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tv awards
return to victory
There was more than just a slight case of deju vu at this year’s Radio Times sponsored British Academy Television Awards.
Michael Gambon, as Best Actor, and Graham Norton, for Entertainment Performance, both weaved their way up to the podium for the third year running while Louis Theroux retained the Richard Dimbleby award for Best Presenter he’d first won twelve months ago.
And just a couple of months after BAFTA Fellow and multiple winner John Thaw died of can- cer, his widow Sheila Hancock was on hand at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane to receive the Lew Grade Audience Award for the telemovie Buried Treasure on her late husband’s behalf.
“It was,” she said tearfully in a genuinely moving speech, “fitting that the last award he’d ever get should be voted on by the audi- ence as he always said that it was only the audience that mat- ters.” Thaw’s final Inspector Morse instalment, The Remorseful Day, had, perhaps inevitably, snared the same award a year earlier.
But there were also some notable firsts on an evening which was replayed in edited ITV highlights twenty-four hours later.
Comedy discovered a new star in Ricky Gervais, whose BBC2 spoof reality series The Office was also named best sitcom, and Sky News picked up its first ever BAFTA for coverage of the tragic events of September 11.
With just four awards this time round, Channel 4, which had dom- inated last year’s ceremony, was relegated to third place behind the evening’s winner, the BBC with ten, followed by ITV with six.
News of Gambon’s unprece- dented small screen hat-trick – following Wives & Daughters and Longitude – arrived early in the proceedings and he acknowl- edged writer-director Stephen Poliakoff “who stopped me doing my usual theatre rubbish” on Perfect Strangers. Poliakoff himself stepped up later to receive the prestigious Dennis Potter Award.
It was third time lucky for Julie Walters who having been nomi- nated twice before across 20 years – for Boys From The Blackstuff and Dinnerladies – won her first ever television BAFTA for My Beautiful Son.
Among the various awards in the gift of the Academy was a special BAFTA for now-retired Grand Prix Racing commentator Murray Walker, described by for- mer World champion Sir Jackie Stewart as “a remarkable man we all love very dearly.”
To one time executive now independent producer Verity Lambert went the Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Contribution to TV and prolific screenwriter Andrew Davies, two of whose adaptations – Othello and The Way We Live Now – both featured strongly at this year’s awards, received the prestigious Academy Fellowship.
The evening was compered ably by Chris Tarrant and the pre- senters included Culture Minister Tessa Jowell, Joan Collins, Sex And The City’s Kim Cattrall, Lord Winston, Timothy Spall and Lord Attenborough. Quentin Falk
Photos: 1. Pride of place: seat assign- ments at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane 2. Dominique Jackson, Sheila Hancock & Kevin Whately with the Lew Grade audience award for Buried Treasure 3. Guests make a red carpet entrance 4. Presenter Kirsty Young gets glittery 5. Ioan Gruffudd enjoys the party 6. Michael Gambon with his Actor BAFTA and presenter Kim Cattrall 7. The always entertaining Cold Feet gang, winners for Drama Series 8. Presenter Davina McCall and Pop Idol winners for Entertainment Programme or Series
9. Cat Deeley (centre) with cheeky chappies Richard Blackwood and Graham Norton
Contents page: the young star of Buried Treasure holds the best tickets in town (Photos by Sylvaine Poitau)
Graham Norton on the red carpet
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