From recognising The Traitors as genuinely fresh television to honouring legends – and making Nadine Dorries look daft – here’s a deep dive into this year’s nominees
Many broadcasters privately express fears of format exhaustion: that everything has been tried, dooming them to revive ever more old shows. So it’s a relief to find among the contenders for the 2023 Bafta television awards a genuine, fresh, must-see show: BBC One’s The Traitors, a mind game in a Scottish castle, which may feel 100% betrayed if it doesn’t win the award for entertainment performance for Claudia Winkleman, and the most famous fringe since Edinburgh’s.
Her show is a strong contender for reality and constructed factual, one of the newest and to some purists most controversial categories, but showing considerable imaginative energy. The Traitors competes with Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, a brilliant exercise in tackling social disadvantage through sport, and BBC Two’s We Are Black and British, a dinner-party format crossed with Question Time. Flintoff, a former England cricket captain, may enjoy having beaten on to the podium former England football captain David Beckham’s very similar Save Our Squad With David Beckham (Disney+).
