The 2018 Bafta nominations certainly cover the full spectrum of contemporary television. Honouring both a high-end product – two nominations for the BBC’s mock-Shakespearean drama, King Charles III – and one of the lowest: a nod for the summer shag-fest Love Island.
There’s a similar range in the best actor category, where the late Tim Pigott-Smith is properly remembered for his career-crowning portrayal of King Charles III in Mike Bartlett’s play, alongside another personal-best performance by a veteran: Sean Bean as a Catholic priest who can bring peace to everyone except himself, in Jimmy McGovern’s Broken. But those famous faces are competing with two actors just either side of 30: Jack Rowan and Joe Cole, both alumni of Peaky Blinders, but noticed by Bafta for work in the dramas Born to Kill and Hang the DJ (Black Mirror) respectively.
Diversity of a different kind is shown, in a continuation of the Academy’s deliberate and necessary drive to recognise a wider range of performing talent, with welcome success for two inventive comedy shows with majority black casts: BBC2’s sketch show Famalam, and ITV2’s time-slip sitcom, Timewasters.
Another progression is that, for the first time, all the shows listed in the scripted comedy section include a woman in the writing team. Sharon Horgan is nominated for Catastrophe along with Rob Delaney, who are up against Daisy May Cooper, whose This Country (co-written by and co-starring her brother, Charlie Cooper) continues the impressive awards season performances of BBC Three, two years after the network became an online-only service. It also has three of the nominations in a new category, Short Form Programme, that sensibly recognises the way in which streaming has released programming from the tyranny of a grid of 30 to 90-minute slots.
Jed Mercurio’s supreme police procedural Line of Duty, with three nominations, achieves sensible redress for being oddly sidelined last year. Among those who might reasonably feel peeved to have been overlooked in 2018 are Peter Kay (although Car Share co-star Sian Gibson is included), ITV’s classy crime-drama Unforgotten, and The Great British Bake-Off, which can claim to be the most successful transfer from one network to another. The multiple documentaries about Diana, Princess of Wales, 20 years after her death, seem to have cancelled each other out.
In a culture concerned about fake news, fiction that looks like fact has become the dominant genre: the most successful comedies (including Detectorists, This Country, Car Share) are shot like documentaries, while many of the most-noticed dramas are fact-based: the BBC’s The Moorside and Three Little Girls and ITV’s Little Boy Blue dramatised respectively: the disappearance of Shannon Matthews in Yorkshire, the Rochdale sex abuse scandal, and the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool.
As the BBC’s journalistic service is one of its licence-fee selling points, it must concern director general Tony Hall that the BBC has no nominations at all for News (where Sky, Channel 4 and ITV share the podium), and only one for Current Affairs. BBC producers and unions may cite budget cuts to help pay for the broadcaster’s vast layers of management, but the increasing tendency of that torrent of bosses towards editorial caution must also be a factor.
The UK’s oldest broadcaster had a clean-sweep, though, in single documentary, where the suspicion that some Bafta juries favour emotive content may be shown by nods for the Rio Ferdinand documentary about his bereavement, Chris Packham on his Asperger’s, and Louis Theroux meeting anorexics.
All traditional British broadcasters, though, will be unnerved by the awesome firepower of the shortlisted quartet in the International section. Very few homemade dramas come near the swagger and expansiveness of the dramas Big Little Lies (Netflix), Feud: Bette and Joan (FX), and The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu). And no recent UK factual series begins to compete with the authority and elegance of Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s 10-part, 17-hour The Vietnam War (PBS).
In 2017, all those shows were screened here, by Sky, Channel 4 or BBC4. But, in a likely future in which such material disappears entirely behind a subscription pay wall, traditional British schedules could start to look very thin.
