The National Television Awards (NTAs) for British TV programmes broadcast over the last year (the exact eligibility period is difficult to find, but will be something like that) were presented at the O2 Arena on 11 Sept and broadcast live on ITV1
The NTAs started in 1995 and were originally held at the Royal Albert Hall (apart from the first year), then switched to the O2 Arena in 2010, where they have largely stayed. They don’t have the history or prestige of the other main UK TV awards, the BAFTAs, but they do have the democratic distinction of being solely determined by public vote. The NTA publish a longlist for each category in around May, and the public vote—via the NTA website—to reduce this to shortlists and later to determine the winners.
There are seventeen awards this year, such as Comedy, Quiz Game Show, New Drama, TV Presenter, Drama Performance and Daytime, and there’s always a Special Recognition Award. Unbelievably, Ant and Dec have won the TV Presenter (or equivalent) prize for twenty-three consecutive years, from 2001 and still going.
Selected Results
New Drama: Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV), a four-part dramatisation of the shocking British Post Office scandal, where over 900 subpostmasters were wrongly convicted—and more were prosecuted, sacked or forced to cover erroneous shortfalls—between 1999 and 2015 for theft, false accounting or fraud due to Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon accounting software. Alan Bates was a subpostmaster wrongly sacked and a leading campaigner for victims of the scandal; he was knighted in 2024.
Returning Drama: Bridgerton (Netflix), an American historical romance series set in an alternative Regency London—where racial equality is established and many people of African descent have aristocratic titles—of the early 1800s and based on the book series by Julia Quinn, an American author, where the eight Bridgerton siblings are searching for love. There have been three seasons so far, in 2020, 2022 and 2024, with a fourth commissioned and due in 2026.
Comedy: Mrs. Brown's Boys (BBC One), created by and starring Brendan O'Carroll, an Irish comic and writer, cross-dressed as the “foul-mouthed matriarch” Agnes Brown, who constantly “meddles in the lives of her six children”. It has “an informal production style often breaking the fourth wall and material that would normally be outtakes are intentionally left in”. The series initially ran for three series in 2011-13 and has had Christmas specials every year since; a fourth series ran in 2023, for which the award was won.
TV Presenter: Ant & Dec in I'm a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! (ITV1). Where do they keep their trophies?
Serial Drama: Emmerdale (ITV1), running since 1972, originally called Emmerdale Farm, set in the fictional village of Emmerdale in the Yorkshire Dales, and currently running at five episodes a week with a viewership of approx. four million (ten million plus in the 1990s). I’ve never watched an episode, but it seems I’ve missed out on a series of exciting storylines over the years, including a plane crashing into the village, a female serial killer and a “mirror-maze death”. My village seems quite tame, but it does have live music in the pub on a Friday night.
Special Recognition: Davina McCall, a 56-year-old English TV presenter with a large list of credits behind her, including long stints on Big Brother and Comic Relief.
See the NTA website, winners section for a roll call of all the winners, Wikipedia, NTA 2024 for this year’s winners or Wikipedia, NTA Best Drama for a neat list of all the drama winners, including five straight wins for Doctor Who from 2005-10 and one for Auf Wiedersehen Pet in 2002.
Next up are the Primetime Emmy Awards on 15 Sept.