Fifth Primetime Emmy Award for NZ Producer

Monday September 17

Fifth Primetime Emmy Award for New Zealand Producer

New Zealand producer Bob Parr has won a fifth consecutive Primetime Emmy® Award for his work as one of several producers on the CBS television series, The Amazing Race.

Announced today [Monday September 17, NZT] via live telecast from Hollywood, the award recognized Mr. Parr’s work on safety, security and production logistics for the show, which has a global audience of more than 100 million.

Mr. Parr said he was “over the moon”. “I never would have believed six years ago when we started making The Amazing Race that we would be here, with five consecutive Emmy Awards.”

Mr. Parr said the series remained one of the most dynamic television productions in the world. “It’s a fantastic show to work on,” he said.

In testing the safety of challenges in the show, he has dived, climbed, parachuted, rappelled, bungy-jumped, slid, run, canyoned, fallen, jumared, rafted, boogie-boarded, trekked, laughed and wept his way across five continents, three oceans and many seas.

“Every episode in every series is different, from different people, countries, security set-ups, or modes of transport,” he said. “It really is as broad as the world.”

As a producer on shows including The Amazing Race, Mr. Parr MBE brings experience from a 25-year career with the British SAS, which saw him deployed in over 50 countries.

Extensive travel with the Special Forces gave him an eye for identifying potential security risks and crisis management, he said.

Mr. Parr returned to New Zealand last month after spending eight weeks traveling around the world on the twelfth series of the show.

A co-founder of Queenstown-based company, Global Film Solutions, Mr. Parr uses his expertise to assess the risk for major production companies filming globally.

“The screen production industry is particularly at risk from liability, because it is unique in the way it works anywhere in the world, in almost any context,” he said.

“Increasingly, the issue of liability is moving away from civil law into criminal law and insurance is no longer enough to protect companies from being sued, or from considerable reputational damage.”

Global Film Solutions has assisted over 100 productions in environments including arctic ice, marine environments, desert, the jungle and conflict-plagued countries.

ENDS