Crown set to rule after receiving five Bafta nominations
HISTORICAL drama The Crown has dominated this year’s TV Bafta nominations after securing five nods, including best actress and best drama series.
Claire Foy is tipped for her portrayal of the younger Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix show’s first season, while Jared Harris, John Lithgow and Vanessa Kirby are featured in the line-up for best supporting actors.
Creator and writer Peter Morgan said: “I am beyond thrilled for The Crown to have been recognised in a year where so much wonderful work has been achieved in British television. We are all giddy and delighted.”
The popular series based on the earlier years of Britain’s royal family is up against The Durrells, Happy Valley and War & Peace in the best drama list.
Meanwhile, Foy faces competition in her category from Thirteen’s Jodie Comer, NW’s Nikki Amuka-Bird and Happy Valley’s Sarah Lancashire.
Describing The Crown’s success as “wonderful,” executive producer Andy Harries, added: “It’s great to feel the appreciation and support of the UK TV and film industry for our series. I am delighted for all our nominees and thrilled about the ongoing domestic and international impact and success of the series.”
The full line-up of nominations was announced by actors Andrew Buchan and Michaela Coel during an event yesterday at Bafta’s central London headquarters.
Benedict Cumberbatch tops the list of leading actors following his role in The Hollow Crown, alongside Robbie Coltrane in National Treasure, Adeel Akhtar in Murdered By My Father and Babou Ceesay in Damilola, Our Loved Boy.
The one-off drama, retelling the tragic story of Damilola Taylor who died in 2000, is also nominated for both single drama and supporting actress, Wunmi Mosaku.
But Night Manager star Tom Hiddleston, as well as his co-stars Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman miss out in the acting categories, with only The Night Manager’s Tom Hollander up for supporting actor for the John Le Carre drama.
The Night Manager, which was broadcast on BBC1, is also absent in the best drama series category, where The Crown, The Durrells, Happy Valley and War And Peace are up for the award.
Another BBC1 drama, The Missing, the thriller exploring the emotional fallout of a child’s abduction, does not appear on the shortlist, which is dominated by Netflix drama The Crown.
BBC police corruption thriller Line Of Duty is also absent from the best drama category, but Daniel Mays is up for supporting actor.
Fans reacted to the omissions on Twitter.
@NFTSDuncan wrote: “Some cool Bafta nominations including The Crown and Stranger Things but Bafta clearly not a fan of The Night Manager.”
@CatieMelrose wrote: “Tom and The Night Manager missed out on a nomination...How?”
@JamieVersey wrote: “Dear Bafta TV. Why no Line Of Duty nomination? The last series was some of the best drama ever shown on British television.”
@blondsteve wrote: “The Missing seems to be missing from Bafta TV nominations! And Unforgotten seems to have been forgotten. And no Line Of Duty? Very odd.”
Elsewhere, Strictly Come Dancing features in both the entertainment programme category and entertainment performance by series host Claudia Winkleman.
Ed Balls’ famous Gangnam Style routine made the list of must-see TV moments, along with Planet Earth II’s snakes vs iguana chase, James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with Michelle Obama, Danny Dyer’s royal revelation on Who Do You Think You Are?, Game Of Thrones’ Battle Of The Bastards and Line Of Duty’s series three finale.
Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, Britain’s Got Talent and Michael McIntyre’s Big Show are also named in the best entertainment programme line-up, while the final BBC series of The Great British Bake Off is listed for best feature.
Aberfan: The Green Hollow is shortlisted in the Single Drama category alongside Damilola, Our Loved Boy; Murdered By My Father and NW.
Coverage of the Six Nations’ England v Wales match competes against Rio 2016 Olympics, Rio 2016 Paralympics and The Open in the Sport category.
The Virgin TV Bafta winners will be announced on May 14 at a ceremony hosted by Sue Perkins in London’s Royal Festival Hall.
CALL the Midwife has been voted the best drama of the 21st century. Following a public vote, it beat the likes of such ratings smashes as Happy Valley, Merlin, The Bridge and The Night Manager to the title at the British Film Institute and Radio Times Television Festival last weekend.
This might seem an unlikely accolade for a show that mixes nuns with the quite literal blood, sweat and tears of childbirth, but Call the Midwife has created a template for a television phenomenon.
With its alchemy of social history, heartstring-tugging storylines and characters to care about it has struck gold with an audience beyond its obvious target.
Me and my father, for instance. We’d both ordinarily run a mile from a drama with this much gynaecological detail.
Indeed, every time the stirrups are on the screen I cough and ask “Cuppa tea, Dad?” before making a sharp exit for the kitchen.
The kettle was particularly busy during Nurse Barbara’s pre-wedding Dutch Cap-fitting at the end of the last series.
But occasional blushes notwithstanding, the pair of us love this programme. When it’s on, it is an essential part of our Sunday night routine.
As the last season closed with a finale that prompted enough tears to fill the Taff, we felt a void that no amount of nerve-shredding Line of Duty police procedural can fill.
Part of its appeal to us is very personal. My late mother was a nurse who went on to teach nursing.
She was an exact contemporary of Jennifer Worth, whose best-selling memoirs of midwifery in London’s East End were the inspiration for the series.
Mam had read the books and saw the first few series of Call the Midwife.
She usually cast a forensic eye over medical dramas, picking out the errors and inaccuracies. But she couldn’t fault the verisimilitude of Call the Midwife and revelled in the memories it evoked of crisp blue uniforms, gleaming belt buckles and a time when the NHS was still a new and revolutionary concept.
So when we watch it, we think of my mother and how she - like the midwives of Poplar - was so passionate about her nursing vocation.
Then there’s the other kind of vocation laid bare on the show.
Popular culture has some very bad habits where the portrayal of female religious life is concerned – from the highly strung nuns of Black Narcissus to the positively psychotic sisters of Armchair Thriller.
But Call the Midwife has turned the spiritual struggles of the sisters of Nonnatus House into compelling prime-time drama.
None more so than its sensitive treatment of Sister Mary Cynthia’s storyline of mental health difficulties. The characterisation of the nuns is so beautifully balanced too. Sister Julienne’s serenity could be too saccharine in the care of a lesser actress than Jenny Agutter.
But she is pitch perfect in her delivery of such wonderful lines as: “Every woman alive is the sum of all she ever did and felt and was.”
Which brings us to the quality of the writing. The character of Sister Monica Joan – played by the imperious Judy Parfitt – is entirely communicated by her frequently baroque syntax.
With dementia encroaching, she slips in and out of reality but never loses her eloquence. Her lines range from the mystical: “Venus and Saturn are now in alignment. It is entirely appropriate that you should appear.” to philosophical common sense: “A weed is simply a flower that somebody has decided is in the wrong place.”
Such masterly scripting is underpinned by thorough historical research. It has been suggested that a big part of Call the Midwife’s USP in these uncertain times is nostalgia – a harking back to that post-war world of close community and family values.
Yet while we might thrill to the pastel palette of Trixie’s fabulous wardrobe or feel a warm glow at the friendly banter of local bobby PC Noakes or everyman handyman Fred, Call the Midwife has never shied away from the underside of ’50s and ’60s Britain.
Creator Heidi Thomas has ensured some of the most controversial and troubling issues in our social history have been reflected in unflinching detail.
Wales’ own Rosie Moriarty-Simmonds inspired the show’s powerful and poignant exploration of the thalidomide scandal which affected at least 20,000 infants across the world.
Rosie’s autobiography Four Fingers and Thirteen Toes was used as source material for the series’ continuing storyline on the impact of thalidomide.
And, as she said at the time, the impact of dramatising these events is potentially more far-reaching than a straightforward factual retelling.
“Call the Midwife will access so many more people – more than a documentary.
“And it will deliver our story in bite-size pieces of information to people of all walks of life.
“The writers at the BBC have been very careful to make sure they’ve got the facts right and make sure it’s a record of what actually happened to us.
“It would have been a travesty if they’d just airbrushed it out of history and pretended it never happened.”
Similarly, the show’s shocking and brave storyline on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) brought a subject that is still hugely relevant to our own society to a mainstream audience.
An estimated 200 million girls around the world have undergone the procedure and Nimko Ali, co-founder of the Daughters of Eve anti-FGM campaign, and herself a victim of FGM, worked closely with the programme’s creators on this episode.
So Call the Midwife is far from cosy Sunday night telly.
As critic Jasper Rees comments, it: “maintains a constant equilibrium of light and dark.”
It deserves its latest accolade because it is a drama that can make its audience laugh, cry and think.
This is one baby the BBC should be proud to have delivered.
And its many fans will be relieved to know that three more series are on the way.