BAFTA TV Awards: ‘Top Boy,’ ‘The Sixth Commandment,’ ‘Such Brave Girls’ win big
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The 2024 BAFTA TV Awards very much celebrated the best of British TV tonight as the majority of big-name stars and more recognizable shows fell away to British shows and stars. The likes of “Succession” and “The Last of Us” went home empty-handed at the Royal Festival Hall. “Top Boy,” “The Sixth Commandment,” and “Such Brave Girls” claimed the three big prizes at the ceremony hosted by comedians Romesh Ranganathan and Rob Beckett.
“Top Boy,” Netflix’s hit show about two London drug dealers dealing with gang violence in East London, won Best Drama Series over “The Gold,” “Happy Valley,” and Emmy hopeful “Slow Horses.” Producers Charles Steel and Alasdair Flind came backstage to discuss their victory, which came for the fifth and final season of the fan favorite.
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“The talent in front of the camera and behind the camera feels like a family. A lot of them started on ‘Top Boy’ and they’ve all gone off to have careers as actors, directors. It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of, actually, the opportunities the show has given to different people,” Flind said.
Steel noted a specific example, wherein Myriam Raja became a key component of the show after starting out shadowing a previous director. “There were lots of entry schemes we had in place, like Myriam who was up on stage tonight. She directed the first four episodes of the final series. Two seasons before that, she started as a mentee as shadowing somebody straight out of film school, then stepped up to direct an episode and then carried the whole series home,” Steel said.
“Such Brave Girls” won Best Comedy Series over “Big Boys,” “Dreaming Whilst Black,” and “Extraordinary.” The BBC Three hit, which is produced by indie film studio A24, follows two sisters and their single mother trying to navigate life, Writer, creator, and star Kat Sadler won Emerging Talent: Fiction at the BAFTA TV Craft Awards a few weeks ago.
Sadler spoke about the sitcom style backstage with her BAFTA in hand, insisting that that was the only way to tell the stories she wanted to tell. “I think the whole challenge of the show was that I wanted to take trauma that had happened to us and real stories and turn them into sitcom plots and prove that was possible. This is a testament to everyone that tried to maintain that vision with me and was on board with it,” Sadler said.
Best Limited Series went to true crime drama “The Sixth Commandment.” The BBC One show tells the story of Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin, who were murdered by Ben Field. Timothy Spall (who won Best Actor) and veteran actresses Anne Reid and Sheila Hancock headed the cast. “The Sixth Commandment” edged out “Best Interests,” “The Long Shadow,” and “Demon 79 (Black Mirror).”
Spall joined the show’s producers backstage to shed a little light on the series. “This is about people’s lives. Obviously, it’s about very tragic murders but it’s about love, it’s about people, no matter how old they are, their desire for love. And in this case it didn’t end well. But it was fabulous to be a part of.”
The show’s producers, Brian Woods and Derek Wax, said that the show initially started out as a documentary about the murders before Wax encouraged the show to be a scripted one. It was Sarah Phelps, who wrote the scripts, who said that the show should not focus specifically on the murderer but rather on the victims and their lives and love. “Sometimes when you’re dying true crime, you think where is the life? Where is the thing that takes us forward through the morass of cruelty? And when I spoke to Ann-Marie Blake, I thought ‘ah, there she is.’ That passion, that dedication, that white-hot love. There it is. That’s where we go.”
Blake is the real life niece of Moore-Martin. She was played by Annabel Scholey in the show but came backstage herself to discuss the making of the series. “It was a difficult journey to get to the space where I could let my aunt’s story be told by someone else. Lots of people wanted a piece of my aunt, it was relentless. But to get to the space where we are now… the warm and respect that she [Phelps] showed for my aunt when we talked about, I wouldn’t have trusted anybody else other than this team to have told this story, and I said no to everybody,” Blake said.
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