Baftas 2021: three hosts, two days – is this a one-off ?
As you are all no doubt aware, the real losers of the Covid era are the awards ceremonies. Once the height of impossible glamour, they have now been relegated to asking that nominees dress up to the nines, just to sit in their own living room and deliver sub-par reaction shots into a laptop webcam.
The Grammys were small and uninteresting. The Golden Globes were full of awkward technical hitches. The Oscars had originally promised a “no Zoom” policy this year, but are quickly learning just how hard it is to force nominees to travel internationally during a pandemic, only to sit for hours and hope for an award they’re unlikely to win.
Now it has emerged that the Baftas will be doing without Graham Norton this year. Instead, hosting duties will be split between Dermot O’Leary, Edith Bowman and Clara Amfo. What’s more, the ceremony will be split across two days, with Amfo giving out eight awards on 10 April, and O’Leary and Bowman doing the rest the following night.
The loss of Norton seems like a loss of authority. Hosting an awards show is a difficult thing to get right: you’re at once pitching your performance to people in the auditorium, many of whose careers will be changed by a win, and millions of people at home, who just want to see what everyone is wearing. Which is why the ceremony traditionally likes to glom on to its favourites.
This millennium has only featured six Bafta hosts; Stephen Fry has hosted 11 times, Jonathan Ross five. There have been a couple of misfires – Jack Docherty hosted in 2000, and the truly berserk anti-comedy of Joanna Lumley meant that she wasn’t invited back after hosting in 2018 and 2019 – but Norton felt like a staple after his stint last year.
I was in the Albert Hall for last year’s ceremony, and his performance was expertly judged. His jokes were barbed without being spiteful, his sincere moments actually seemed sincere and, most importantly, he understood the importance of economy. This was his first shot at hosting the film Baftas, but it felt like he’d been doing it all his life.
That might be because he had long been a mainstay of their television counterparts, hosting them in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2019. But, again, he wasn’t there last year for the hastily assembled part-remote lockdown TV Baftas. There, the glory went to Richard Ayoade, who was an inspired choice to hosts an awards show in what basically amounted to a massive void.
Ayoade brought a much-needed dose of self-aware, “This is all a bit crap, isn’t it?” smarts to proceedings. Chances are he’d fare less well at a flesh-and-blood ceremony, which traditionally calls for a little less nuance and a little more sincerity, but he couldn’t have been better for the weirdness of 2020.
Perhaps that’s the rationale behind the hiring of O’Leary, Bowman and Amfo. This won’t be a normal awards show. There will be no fidgety huddle of A-list stars 10 feet away from the stage. There will be no breathless red carpet event to cover. It won’t be an event that needs hosting in the traditional sense. Instead, it sounds like more of a magazine format, with the hosts simply throwing between items. And if that’s the case, why not hire the people who are best at throwing between items?
The big question is whether Norton will return to host the Baftas next year. It sounded very much like this was a temporary arrangement “Bafta loves working with Graham Norton,” a spokesperson told the Sun. “He was a great host last year. We have a very successful working relationship with him across both the film and TV awards and have done for a number of years.”
So maybe he’ll be back. Then again, given the uncertain future of public life post-Covid and the spectacular way that award show ratings have cratered over the past 12 months, maybe nobody will even want to see a televised Bafta ceremony next year.