BAFTA/Thomas Alexander - The BAFTA Television Craft Awards will take place on Sunday 27 April 2025
- The BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises will take place on 11 May 2025
The countdown to next year’s BAFTA Television Craft Awards and the BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises begins, with the categories, eligibility, voting rules and timeline both unveiled today. Entries are now officially open.
Celebrating the exceptional storytelling, creativity and craft of British and international television and the people who bring it to life on-and-off screen, the two ceremonies span 49 competitive awards categories, from casting, photography and editing, to writing, performing and directing across all TV genres.
Earlier this year, 2.7 million people watched the ceremony on BBC One and iPlayer alongside over 7 million views of BAFTA’s social media coverage of the night. Happy Valley, Top Boy and The Sixth Commandment led the wins.
BAFTA reviews all aspects of its awards annually with BAFTA’s Television Committee and sector peers. Its guiding principles are to celebrate creative excellence, level the playing field, provide a fair and robust process, encourage positive change, and evolve alongside the ever-changing industry landscape.
A comprehensive overview of entry information including rules and eligibility requirements can be found on BAFTA’s Awards webpage here.
Key Changes
- As previously announced, three new categories – a Children’s Scripted Award, a Children’s Non-Scripted Award, and a Children’s Craft Team Award – will be introduced into next year’s BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises, and BAFTA Television Craft Awards. The introduction of these categories marks the next phase of plans to profile the very best of films, games and television for children and families to global audiences across BAFTA’s awards ceremonies. More detail is available here.
- An expanded Entertainment category in the BAFTA Television Awards will include comedy entertainment moving forwards; representing the very best in chat, game, panel and talent shows, as well as music specials, and stand-up and comedy clip shows.
- The voting process for Live Event, News Coverage, Soap, and Sports Coverage has been updated. From 2025, all BAFTA Television voters will determine the nominations and the winners of the most nationally viewed genres of programming.
- UK-based productions will be required to provide information on their efforts to ensure representation and inclusive practices on-and-off screen as part of ongoing efforts to improve the diversity and culture of the screen industries. Whilst this is not a new policy, having been first introduced into the BAFTA Television Awards in 2020 using the British Film Institute’s Diversity Standards, the information asked of productions has, for 2025, been refined to ensure BAFTA’s analysis and subsequent activities to help tackle areas of underrepresentation are relevant and impactful.
Key dates
- Thursday 26 September: Entries Open
- March 2025: P&O Cruises Memorable Moment nominations
- Thursday 27 March 2025: BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises and BAFTA Television Craft nominations
- Sunday 27 April 2025: BAFTA Television Craft Awards
- Sunday 11 May 2025: BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises
Hilary Rosen, chair of BAFTA’s Television Committee, said: “After a year in which television led conversations across the country and around the world – whether live events, dramas or news coverage – it's thrilling to once again open entries for Britain’s biggest celebration of the small screen. This is a rulebook which puts our beloved children’s television industry back in the spotlight and increases the number of categories determined by our 5,800-strong TV voting membership whilst reflecting wider industry changes decided in consultation with our sector peers. We’re an industry powered by extraordinary creative talent, so we can’t wait to celebrate the achievements of the story tellers and programme makers who bring their ideas to life on our screens, next spring.”
The P&O Cruises Memorable Moment Award will also return, honouring the impact of television in the UK and its power to entertain, inform and bring the nation together – looking back at key moments from 2024 that inspired and moved audiences at home.
The P&O Cruises Memorable Moment Award, the only award voted for by the public, was won earlier this year by Happy Valley for the ‘Catherine Cawood and Tommy Lee Royce’s final kitchen showdown’ scene. A public vote will open in early March 2025 when nominations are announced.
The 2025 awards will showcase programmes broadcast in the UK between 1 January – 31 December 2024 with one exception – as a dedicated children’s ceremony last took place in Autumn 2022, the eligibility window has been extended for children’s television programmes and their craft teams (1 July 2022 - 31 December 2024), where applicable, for one year only.
-ENDS-
For more information, please contact:
BAFTA Press Office
T: 020 7292 5863
About BAFTA
BAFTA’s mission as a charity is to champion the creative and cultural importance of the screen arts across film, games and television. Through its Awards ceremonies and year-round programme of talent initiatives and learning events that include masterclasses, lectures, scholarships, bursaries and mentoring schemes in the UK and North America, BAFTA identifies and celebrates excellence, discovers, inspires and nurtures new screen talent, and enables learning and creative collaboration. For more, visit www.bafta.org. BAFTA is a registered charity (no. 216726).
