Channel 4 might have won most prizes at the Royal Television Society awards – including a double for Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney comedy Catastrophe – but the bragging rights went to BBC4.
The channel, under threat in the latest round of BBC cuts, picked up a hat-trick of gongs including two for its season of “slow TV” programmes, one for Handmade and another for Oak Tree: Nature’s Greatest Survivor, a year-long study of a single 400-year-old oak tree.
Whether its success will encourage more mainstream channels to “go slow” remains to be seen, but perhaps BBC4’s more senior sibling, BBC2, could learn a trick or two. While BBC4 was celebrating a hat-trick, BBC2 had the sole consolation of the acting prize picked up by Anthony Hopkins for The Dresser.
