There’s a valedictory feel to this year’s Bafta TV nominations. Nineteen slots are shared by three drama series – The Crown, Happy Valley, and Succession – for their final seasons (at least unless Netflix lures the creators of the Windsors fiction back for an epilogue involving hospitalisations and doctored photos).
Happy Valley and Succession happily left at the height of their success, as acknowledged by creators Sally Wainwright and Jesse Armstrong competing in the writing category. The omission of The Crown’s Peter Morgan suggests he took his eye off the keyboard in a finale that brought back a ghost Diana in scenes that may leave Bafta thankful there is no TV equivalent of the Golden Raspberry Awards for bad content, which shadows the Oscars. The royal drama scoring so highly in the Craft awards (Costume, Make-Up, Hair etc) fairly reflects a sense that its visual production values maintained quality longer than the scripts.
With two other much-noticed dramas – The Long Shadow and The Sixth Commandment – likely to be one-offs due to featuring investigations of murderers (Peter Sutcliffe, Ben Field), the industry, in a time of struggle for audiences, may feel nervous about so much strong output stopping. In that respect, the most significant performer, with half a dozen nods, is Apple TV+’s magnificent Slow Horses, set in an MI6 unit for failed spies. Thankfully, with Mick Herron still writing the source books (at least five novels and four novellas are still to reach the screen), Gary Oldman should be able to go on for as long as he wants as the malodorous spymaster Jackson Lamb, a sort of George Smelly in contrast to John le Carré’s George Smiley, for which Oldman won a 2011 Bafta Film nomination in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Among performers, the biggest surprise is that, at 52, David Tennant, by consensus one of our finest screen and stage actors, only now gets his first main Bafta nomination (the Welsh and Scottish academies have previously noticed him), and in the Comedy section for Good Omens. Tennant’s earlier mistake with Academy voters may have been to appear in work considered either too populist (Doctor Who, Broadchurch), or too brutal, such as the serial killer in the miniseries Des.
Certainly, Bafta voters have recently shown a reluctance to reward repugnant criminals. It seems striking that James Norton, as the baddie in Happy Valley, misses out while Sarah Lancashire as the good cop seems certain to win her category, although Norton’s contribution to the extraordinary final scene was equally outstanding. Amid this apparent fear of voting “for” evil, Steve Coogan’s recognition for his Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning feels a rare case of absolute technical mastery (the voice, look and inner moral void perfectly captured) overcoming concerns about content.
The acting lists again show the fine distinctions about role size that stalk awards seasons. Having just won a full Golden Globe for her Diana in The Crown, Elizabeth Debicki is a supporting performer here. Similarly, Matthew Macfadyen, arguably the major figure in the finale of Succession, is in support to Brian Cox in the main Actor category. (Unusually, Bafta voters can choose any actor in any category, so some clever ticket-splitting seems to have taken place.)
Until recently best known as a musical theatre actor, Hannah Waddingham achieves a notable double listing for performance (Hannah Waddingham: Home For Christmas) and presentation (Eurovision Song Contest 2023), and can probably have her pick of TV gigs. She could have done a Bafta triple if the third season of Ted Lasso, in which she acts, had come through the International category. However, it didn’t, partly because that single section is too cramped for the volume of great broadcasting from abroad: The Bear, Beef, Succession and The Last Of Us are just four of this year’s six.
Reality TV, a trophy that has felt short of contenders, becomes impressively fresh this time around. Even with The Traitors missing a year between series, there are three strong new formats: Squid Game – The Challenge, Banged Up, and My Mum, Your Dad. As the concept of Fact feels increasingly shaky, Reality, once mocked as an exercise in falsehood, is weirdly becoming more reliable.
In the Factual competition, there are reminders of the crucial role played by documentary as an educational supplement to the news. At a time when a long period of suspended devolved government in Northern Ireland was followed by a nationalist becoming first minister (an outcome that seemed historically impossible until recently), BBC2’s Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland was a vital primer to the past, while Russia’s war against Ukraine is crucially elucidated by the first series of Putin v The West, the latest work from one of the greatest documentarians, Norma Percy. A second series is up for contention next year and, in a geopolitical rather than televisual sense, let’s hope there are not too many seasons to come.
In another way, the 2025 prizes cast a shadow over this year’s. In common with most broadcasting awards, Bafta honours work from the previous calendar year. This can feel odd when a show broadcast just after the 31 December cut-off has to wait 16 months or so until the following spring for recognition: the final series of Happy Valley started on 1 January 2023.
This year, there is an even more extreme example: screened on ITV on the first night of this year, Mr Bates V The Post Office drew around 15 million viewers on transmission/catch-up, forced a change in the law to exonerate most of the 700-plus sub postmasters falsely accused of fraud due to dodgy accounting software and led to former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells being stripped by the King of her CBE.
Beyond the irony of the Post Office causing worries about delivery delays, with a TV programme being such a loud and continuing part of the national conversation, does it risk seeming weirdly slo-mo to wait until this time next year to say thank you? Some members of the Broadcasting Press Guild have argued for a special “out of competition” award to be given in its prizes announced tomorrow, and the Royal Television Society, which doles out its trophies on Tuesday, has looked at a similar solution. Bafta, though, has held to timetables complicated by multiple layers of member voting, although there remains the option, at the 12 May ceremony, of giving a fellowship or special trophy to someone connected with exposure of the Post Office scandal.
The categories again contain brilliant and diverse work, but two feel shaky. Soap – a genre struggling for audiences and quality – was recently cut, due to a shortage of contenders, from a shortlist of four to three. Even so, the 2023 trio – Casualty, EastEnders, Emmerdale – are identically reproduced this year.
I also repeat last year’s plea for the News Coverage category to be cancelled, or at least suspended during this period of multiple competing bloodiness. It has always felt uneasy for jurors to decide which is the “best” coverage of a war, but the 2024 panel has to adjudicate between Channel 4 News and Sky News on what the nominations call “the Israel-Hamas War”, in which case, in a social media-dominated world, issues of alleged prejudice in the room or the coverage seem certain to ignite.
(Disclosure. I am a voting member of Bafta, but had no knowledge of the results until their announcement today.)
