The nominations for the 2024 BAFTA TV Awards and BAFTA TV Craft Awards were announced on Wednesday, and Directors UK saw members nominated in all three directing categories.
In the Director: Factual category, Gesbeen Mohammad is nominated for Inside Iran: The Fight for Freedom, James Bluemel is nominated for Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, John Dower is nominated for Lockerbie and Peter Beard and Bruce Fletcher are nominated for Otto Baxter: Not a F***ing Horror Story.
In the Director: Fiction category, Joseph Bullman is nominated for Partygate, Lewis Arnold is nominated for The Long Shadow, Peter Hoar is nominated for The Last of Us and William Stefan Smith was nominated for Top Boy (Episode Six).
In the Director: Multi-Camera category, Julia Knowles is nominated for An Audience with Kylie and The Coronation Concert, Nikki Parsons, Ollie Bartlett and Richard Valentine are nominated for Eurovision Song Concert 2023 and Paul McNamara is nominated for the FA Cup Final.
Elsewhere, there were nominations for several directors in the Emerging Talent: Factual category. Ben Cheetham is nominated for Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son?, Jordan Pitt is nominated for Untold Stories: Hair On Set, Fred Scott is nominated for London Bridge: Facing Terror and Ted Evans is nominated for Rose Ayling-Ellis: Signs for Change.
Meanwhile, in the Emerging Talent: Fiction category, director Haolu Wang is nominated for Bodies.
Read a full list of nominations for this year’s BAFTA TV Awards and BAFTA TV Craft awards.
Gender representation in the directing categories
Today, Chair of BAFTA Sara Putt said: “At a time when budgets are tight and creative risk-taking can feel ever riskier, we hope our awards can play a positive role in reinforcing the value of nurturing new talent and ideas, as well as holding a mirror up to stubborn industry inequities, particularly for talented female directors who are still significantly outnumbered by their male counterparts when it comes to awards submissions.”
BAFTA told us this afternoon that in the three Director categories in the BAFTA Television Craft Awards, the percentage of female to male directors entered for awards consideration was 28% vs 72%; just under three men for every woman, on a par with the percentage of those nominated.
This is a reflection of a real problem at the heart of the industry, if there are not enough programmes made by diverse directors to put forward that is a problem. If there is a reluctance from production companies submitting projects by underrepresented directors, that is also a problem.
The figures above are nowhere near representative of the make-up of our society. The BAFTA Craft awards are the most high-profile recognition of behind the camera talent in the UK, and we are an industry with a responsibility to tell stories made by diverse voices. We say the same thing every award season – when is this going to change?
We’re talking today about gender representation, but we reiterate that it’s important representation and diversity is intersectional.
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