The latest Bafta TV awards again show the range of talent across UK television. Though drama characteristically dominates, the shows with most nominations – Rivals, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Slow Horses and Baby Reindeer – represent a range of genres and source material (from real events via a 36-year-old Jilly Cooper bonkbuster to a solo theatre show) suggesting that the 2025 voters have largely avoided historical snobbery, long a problem in these prizes.
The awards also continue a belated honouring of overlooked talent. After improbably having to wait until last year for his first main Bafta nomination, David Tennant gets a rapid second, for his thrilling turn as a Richard III of the TV industry in the raunchy Cooper adaptation Rivals.
It also seems rudely overdue that performers as great as Jonathan Pryce and Sharon D Clarke have had to wait until now: honoured for Slow Horses and Mr Loverman respectively. Danny Dyer also makes his debut in the lists, though oddly not for his career-transforming wigged romantic in Rivals but for Sky Max’s Mr Bigstuff.
As always, we have our own regretted omissions. James Corden and Ruth Jones, for Gavin & Stacey: The Finale, feel cruelly overlooked in the scripted comedy section, as does Peter Straughan in the scripted drama category for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, a masterclass in the distillation of the 883 pages of Hilary Mantel’s novel into punchy dialogue that sounded plausibly 16th century while still comprehensible now.
And in an international category with only six places, the number of omissions is becoming ridiculous. Although some shows made by streamers (Rivals, Slow Horses, Supacell) are judged British enough to compete in the main categories, the chosen international half-dozen – including Shōgun, After the Party and Colin from Accounts – crowds out Pachinko, Nobody Wants This and Disclaimer.
In awards covering the first political cycle since 1964 that UK and US elections have fallen in the same year, there will be some concern in journalism departments at the lack of recognition, although the director of the BBC election night gets a craft nod.
Although the BBC remains the leading nom-magnet – with 49 nods in the television awards and 26 in the parallel craft awards – its director general and chairman may be alarmed at an apparent vertiginous tilt in the industry’s balance of power.
The oldest British broadcaster’s almost half-century in the main television awards is well beaten by the 69 for other broadcasters, with Channel 4 (18) and ITV (15) having very strong years – the former helped by great comedy and current affairs, the latter by its dramas, Mr Bates and Until I Kill You – and the streamers growing in power.
Most alarming for the corporation, ahead of renegotiations of its Royal Charter and funding system from 2027, is that 26 nominations are shared by shows that fulfil a key BBC remit – drama about contemporary Britain – and yet were not made by the BBC: Mr Bates (ITV), Baby Reindeer (Netflix), Slow Horses (Apple TV+) and Rivals (Disney+).
There can be some sympathy for the BBC excuse that it doesn’t have the money: the awards ceremony on 11 May will take place in the context of warnings that British TV production and careers are becoming unsustainable due to pressure on budgets from streamer competition and UK tax breaks originally intended to help the industry. (Now renamed “expenditure credits”, these benefits can favour big budget projects that are more likely to be made by foreign broadcasters.)
Even so, with Adolescence – another British story made with Netflix money – currently setting ratings records, candidates applying to replace the departing Charlotte Moore as BBC Chief Content Officer must surely be asked at interview: should you/would you/could you have made at the BBC Adolescence, Mr Bates, Baby Reindeer, Rivals and Slow Horses. And if not, what is the point of the BBC drama department?
An Adolescence issue for Bafta is that, weirdly, this is the second year running that there is a sense of a deafening television conversation elsewhere: a TV drama that everyone is talking about but has to wait a year for Bafta recognition. Because the qualifying period is the previous calendar 12 months, Mr Bates vs the Post Office (premiered 1 January 2024) is only honoured now, 15 months later. And Netflix’s Adolescence (dropped 13 March this year) will only come into contention this time next year.
Academy voters have been happy to wait to vote for Mr Bates, although as at this week’s Royal Television Society awards – where the Post Office drama won no trophies despite nominations – the show may suffer in voting rooms from a sense of being so early last year.
It’s probably impractical to change the Bafta nominations window so shows that really want the gold mask on their shelves should arrange winter or autumn transmission: Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light (BBC One, from 10 November) and Rivals (mid-October) may have benefitted from transmission close to the filling in of ballots. (Disclosure: I am a Bafta voter, though with no insider knowledge of the voting process.)
Another issue for the organisers is that while best soap clearly doesn’t have enough contenders – it is now effectively a matter of choosing three from four, with Hollyoaks missing out – the international category clearly has too many, calling either for more international categories or further redefinition between “domestic” content (the five terrestrial networks plus Sky) and “international”, a category invented to contain (in every sense) the streamers but which is stretched by the growing number of British stories they tell.
Next year, Adolescence will surely have to be classified as British and will surely sweep the awards, continuing the sense that, for purely logistical reasons, Bafta is a year off the pace.
