RTS awards

The first series proved a hit with viewers and was nominated for a Royal Television Society Programme Award earlier this year. 

The show, which is filmed in a gig environment, sees two teams made up of comedians, hip hop legends and celebrity hip hop lovers battle it out in front of a live audience.

Hosted by Rizzle Kicks' Jordan Stephens, the two teams will once again be led by TV presenter Maya Jama and rapper Lady Leshurr, with new guests joining the trio each week.

At her very first World in Action meeting as a young researcher, Dorothy Byrne experienced a feeling she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Until she realised that it was “the feeling I got if I accidentally wandered into the gents’ toilets – I shouldn’t be here!”

Being a rare woman in a man’s world in the early 1980s didn’t deter her, however, and Byrne has now worked in investigative broadcast journalism for nigh on four decades.

Just under 100 industry professionals gathered at Prime’s new events space, Archive, to discover whether their work had made it on to the awards shortlist. Larry and Paul, a comedy act who have built up a strong local following on BBC Radio Leeds, hosted the launch.

Nominations for the 18 awards categories reflected the healthy level of production in the Yorkshire region. The hotly contested factual awards earned multiple nominations for Daisybeck Studios, Air TV, True North and True Vision Yorkshire.

The prestigious award, now open to entries, celebrates an outstanding technologist or engineer of the future and accepts submissions from individuals in the early stages of their career across broadcast or its related industries.

David Nath – the co-founder of Story Films – picked up the Director award, while Joe Carey won the Editing prize. Nath’s script for the programme was taken verbatim from the police interview recordings of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot a fleeing burglar dead in 1999. The judges described it as a “truly exciting piece of television, so well done technically and very well cast”.

“The standard of entries for 2019 was very high – several jurors said that you could ‘broadcast that tomorrow’ about many of the films we watched,”  said Aradhna Tayal, the Chair of the awards.

“Many seized the opportunity to use their work as a means of challenging and addressing real-life, taboo topics,” she added. “The jurors were in agreement that the entries this year demonstrated the ways in which art can be both important and meaningful.”  

The winners of the RTS Cymru Awards have now been announced. At a ceremony at the University of South Wales on February 6th, the winners of the Student awards and the two new industry awards (Newcomer and Industry Breakthrough Awards) were revealed by hosts Matt Lissack and Polly James.  

Chair of judges Lisa Hazlehurst, who is head of Lion Television in Scotland, unveiled the categories and criteria at the launch event.

She also announced a new category for writers to “recognise the wealth of writing talent in Scotland. The judges will be looking for originality, innovation, style and creativity.”

A number of winners from the 2018 awards attended the event and shared their experiences of landing an RTS trophy.