Channel 4 - FourDocs blog

Bafta winners

Becca Frankel 21 April 2008, 5:03 PM

Last night was the Oscar's for television. Here's a list of the documentary related winners and runners up:

Best factual series
The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities (BBC One)
Also nominated:
Meet The Natives (Channel 4)
Paul Merton in China (Five)
Tribe (BBC Two)

Best single documentary
Lie of the Land (Channel 4)
Also nominated:
Beautiful Young Minds (BBC Two)
Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell (ITV1)
Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives (BBC Four)

Best specialist factual
Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain (BBC Two)
Also nominated:
Earth: The Power of the Planet (BBC Two)
The Genius of Photography (BBC Four)
The Relief of Belsen (Channel 4)

Best current affairs
China's Stolen Children - A Dispatches Special (Channel 4)
Also nominated:
Dispatches - Fighting The Taliban (Channel 4)
Honour Kills (BBC Three)
Panorama: Dog-Fighting Undercover (BBC One)

Jezza Neumann, who directed China's Stolen Children as a Dispatches Special with Brian Wood's True Vision is also up for a whole host of awards at the Bafta Craft awards next month. These include for BREAK-THROUGH TALENT, PHOTOGRAPHY FACTUAL, DIRECTOR FACTUAL and EDITING FACTUAL.

The Tower was a powerful, ambitious series which deservedly won, but I'm not sure about the choice for best single doc. Personally I loved the way Beautiful Young Minds transported you into an imagined world in a tightly structured way that mimicked the mathematical world it was exploring, and suspect that Malcolm and Barbara may have been overlooked because of the faking scandal that arose when it aired. Paul Watson has in fact had films nominated 9 times at Bafta, yet never walked away with an award. To correct this, and celebrate his career and achievements, he was last night presented with a special award.

Here's an interview just recorded with him. And pay attention to his pleas to prevent television stagnating. What we need is people to hang around with new filmmakers, to listen to their ideas, and then feed them back into the commissioners. Well, welcome to FourDocs! We really do want to hear brave new ways to make films, and do pass them on to the people who matter. We'll detail some success stories to come from people passing us clip tapes and film links soon!

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It's good to know...

... we've teamed up with The Co-operative for this competition. We have a team of experts ready to watch the films, and they will choose which one will win a cash prize of £2,000, which ones get shown to a Channel4 Commissioning Editor, and which ones have the chance to be shown on Channel 4 itself on their 3 Minute Wonder strand.

Entered so far ...