VACCINE HEROES HAILED ON A shot in
Achievement award winner Rosemary Cox with Joanna Lumley
Champion award winners Amy and Ella Meek
EastEnders’ actor Rudolph Walker
PRIDE of Britain is a song for unsung heroes. And since the moment Paul McCartney attended the first awards in 1999, its unofficial theme has always been All You Need Is Love. Twenty two years on, love remained the heartbeat of this year’s event.
Whether it was Gee Walker’s children saying ‘We love you, mum’, or Joanna Lumley telling organ donor campaigner Rosemary Cox she loved her, or Ed Sheeran’s love song to Harmonie-Rose Allen who lost her legs and arms to meningitis, love was all around.
It shone through the friendship between two young fundraisers Hughie Higginson and Freddie
Xavi. It was in the solidarity of Sands United, the football team for dads who have lost babies. And it was in the camaraderie of the Oxford team who kept each other going to discover a world-changing vaccine.
In the year that Pride of Britain lost its own founder Peter Willis, who died in June, the nation’s most emotional awards was even more poignant than usual.
At the last event in 2019, Covid did not yet have its name. In 2021, as Carol Vorderman thanked Oxford Vaccine team, it was the first time in 22 years anyone had seen the awards co-host reduced to tears.
A room full of famous faces, from ITV’s Simon Cowell to Hollywood’s Sharon Stone, and even Sausage from the Masked Singer, got to its feet for one of the longest standing ovations the Pride of Britain Awards, in partnership with TSB, has ever seen.
After taking place last year as a virtual event, Pride of Britain was only possible in person this year because of the hard work of vaccine scientists and NHS at the first Pride of Britain awards in 1999
THANK YOU FROM US ALL:
I would have walked across broken glass to give you this award
vaccinators – many of us with the Oxford jab fighting our bodies’ daily battle against the virus.
Hearing how the team behind it had lived from the University’s vending machines, missing their own families, only added to the gratitude.
The team brushed off achievements which have led to 1.7 billion doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine being given worldwide. “It’s lucky that mini-Cheddars and Bounty bars are two of your five a day,” Prof Cath Green OBE laughed.
Prof Sir Andrew Pollard added: “We’re all pretty ordinary people, just doing our normal jobs in an unusual time”.
As Stephen Fry, presenting them with their award said: “It’s only true heroes who think they aren’t heroes.” He added: “I would have walked across broken glass to give you this award.”
Actress Sharon Stone, who recently faced the tragic loss of her baby nephew, spoke for many as she gave a Prince’s Trust Award to Syrian refugee Hassan Alkhawam. “It’s really lovely to see people again,” she said. “I’ve been crying all night.”
Fittingly, for a year when we remembered Peter’s passion in creating these awards, this was an incredible group of winners. There was something unmistakably Pride of Britain about Stephen Wharton, a