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celebrating excellence
New faces and old favourites step up for this year’s British Academy Television Awards sponsored by Radio Times
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If perfect evidence was required of the all-inclusive nature of the BAFTA TV Awards, then you had to look no further than this year’s glittering event.
Competing for what Television Chair, Dianne Nelmes has aptly described as “the highest honour in television” were representa- tives from across the wide spec- trum of TV – from soaps to spe- cialist programmes.
The awards represented not only the peak of the year’s televi- sion productions, but also reflect- ed their astonishing diversity – from ITV’s I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here to C4’s disturbing docu- mentary Young, Nazi And Proud.
For the second successive year – and for a brilliant hat-trick if you count her 2001 film BAFTA for Billy Elliot – was the ever-ebullient Julie Walters, named Best Actress for astonishing performance as a grieving mother in Murder.
After several previous nomina- tions, Albert Finney won his first ever Best Actor BAFTA as Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm. There are now plans for him to reprise the role in a sequel.
Earlier in the evening, hosted at the London Palladium by iron
lady Anne Robinson, who purred proudly that this was the first time a woman had been given sole charge of the prestigious event, Ricky Gervais was another return- ing hero.
His hit programme The Office once again scooped two awards – for Best Sitcom and his own Comedy Performance as the egregious David Brent.
Talking of comedy, it was a rightly ecstatic and interestingly – bearded Paul Merton who gal- loped to the stage after finally winning Best Entertainment Performance nearly 10 years after he was first nominated in the same category for Have I Got News For You.
Another two-in-a-row man was RDF’s Stephen Lambert for Faking It, named Best Feature. You can find coverage of that as well as the award to Sky for Best News Coverage not to mention David Jason’s tumultuously received Fellowship elsewhere in this issue of ACADEMY.
Also rightly acclaimed was the producer duo of Norma Percy and Brian Lapping, named by Simon Schama as winners of the Alan Clarke Award. Their docu-
mentaries include Endgame In Ireland, Death Of Yugoslavia and Avenging Terror. Schama described how they had “taken big outcomes and turned them into human thrillers.”
Other guest presenters includ- ed Sir Ian McKellen, Ronnie Barker, James Nesbitt, Sara Parish, Robert Lindsay, Zoe Wanamaker, Michael Parkinson, Patrick Stewart, Bruce Forsyth, Sue Johnston, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Denise Lewis, Jo Brand, Carol Vorderman and Peter Kay.
For the publicly voted, and Radio Times sponsored, Lew Grade Audience Award, revealed by David Dickinson, ITV’s Foyle’s War pipped Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Coronation Street, EastEnders and Pop Idol. ‘Corrie’ had already been named Best Soap.
And the public sitting at home for this year’s awards, shown “as live” on BBC1, helped maintain the six million plus figure posted in the previous two years – with the audience peaking at 7.2m as the awards climaxed towards 10pm.
“The Academy is here to cele- brate excellence, whatever form it takes,” said Dianne Nelmes, in
the Annual Review. “Most of us in the television industry have our nose to the grindstone all the time. The Academy is very impor- tant because it gives us a moment to reflect.” Quentin Falk
Photos l-r:
1. Carolyn Reynolds and Keiran Roberts, Soap winners for Coronation Street
2. Julie Walters delighted with her second year Actress win for Murder
3. A proud Paul Merton receives his Entertainment Performance
award from Bruce Forsyth for Have I Got News For You
4. Stephen Lambert, Features
winner for Faking It, shares a joke with Patrick Keilty
5. A second year win for the thrilled SKY News team
6. Winners of the Flaherty Documentary Award for Feltham Sings
7. The Young, Nazi and Proud team
8. Well-deserved recipients of the
Alan Clarke Award, Brian Lapping
and Norma Percy
9. Anil Gupta, Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais and Ash Atalla are all smiles winning the Situation Comedy BAFTA for The Office
10. I'm a Celeb team with Darren Day, Rhona Cameron and Tony Blackburn 11. Cast and crew from the winning Drama Series, Spooks
photos by Sylvaine Poitau
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