The 2023 Bafta TV awards will be presented on Sunday (BBC One from 7pm) with The Responder, This Is Going to Hurt, Slow Horses, Somewhere Boy and Bad Sisters among the most nominated contenders. As a Bafta member, I voted in the process that led to the long lists and on one jury but have no advance knowledge of winners. Here are my predictions for the biggest night in British television.
Drama series
A super-competitive section. Bafta has historically differentiated between serious and funny content but the flourishing genre of jokes-and-jolts challenges this, exemplified by Apple TV+’s dark Irish comedy Bad Sisters. Two police procedurals with a non-generic ingredient (the mental cost to officers in The Responder, the shadow of the 1984 miners’ strike in Sherwood) are compelling contenders, but victory for Channel 4’s Somewhere Boy – a dark fairytale about a child long-protected from the world’s realities – would reward the greatest originality.
Mini-series
Comedy-drama also dominates this shortlist. Proxy politics is often a Bafta factor and jurors could send love to the NHS by backing Adam Kay’s medical meltdown This Is Going to Hurt, although points could be lost to suspicions of misogyny from some viewers. The two solid fact-based ITV shows – espionage drama A Spy Among Friends and fake-disappearance farce The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe – are strong runners, but giving the prize to BBC Three’s influencer thriller Mood would recognise brilliant younger talent. (Its multi-credited creator, Nicôle Lecky, took the music award at the earlier Bafta craft awards.)
International
Shows from foreign streamers increasingly dominate UK viewing, but these are mainly crammed into a single category. Restaurant drama The Bear feels the most appetising starter, although, after the first series of The White Lotus failed to be shortlisted, some jurors may wish to recognise a multiple Emmy-winner.
Leading actress
Another deliberation where midnight oil may have been required. Former category winners Sarah Lancashire and Vicky McClure may be disadvantaged by fairly low-key shows: Julia and Without Sin. Royalists might bow to last year’s death of Queen Elizabeth II by choosing Imelda Staunton in The Crown. But powerful emotion often wins trophies, and this feels like a contest between Maxine Peake as the mother of a Hillsborough victim in Anne and (for me) Kate Winslet as a mum whose child is being killed by social media exposure in I Am Ruth. (Which also seems likely to win the single drama section.)
Supporting actress
Major established talent – Lesley Manville (Sherwood) and Anne-Marie Duff (Bad Sisters) – will rightly have backers but Adelayo Adedayo would be a deserving winner for bringing distinctiveness to the often off-the-peg role of sidekick cop in the Merseyside police nightmare The Responder.
Leading actor
Martin Freeman performed superbly against type and accent in The Responder, though some may have been swayed by a last (and, at Bafta, also first) chance to honour Cillian Murphy for his magnetic 36 hours of work in Peaky Blinders. Oscar-winners can carry extra heft for TV juries, though, and Gary Oldman is electrifying as the gobby, slobby and also Sherlocky spy chief in Apple TV+’s marvellous Slow Horses.
Supporting actor
Juries are secluded from each other, so this panel won’t know that Lewis Gribben has been overlooked for the central and tougher role in Somewhere Boy, which could create the anomaly of Samuel Bottomley being honoured alone here. Adeel Akhtar, as a suspect in Sherwood, confirmed his versatility, as did Will Sharpe in The White Lotus but each already has a Best actor Bafta so Salim Daw, a respected veteran in the complex role of Mohamed Al Fayed in The Crown, would be a popular choice.
Entertainment performance/reality and constructed factual
Some nominees – such as Ant and Dec and Graham Norton – are perennials but one aim of the prizes is to recognise new standout work. The most powerful debut of 2022 was betrayal gameshow The Traitors, and failure to recognise the format and Claudia Winkleman’s cunning fronting of it would suggest that someone had been plotting against them.
Female/male performance in a comedy programme
These are coin-toss contests, with six equal claimants on each list. I’d like to see Siobhán McSweeney take the female statuette for finding new menacing comedy in nuns as Sister Michael in Derry Girls. On the other side of the draw, Lenny Rush feels the likeliest winner for Am I Being Unreasonable?
Specialist factual
Four-time Bafta-winner Adam Curtis could have stuck with the successful formula of The Power of Nightmares and HyperNormalisation – geopolitical psychoanalysis, mining TV and movie archives for metaphors organised by Curtis’s quizzical commentary. His voice is absent from Russia 1985-1999: Traumazone and the focus narrower – home movies and archive from the last phase of the USSR – but the editing eye is as sharp as ever. Aids: The Unheard Tapes and The Green Planet also told compelling stories, but Curtis’s series again shows a TV genius at work.
Live event
Was Elizabeth II alive (Platinum Jubilee: Party at the Palace) or dead (the State Funeral) the superior piece of TV? To avoid such an inelegant contest, jurors may well opt for ITV’s Concert for Ukraine, though even that raises the question of whether televisual or political quality is being favoured. Shouldn’t Bafta axe this category before the 2024 panel has to compare different angles on Princess Anne’s hat at the Coronation?
Single documentary
Three impressive pieces of longer historical context – Sky’s Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, and BBC Two’s Escape from Kabul Airport and Our Falklands War – seem likely to lose to BBC One’s The Real Mo Farah, which rose above the genre of sports biog with the stunning revelation that the runner had been illegally trafficked to the UK. One of the news scoops of the year, this segment also had a significant effect on home secretary Suella Braverman’s immigration policy as she floundered when asked if a current equivalent of Farah would be sent back home, rather than staying to become a superstar athlete and a knight.
P&O Cruises memorable moment award
Disclosure: I was on the panel that chose the six moments from which the public will choose a winner. Against strong claims from the peace process finale of Derry Girls and the revelation of Mo Farah’s secret, the likely winner seems to be Elizabeth II’s Tea Party With Paddington Bear: a piece of high diplomatic and CGI skill that crowned out the Queen’s 70-year TV career.
