How a student's tears won the RTS award

As a child I only ever received one prize – for reading aloud. I got a brown covered copy of Great Expectations. Winning one at the TV news and current affairs ‘do’ the other night was as exciting.

Yet there is something embarrassing too to be honoured by your peers. You feel that it is impossible to detach what you do from the team around you, and they almost never get one.

But then, on the other hand, there is something far more uplifting about being recognised by those you work with than some other sort of inexplicable honour that seeks to place you in the pantheon of empire and the rest.

Actually, this year I think the person who won my prize was the wonderful black American young woman student who broke down and cried in front of our camera at Washington’s Howard University at the moment Obama won the US presidential election.

Her tears provided the most moving insight into what it meant of anyone I ever saw or heard in his four-year quest for the presidency.