The ‘years of therapy’ scary sex award
Winner: American Gods
Amazon’s crimson fantasy announced its WTF credentials in an early scene where a paunchy duffer (Joel Murray – Bill’s brother!) can’t believe his luck: he’s making love to a smoking hot, younger woman (Yetide Badaki). But she’s actually Bilquis, the immortal Queen of Sheba and, as the ageing geezer pops, he’s consumed whole by the goddess’s hungry magic vagina, never to be seen again – giving a new meaning to the phrase “putting the old chap in”.
Most surreal cock-up
Winner: Huw Edwards, BBC News
Thanks to a system malfunction, viewers tuning in for the start of the Beeb’s 10 o’clock news on 20 June got a disorientating experimental montage instead. The Breaking News ident. Huw Edwards sitting silently. A photo of four bankers. Huw Edwards sitting silently. A snatch of music. Huw Edwards sitting silently. The ghostly face of Philip Hammond. Huw Edwards, sitting silently. David Lynch narrowly failed to do something weirder with episode eight of the new Twin Peaks.
Most false dinner-party binge claims
Winner: OJ: Made in America
“Yah, you have to watch it. We’ve done all of it. Yes, all seven hours. We set aside a whole week. It’s not just about the OJ Simpson murder trial; it’s a profound and devastating treatise on race, class and the media that tells us as much about America now as it does the 90s. Yes, we saw all five episodes. No, we didn’t abandon it halfway through the first one, which was mostly about American football, and whack Love Island on instead. Oh, you’ve not seen it? You really must. Mmm.”
Sickest bastards
Winners: Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith
Forget the cry-laugh: Inside No 9’s creators perfected the vomit-laugh with an emetic twist in the season three episode The Riddle of the Sphinx. Pemberton’s Cambridge don, after some already-nasty japes where a colleague (Shearsmith) forces him to eat flesh cut from the buttock of a just-murdered student (Alexandra Roach), is told that he is, in fact, her father. He’s chewing his dead daughter’s arse! Steve, Reece, get help. No, wait: finish season four. Then get help.
The five hours of our life we’d most like back
Winner: SS-GB
In 2017, we don’t need much persuading to ride with a Nazi-punching thriller about Brits not tolerating totalitarianism. BBC1’s dramatisation of Len Deighton’s alternate-1940s novel had a promising opener and – for those who hung in– a half-decent finale, but mostly it inched agonisingly forward as if it was afraid a bomb might go off, or Hitler had instructed his men to peacefully bore us into surrender. SS-GB pioneered a new genre: the low-stakes war drama.
Juiciest self-parody
Winner: Tom Hardy, Taboo
If there is a peculiar satisfaction in actors pushing their screen personae to the extreme, Tom Hardy’s turn in BBC1’s grit-flecked period vengeance drama Taboo – co-creator, T Hardy – was a full-fat treat. Enigmatic and brooding to the point where he often just stared at people because words themselves were too scared to be in his mouth, Hardy was a glorious cartoon of grunts, whispers and intimidating noises. Sample line of frightening dialogue: “Hh. Nggggg.”
Worst losing of the news
Winner: Channel 4 News
In March, a Channel 4 scoop on the story of the year at that point – the Westminster terror attack – collapsed while the show was still on air. The channel had won the race to identify the attacker, only for the named guy to pipe up with a solid alibi: he was in jail. As Jon Snow read out a grovelling U-turn, other newshounds trapped in the mad breaking-news cycle sighed with relief that it hadn’t happened to them.
Filthiest kitchen porn
Winner: Big Little Lies
Ultimately, HBO’s drama might have been about the hidden pain of the parents in super-flash Monterey, California – but oh, get those kitchens. Reese Witherspoon and family, trading brittle barbs across a black-marble island countertop bigger than some London flats; Nicole Kidman blankly loudhailering her kids from the other end of a kitchen-diner where the table and the hob are 25 yards apart … this was TV’s first drama to be set entirely inside an aspirational Pinterest board.
