Winners announced for 2017 annual Royal Television Society Programme Awards

The RTS Programme Awards honours excellence across all genres of television programming and recognises exceptional actors, presenters, writers and production teams as well as the programmes themselves.

Alex Mahon, who spoke at IBC2016, CEO of The Foundry chaired the awards ceremony, honouring Julie Walters for her outstanding work in film and television with The Lifetime Achievement Award. 

The BBC won 13 awards across the categories, including the new RTS Channel of the Year Award for the newly introduced online only channel, BBC Three. Taking home two awards was BBC’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge having received the Breakthrough Award as well as the Best Comedy Writer for Fleabag. The Comedy Performance Award went to Asim Chaudhry for his role in People Just Do Nothing which also won the award for Scripted Comedy. Murdered By My Father won the Single Drama award.

Winning female actor award for her performance in Undercover was Sophie Okonedo. Happy Valley was awarded Drama Series title, with the show’s writer Sally Wainwright winning the coveted Writer – Drama award. Wainwright was acknowledged for her contribution to the industry receiving the Judges’ Award for being a writer of outstanding distinction.

“It has been an outstanding year of broadcasting. I would like to congratulate all of the winners – it is your talent and brilliant work which makes British television excel on a global scale” – Alex Mahon

Channel 4 took home nine awards, with Adam Hills, Alex Brooker and Josh Widdicombe receiving the Entertainment Performance award for The Last Leg. Robbie Coltrane won the male actor award for his role in National Treasure with the drama also winning the mini-series category. Grayson Perry won two awards for Grayson Perry All Man series, for both the Presenter and Arts categories.

Daytime programme was awarded to Find It, Fix It, Flog It, whilst the award for Live Event went to Stand Up to Cancer. The award for Sports Programme went to Rio Paralympics, and First Contact Lost Tribe of the Amazon won the award for Science and Natural History.

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway won the Entertainment category for ITV; whilst Emmerdale won the award for Soap and Continuing Drama, for the second year running.

ITV won the awards for Single Documentary for The Murder of Sadie Hartley  and The Aberfan Young Wives’ Club won the award for History. BBC Two’s Exodus: Our Journey to Europe won the Single Documentary category. Employable Me was awarded the Popular Factual and Features Award. Osi Umenyiora won the award for Sports Presenter, Commentator or Pundit prize for his work on the show Race to Super Bowl 50, NFL This Week and The NFL Show.