Q &A with Survivor host

Survivor host Jeff Probst - 15 seasons on and still beating Ugly Betty.

You must have a decent stamp collection. In your passport, that is.

I do. My passport expired last year and it was like saying goodbye to a really good friend. I just hated that I had to start over. You go through customs and wanna say, I really have travelled before, with lots of stamps.

Have you made it to New Zealand yet?

The closest I got was the Cook Islands which I loved. It was probably my favourite place in terms of island living and people.

How much do you see of each country?

We're pretty much stuck in the one place. Our show starts on day one and it doesn't stop for 39 days. That doesn't mean we don't have days off but it's hard to leave. You can take a car and maybe drive 45 minutes or you can take a boat to another island, but you couldn't leave from where we were, for instance, and go to Beijing for the day.

What obstacles did you encounter filming in a communist country?

The difficult part was getting in. The only real concession we had to make was allowing them a representative on location who could make sure we weren't portraying China in anything but a positive light.

We only had one issue that came up when we told them we were going to do what we called our gross food-eating challenge. On reflection we might have positioned it a little differently. They said wait a minute, what do you mean? We said, "we're going to eat foods like baby turtles and Balut." They're these little embryos they eat off the street like we would eat a pretzel in America. So we had to work with them on that. It was a cultural thing. Other than that, the language barrier was a big problem. There's no faking Mandarin.

This is the 15th series. How long will the show continue?

Well it will definitely go through 16 and I have a feeling we'll do more after that. This last season we finished the 12th most watched show in America. That's pretty good for a show in its 15th season and we're still beating Ugly Betty.

Survivor is often blamed for kick-starting this slew of bad, reality TV. How does that sit with you?

I get it. But the sad truth is, if people weren't watching, it wouldn't be on the air. TV has its own weeding out system called ratings. Reality has reached such a low level of poor craftsmanship and loosely scripted baloney that in the end, it works to the advantage of a show like Survivor. We might be the granddaddy and we might not be on the cover of magazines anymore but we're still the real deal.