Conquest of the Skies (2015)Veteran broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough was announced earlier this week as this year’s winner of a prestigious personal Peabody Award. The rare personal award recognises outstanding individual contributions and careers in broadcasting. Previous recipients have included news legends Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, broadcasting giants like Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner and Alistair Cooke, producer Lorne Michaels (Saturday Night Live), filmmaker Frederick Wiseman and entertainers Bob Hope and Carol Burnett.
Peabody Awards are given to television and radio programmes and series of excellence, and there were two British productions among the nine winners in the entertainment category, announced on the 16 April edition of Good Morning America: Hugo Blick’s dramatic mini-series The Honourable Woman (shown here on BBC2 and in the USA on the Sundance Channel) and Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology Black Mirror (Channel 4/Netflix).
Also among the winners were several shows featuring British performers: the topical satire Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and the drama series Fargo (Martin Freeman) and The Knick (Clive Owen). British viewers have already had the chance to see these series, while another winner, Jane the Virgin, debuts on E4 on 22 April.
The Peabodys, administered by the University of Georgia, are the oldest awards for broadcasting in the world. They were established in 1941 with the intention of giving the worlds of radio and television their own equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize and have expanded in recent years to cover all forms of electronic media.
The awards board of 17 jurors, which I have had the privilege to sit on for five years, and which includes distinguished American academics, critics, broadcasters, journalists and media experts, met in Athens, Georgia last week to finalise this year’s list of winners. Every award-winner needs the unanimous approval of the board and the award is much prized in American broadcasting circles and beyond.
The remaining winners, in the fields of documentary, news, radio, children’s and education, will be revealed next week and the awards will be presented at a ceremony in New York at the end of May.
