The best advice to anyone hoping to inspire a TV drama is to become famous or suffer kidnap or murder.
Of the 28 Bafta nominations in the drama, performance and production categories, all but one have gone to crime stories or biopics. Even the exception, Our World War, is based on the real-life stories of men killing each other in the trenches.
Some contenders even achieve the double of biography and a link with homicide. Jason Watkins, a long underrated character actor, is nominated for leading actor for his impressively unsentimental depiction of Christopher Jefferies, the Bristol landlord falsely accused of murdering his tenant, Joanna Yeates. Leading actress nominee Georgina Campbell’s character in Murdered by My Boyfriend was closely modelled on a fatality from domestic violence.
The Bafta jurors cannot be accused of always honouring solemnity. Two of the real-life stories up for awards are inspiring and heartwarming – Sheridan Smith’s visually and musically pitch-perfect Cilla Black for ITV’s Cilla, and Toby Jones’s embodiment of Neil Baldwin, who overcame serious learning difficulties to become a significant figure in academia, football and Anglicanism, in BBC2’s Marvellous.
But what the academy risks overlooking is comic or uplifting fictional characters who do not kill each other. For example, there is nothing for Sally Wainwright’s late-love comedy Last Tango in Halifax, with judges seemingly preferring the writer’s other more morbid Sarah Lancashire drama, Happy Valley.
Admittedly, last year’s schedules were exceptionally rich in high-class thrillers, with the result that even some of those failed to make the cut.
Gillian Anderson’s Belfast cop show The Fall seems to have suffered – rightly, in my view – for controversy over alleged misogyny. It’s sadder, though, to see so little recognition for Hugo Blick’s The Honourable Woman, a conspiracy thriller based around the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Last summer, I was convinced that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s lead performance would create an unenviable head-to-head-scratcher for jurors required to separate her from Lancashire in Happy Valley and Keeley Hawes in Jed Mercurio’s searing police procedural Line of Duty. Yet Gyllenhaal has not even made the shortlist.
With the next government due to renegotiate the BBC charter and licence fee, it looks embarrassing that the corporation has nothing at all shortlisted in specialist factual, a genre seen as defining public service broadcasting.
That wound will sting even more because Sir David Attenborough, one of the BBC’s greatest broadcasters, gets a nod in that section for Conquest of the Skies 3D, made for Sky.
Despite all the speeches from the BBC director general, Tony Hall, about prioritising arts coverage, Channel 4 provides both contenders from that genre, including Grayson Perry’s superb portrait series Who Are You?
Some consolation is that the BBC’s much-admired Wolf Hall falls into the 2016 Baftas and can be expected to figure heavily then, when, as a period piece, it should at least provide some variety among the current dominance of crime and biographical stories.
Although, on reflection, Henry VIII – a famous Briton who was a serial killer of women – can be considered the ideal Bafta-friendly character.
