The awards recognise the huge variety of skills involved in programme production from editing to lighting, and costume design to digital effects. 

BBC dramas lead the way in nominations. Taboo, which stars Tom Hardy is up for six awards, whilst Broken and Three Girls received four nominations each. 

Three Girls director Philippa Lowthorpe received a nomination in the Director - Drama category alongside Euros Lyn for Damilola, Our Loved Boy and Julian Jarrold for The Witnesses for the Prosecution, all for BBC One. 

Daniel Lawrence Taylor discusses his new timetravelling sitcom Timewasters

In his new series, Simon Reeve travels to Russia on the centenary of the Revolution to find out what life is really like in the Federation

It’s violent. It’s explosive. And it’s going out live on Dave, "the Home of Witty Banter".

It doesn’t. For inspiration, I look at Victoria’s own watercolours of Christmas at Windsor. Albert wanted to recreate the Christmases of his Coburg childhood and he put up a tree for each of their nine children, hanging them from the ceiling with tables, called altars, for presents underneath. For all their cosy, domestic image Victoria and Albert, weren’t afraid of a little bling.

You can’t just get up one morning and decide to be an explorer.

Well, you can, but you’re not going to get on television with that attitude. You’ve got to jump through lots of hoops to get there and it’s not just a case of how many countries you’ve been to. You don’t have to join the Army to get into TV, but I think it’s good to have some level of expertise or niche knowledge. Once you’re an expert in anything, in any industry, people will come to you. That’s where you want to be.

But, argued the actors, writers and producers on the panel at an RTS event in mid-July – “LGBTQ in soap: job done?” ­– the fight against prejudice is not yet won.

“Soaps are incredibly powerful in terms of being able to get a message out and in changing people’s perceptions,” said Daniel Brocklebank, who plays gay vicar Billy Mayhew in Coronation Street.

Chaired by Philip Edgar-Jones, Director of Sky Arts, the awards recognise the best audiovisual work created by students across the UK and Republic of Ireland at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Awards are judged in six categories – Animation, Comedy & Entertainment, Drama, Factual, News and Short Feature.