West-Midlanders Win Big at BAFTA TV Awards

2023’s BAFTA TV Awards was a memorable night with lots of representation from West-Midlands talent.

Black Country actress, writer, and comedy legend Meera Syal CBE received the prestigious BAFTA Fellowship Award, presented by Birmingham actor Adrian Lester, who called her ‘lightning in a bottle magic’. Syal’s moving speech calls for more diversity as ‘we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and giants’. She closes her speech with the powerful statement ‘the untold stories are the ones that change us and sometimes change the world’. After Syal took to the stage to accept the coveted honour, she placed a Bindi on her Bafta Fellowship award. Upon receiving the award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Sherwood, Adeel Akhtar said looking around the ceremony at ‘all the different types of people telling different types of stories’ and honouring Meera Syal with a BAFTA Fellowship said it ‘feels a little bit like a miracle’.

Joe Lycett Vs Beckham: Got Your Back At Xmas won the TV Features award. The Channel 4 special of his show featured a stunt in which he threatened to destroy £10,000 of his own money unless David Beckham pulled out of his deal with World Cup hosts Qatar, where homosexuality is still illegal. Lycett later revealed he had not destroyed the cash through a shredder. A statement from Lycett was read out on stage which said: ‘I’m sorry to not be there, but according to my PR team I have shingles.’ The reference to the conditions appeared to be about presenter Holly Willoughby who revealed she had shingles before taking time off from This Morning due to the illness. Comedian Lycett then thanked his team before ‘dedicating’ the award to ‘people still being oppressed in Qatar’.

The Daytime award was given to The Repair Shop: A Royal Visit which saw the King, then Prince of Wales, take part. Arriving on stage, Wolverhampton resident Jay Blades said: ‘Wow, just give me two seconds, I have to take a picture, it’s quite special. We started as a daytime show on BBC Two, I’m so glad we’ve got an (award).’ Blades added that it was the ‘first time’ that a ‘six-foot black guy, from Hackney, (with a) gold tooth, (from a) single parent’ was presented with an award for daytime TV’.

Brummie comedy legend Sir Lenny Henry presented the award for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme to Irish actress Siobhán McSweeney for her role in Derry Girls. He jokes that ‘once again (women in comedy’s) skill and talent proves that the only thing standing in their way is men who don’t know when to shut up, and yeah I’ve just realised I’m doing that now’.

The multitalented Birmingham actor, director, and author David Harewood OBE presented the BAFTA Special Award for outstanding contribution to television to historian and broadcaster Professor David Olusoga OBE. Harewood said ‘over a three decade career straddling academia, award winning books, and groundbreaking documentaries, David has always been a trailblazer’.