Boring Baftas a Dahm shame

WHAT is the point of the Baftas? It’s yonks since it did its job and just celebrated TV excellence.

Now it’s one long, drawn-out festival of transparent box-ticking, tepid comedy, stilted chat and crackpot results.

It’s almost as if the judges don’t watch telly.

Or don’t care about anything that isn’t signalling right-on virtues.

None of the best dramas from 2022 won a gong. Not The Responder, not Slow Horses, The White Lotus, Hacks, Top Boy or Reacher.

Best imported drama was apparently Dahmer – Monster

(it wasn’t).

Derry Girls, inset, rightly scooped the comedy gongs but most rival contenders were either unwatched or nothing remotely like anything Joe Public would recognise as humour. Look at

Bafta’s scripted comedy winners in the 70s – Porridge, Fawlty Towers, Rising Damp, Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads… it’s OK to weep for what we’ve lost. Even Joel Dommett was shocked when The Masked Singer won an entertainment award. “I really didn’t expect this,” he gasped. The dullness of the evening seeped into a million living rooms like sleeping gas. Why though?

It’s not screened live, there’s a delay, so why can’t they edit out the endless minutes wasted by filming winners ambling to the stage? (And Mandela thought he had a long walk.) Not to mention the luvvie gushing.

Ricky Gervais put it best at the Golden Globes when he told winners to “accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and f*** off”.

It was echoed by Sunday’s co-host Rob Beckett when he half-joked: “They should shut up and get on with it.”

But any time the jibe might have clawed back was squandered by the shallow and pointless winner interviews bafflingly conducted by Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg.

With judicious editing they wouldn’t have had to stuff the Women’s Euros into a highlights package.