Things were going so well at The British Soap Awards – until Anita Dobson turned up and proceeded to do the soap version of saying the name of the Scottish play: She mentioned viewing figures.
As Anita introduced Letitia Dean’s long overdue Outstanding Achievement Award, I’m sure she thought it would be fine to boast about Sharongate’s 23.5 million viewers
Unfortunately, even on a good week our current No1, Coronation Street, struggles to attract a quarter of that.
Which makes me wonder whether soaps still need a televised awards show.
Obviously, binning it would be bad news for Pip Schofield. Hopefully he’d pick up some scraps of work elsewhere though. You know, so we don’t forget who he is. I’m not sure anyone else would miss it.
Saturday’s two-hour slog only just scraped two million, so Pip was perhaps being wildly optimistic with “see you in 2023”.
There is little to interest the casual viewer these days.
You don’t say “who’s that?” on the red carpet because a cast member has suddenly scrubbed up really well.
You say it because you genuinely don’t recognise many people.
The last semblance of any casual audience engagement went when they ditched the Sexiest Male and Sexiest Female categories in 2015.
That was also the point at which the soap awards stopped being fun and started taking itself far too seriously.
It went a step further this year as Best Actress and Best Actor were replaced by Best Leading Performer.
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The gap was then plugged by the introduction of Best Family, which is not only a half-arsed award, but also, surely, discriminates against those cast members who aren’t in a family.
They got some things right though. The tributes to Barbara Windsor and June Brown were beautifully done – despite adding to the general end-of-an-era vibe.
Speaking of which, the Neighbours tribute also brought a tear and a sigh. It was a fitting goodbye to a TV institution. Sadly, for some of our own struggling shows, it was perhaps less of a goodbye, more of a see you soon in soap oblivion.
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