the time; also, he’d made his name by building companies, not serving on their boards. “You’d have a great time,” Alli recalls Viscount Astor saying. “We own the Agatha Christie estate.”

Alli, “a bit of a Miss Marple fanatic,” was instantly sold. The entrepreneur is an avid collector of Agatha Christie first editions. Among his most treasured possessions is a signed copy of his favorite book, the Marple mystery 4:50 From Paddington, given to him last Christmas by Christie’s grandson, who also works at Chorion. “[Marple’s] just so British,” Alli enthuses. “There’s nowhere else in the world that your heroine could be an old woman who lives in a village.”

After joining Chorion’s board, Lord Alli, now 42, became its chairman. He helped to de-list the company from the London Stock Exchange last May, when Chorion management and the London-based private equity firm 3i bought the company out for nearly $200 million.

Now the guardian of beloved British authors like Agatha Christie—along with other Chorion properties like the children’s book character Noddy and Georges Simenon, the celebrated author of French detective novels—the diminutive, bright-eyed Alli seems an odd choice to be delivering quaint literary cargo to the United States and beyond.

He began building his estimated $70 million fortune at age 27, with the founding of Planet 24, a production company responsible for helping start the reality show trend with hits such as Survivor. The son of immigrants—his Trinidadian mother worked as a nurse and his Guyanese father as a mechanic—Alli left his South London school at 15 to help support the family after his parents divorced. In 1992, Planet 24 started dusting off the cobwebs of then-fusty, BBC-dominated British television by producing youth programs. The company’s breakout hit, The Big Breakfast, featured hosts yelling at the camera and pop stars being interviewed in bed. The show ran for a decade and at its peak garnered 31 percent of the audience share.

Alli and his two partners sold the organization for $24 million in 1999. Producing such lowbrow fare has left Alli open to criticism that he’s dumbing down British culture, in particular television. Gay, Asian, half-Hindu, half-Muslim, and willing to challenge fusty British notions of entertainment, Alli seems made to cause controversy, particularly when he became a peer in 1998 at age 33. “He perfected TV presented by morons for morons,” sneered the tabloid the Mirror.

But in fact, Alli’s ability to tap into the prevailing zeitgeist may be just the reason he was tapped for his current project. Chorion’s stock-in-trade is literary retro chic: taking neglected period writers like Christie, Raymond Chandler, and children’s book author Enid Blyton and repackaging them for modern audiences. “Alli’s a media man through and through,” says Patrick Yao, a media analyst at Bridgewell Limited. “He’s very much a people person, but he’s also very shrewd in terms of seeing a trend within a market and developing the business opportunity.” The wooden character Noddy, once a sweet bit of British childhood nostalgia, was acquired by Chorion in 1996 and made over into a $235 million global brand, with merchandise including dolls and books and a PBS show airing in more than 100 countries.

Alli’s new business opportunity? America. To date, Chorion’s assault on the U.S. has been modest and mostly limited to the PBS niche, with new programs devoted to Noddy, Miss Marple, and Poirot. But the big hit is coming, says Alli. His best hope is the 1970s British children’s book series Mr. Men, which has already sold 100 million copies worldwide. The characters are being dusted off, given a funkier makeover, and animated before their debut on the Cartoon Network in 2008; also, Alli says that Target will begin selling a Mr. Men back-to-school line in September. The two-pronged approach is the beginning of an American brand blitz that Alli thinks “is beginning to smell like a breakout success.” Another brand on its way to the U.S. is Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series, about the holiday adventures of four British kids and a dog, which the Disney Channel will begin airing in the U.K. in 2008. Nickelodeon will also carry one of Chorion’s recent American acquisitions, Ian Falconer’s book series Olivia, about a piglet sophisticate. Over the next few years, Alli wants to create other equally muscular Chorion brands. “I think,” he says with a grin, “we could rival Disney.”
    
He’s fond of making such bold statements. The official photo on his House of Lords website shows him sporting a diamond stud earring. In his Chorion office, he prominently displays the work of the photo-realist Chuck Close and Op Art painter Bridget Riley. There is a limit, though, to how far out he’s willing to go. Despite his status as a media mogul and one of the originators of reality TV, he’s camera-shy; he rarely gives interviews and refused to be taped for a Portfolio.com video segment.

On the other hand, he’s no shrinking violet. By his early thirties, Alli had enough achievements for several lifetimes. He’d made his fortune. He’d helped reshape Britain’s television culture, not to mention rethinking its Labour Party. Since then, he’s gone on to set up the London-based media company Shine with Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth. “By far, in my view, the most talented Murdoch,” says Alli. “If she’d been born a boy, she’d be running the whole thing.” While an active member of the House of Lords, he helped the Labour party push through a robust program of gay-friendly legislation. “He’s one of the few people who understands both the creative and commercial aspects of the media,” says Rob Woodward, chief executive of SMG, a Glasgow-based media company, which earlier this year appointed Alli to its board. “He’s highly respected by talent and equally respected in the commercial world.”

“What we do in broadcasting is to make big ideas bigger,” says Alli. “But people often try to take big ideas and make them small.”