Paul Talbot, who died Wednesday at 86, brought “Romper Room” to Australia, “The Price is Right” to France, and “Baywatch” to the entire world.

Talbot helped originate the sale of American television programs in foreign markets, a practice that started small in the 1950s and later became fantastically lucrative. In the 1960s, Talbot turned “Romper Room,” the televised preschool classroom, into an international franchise with local shows in 25 countries.

In 1969, Talbot developed Graham Kerr’s “Galloping Gourmet” cooking show for network television and then distributed it via a pioneering barter arrangement under which stations received the show in return for advertising time.

When European nations broke up their state television monopolies in the 1980s, Talbot found them to be eager customers for inexpensive, locally produced versions of American game shows such as “The Dating Game,” “Family Feud,” and “Password.” For several years his Talbot Television was the world’s largest producer of game shows – more than 80 at one point. Most of them were based on the originals developed by Americans Chuck Barris and Mark Goodman. Millions today watch “Mita Maksaa” in Finland, “Prijzenslag” in the Netherlands, and “Der Preis ist HeiSS” in Germany. “Il Prezzo e Giusto” in Italy is as recognizable as Bob Barker’s original, although the models kiss everyone.

Talbot’s greatest single success was “Baywatch,” which he co-produced and eventually placed in 144 countries around the globe. “There’s no territory that doesn’t have ‘Baywatch,'” Talbot told Video Age International in 1999. “The last country we sold it to, because we couldn’t find any more countries, was Papua New Guinea.”

His global market penetration grew out of an a more arid beginning, distributing “Hopalong Cassidy,” the Western series, to Britain, Mexico, and Cuba in the early 1950s. Sweden turned out to be a tougher sell. When he screened the show for the state authorities who ran Swedish television, they told him, “Oh, this is terrific. The public will love it. But it might become habit-forming, and we wouldn’t want that.”

Talbot was born in 1918, on 128th Street in Manhattan. His father was a Wall Street lawyer, and he was brought up at the family’s summer home on Cape Cod. He visited his father occasionally and dined at the restaurant 21. Industrious and publicity-minded from an early age, Talbot made pocket change with an egg delivery route and dreamed of his first public relations coup – riding his red Express wagon to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. That stunt never came off, but family lore has it that Talbot did manage to make the 1939 New York fair, playing one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

A 1939 graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Talbot initially found work voicing radio soap operas such as “The Adventures of Henry Aldrich” and “Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories.” Blessed with a vivid shock of red hair, he was hired by CBS-TV for contrast on the set when it was experimenting with color technology. He sometimes served as host for broadcasts of American Square Dance Association hoedowns. “I would announce and then I would join in, and they would teach me steps – which I always misstepped – and this was, in those days, considered amusing,” he said.

Television more or less ended when World War II began. Drafted into the Army in 1942, Talbot first worked in public relations and later joined Eisenhower’s staff in London. After the war, he began selling radio scripts abroad. One of his first clients was Radio Andorra in the tiny principality of the Pyrenees, which happened to have a 60,000-watt transmitter that broadcast to much of Europe. Business was slow, but an Army buddy helped Talbot find work writing scripts for the radio versions of “Superman,” “Batman,” and “Aquaman.” Soon, he purchased the foreign rights to the shows and sold them to stations in Mexico and Australia for local production. Local production became the hallmark of much of his later distribution.

Branching out into television, Talbot sold episodes of “Hopalong Cassidy,” “Lassie,” and several other shows to foreign markets, where they were often remarkably popular. “There is one place they don’t consider foreign,” he once told World Trade Magazine. “You grow up with Hollywood the way you grow up with heaven. It’s a wonderful place, but you are not sure exactly how you got there.” In later years, Talbot had spectacular success distributing the soap opera “All My Children.”

Nevertheless, it was hard work, and for many years he mainly lived in hotels. “I went to Russia at the height of the Cold War – the 1950s – naively thinking I was going to sell them ‘Hopalong Cassidy,’ but all they wanted at that time was for me to buy something from them,” Talbot told Video Age International. “They showed me endless ballets.” He also began marketing simulcasts of boxing championships, which were broadcast onto movie screens.

In Australia, a nascent television industry proved one of Talbot’s best customers. As the leading authority in the country on international broadcasting, he represented the national Olympics committee in negotiations over television rights with networks around the world for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. It was the first Olympics to charge for what the networks regarded as a news event that ought to be distributed for free. The BBC and networks in America ended up boycotting the games, and Talbot shouldered a share of the blame.

“They did hold out and that’s one of the reasons they’re getting $2-3 billion … for the rights to the Sydney Olympics coming up in the year 2000,” Talbot said in 1999.

Talbot purchased the international rights to “Romper Room” from the show’s founders, Bert and Nancy Claster, and in the early 1960s auditioned for a new teacher in Sydney, Australia. The winner was a young kindergarten teacher named Susan Thompson, who eventually became Talbot’s wife. Ms. Talbot took over the international propagation of the show, leading the teachers in special seminars.

After a few abortive business ventures down under, including Heroes, an attempt to replicate the hamburger chain McDonald’s, Talbot partnered with Graham Kerr, a former Royal Air Force cook, to produce “The Galloping Gourmet.” The show was the most widely broadcast cooking show of its day, seen in 38 countries. It featured the disarming Mr. Kerr combining high-calorie fare with amiable banter. An advertisement for a profitable line of cookbooks and cookware followed each show. The series, which ran to more than 450 shows, ended in 1971, when Mr. Kerr abruptly embraced evangelical Christianity in the wake of a near-fatal auto accident.

Politically liberal, Talbot helped organize the 1948 convention of the Progressive Party. For recreation, he liked sailing his 36-foot ketch, Miss Susan, out of Cape Cod, and when he was producing the show “Black Beauty” he would frequently take a ride on the show’s star horse.

Paul Talbot

Born December 16, 1918, in New York City; died July 6 at his home on Cape Cod after a brief illness; survived by his wife, Susan; sons Keith, John, and Thomas; a daughter, Rachel; and a grandson.