This year’s Bafta comedy nominees fall into three main categories: deserve to win (and should win), deserve to win (but won’t win) and absolutely don’t deserve to win (but will win anyway to the eternal ire of the internet).
Let’s get the last one out of the way early. Brendan O’Carroll has been nominated in best male performance for Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas Special. At this stage, it’s hardly worth even bringing up Mrs Brown’s Boys in the Guardian. You’re the liberal elite, and the one time you caught an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys – by accident, while you were trying to find a BBC 4 documentary about the history of wood – you became so incensed that you spat your quinoa all over your Birkenstocks.
Clearly the offputting broadness of O’Carroll’s work is only offputting to the likes of you. If the Bafta was strictly a popularity contest, he’d walk it; last year’s Christmas special drew an audience that probably exceeded the combined total of his competitors. However, his competitors are all uniformly something special. He’s up against the virtuoso flashiness of Matt Berry from Toast of London, the understated heart of Tom Hollander from Rev and Hugh Bonneville from being the least annoying thing about W1A.
Through sheer force of personality alone, Berry probably finds himself as the frontrunner in this category. However, Rev was such a perfect little gem of a show – and entire episodes would rely completely on the sadness in Hollander’s eyes – that I’d be thrilled if he won it. He won’t, but he should.
The remaining two categories are fortunate enough not to be artificially blown out of proportion by a Mrs Brown’s Boys, and could realistically go to any of the nominees. The female performance in a comedy programme category, in particular, is especially strong. Olivia Colman is there. Jessica Hynes is there. Catherine Tate is there. Tamsin Grieg is there. They’re all deserving winners, but not necessarily for their nominated vehicles.
As great an actor as Grieg is, there’s no escaping the fact that sitting through an episode of Episodes is like sitting through an eternity of having bamboo shards jammed into your urethra. Similarly, Catherine Tate’s Nan character had lost her appeal by the second time she appeared on Tate’s sketch show, so giving her an award for a standalone show would be madness.
That leaves Hynes and Colman, both national treasures and both playing out of their skins in their nominated shows. However, since W1A doesn’t really give her a chance to modulate her performance, let’s rule out Hynes. So, by that measure, Olivia Colman will win for Rev and everyone will be happy.
That just leaves the scripted-comedy award, where the nominees include the little-watched and little-loved (BBC Four’s Detectorists), the little-watched and quite loved (Sky 1’s Moone Boy), the wide-watched but barely loved (BBC Two’s The Wrong Mans) and one of the funniest things of the last year that should definitely win at all costs and probably will because it was quite self-referential and TV people love that (BBC Two’s Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos). Of these, I’d guess that The Wrong Mans will win.
