Mid-00s ITV had a habit of making copies of BBC formats. But they were good fodder for TV Burp, which is the only reason I remember them.
"If you like Who Do You Think You Are, you may also like You Don't Know You're Born, which is the same!"
Tycoon was also around this time, although there's a difference between plagiarising and just jumping on to any passing bandwagon. At the time The Apprentice and Dragons' Den were both hugely successful and ITV, always happy to cash in on the latest craze, tried to see if they could make a hit out of business-themed shows as well, but obviously they didn't. But when one show is a hit or there's a craze, there's always commissioners looking for shows like it, and producers pitching things like it (I remember reading some entertainment commissioner saying that in the months after the 2012 Olympics, they had been pitched celebrity formats based around pretty much every single Olympic sport).
It's the same in every part of entertainment, really - think about all the boy bands that followed in the wake of Take That, all the product of other record companies and managers wanting a piece of the lucrative market. And similarly nobody was doing much in the way of sci-fi and fantasy on British TV until Doctor Who was successfully revived, and then everyone was doing it.
Some of them were alright. The one I always remember is Better Homes on ITV, which is exactly what you get when you try and do a variation on a hit show, in this case Changing Rooms, but not make it so similar you get sued. What I particularly like about that is that when Ground Force was a hit, they then spun it off into Better Gardens as well.
But even though they were hugely derivative, it got big ratings and a decent enough show, well made, and also this was in an era when you didn't get big shows like that running pretty much all year round (cf The Repair Shop), so for most people, Better Homes happily filled in the gaps between series of Changing Rooms, it was enough like it to pass the time. Similarly when Airport was a hit and ITV commissioned Airline, which was also a successful show for them, because people liked watching them. It's a bit like when I was a terrible student and bought lad mags - if I'd already bought FHM and Loaded that month and I was going on a train, I'd buy Maxim, which always seemed a bit second-rate, but I didn't mind it and it passed the time.
It's a concept that doesn't work so well now, because the big shows themselves can now be produced in such volume that there's no need to turn to a lookalike to fill the gaps. ITV's attempts at MasterChef-style shows are a good example - they've always flopped, and one reason is surely because there's so much MasterChef already, nobody needs a substitute.
It's not an entirely ITV thing, although they have probably been the broadcaster most eager to jump on to any passing bandwagon if it looks profitable. Ronnie Corbett did a series for BBC1 about ten years ago called Ronnie's Animal Crackers which was the most obvious attempt to find something for BBC1 that did for them what POG's Dogs was doing on ITV, and similarly all those shows on BBC2 like Common Sense which were an attempt to replicate Gogglebox.
That is always the case in television, people get ideas from everywhere and they always want their equivalent of the latest hit. I remember a few years ago there was a piece in Broadcast where a commissioner talked about the kind of shows they wanted, and someone in the comments underneath said "so, in summary, they want more shows that are going to be hits and not shows that are going to be flops".