At long last – the TV Baftas 2022 prove showbiz isn't just for toffs

From Jodie Comer to Stephen Graham, Sunday night's show was a celebration of working class talent

On the day we said goodbye to Dennis Waterman (the son of a British Railways ticket collector from Clapham), the latest Doctor Who was revealed to be Ncuti Gatwa (the son of Rwandan refugees who fled genocide) and Bafta saluted Sir Billy Connolly (raised by his aunts in a cramped tenement in Partick), it felt entirely appropriate that the 2022 TV Awards felt like a victory for working class talent. In an amusing cameo, Alan Partridge joked that progress had been made in TV recently, as not all the executives are from Oxbridge any more, “just most of them”. This year’s awards seemed tailor-made to be a rebuff to that quip.

“Humble beginnings” is perhaps a better way of putting it. Those words were spoken onstage by Big Zuu, aka rapper and presenter Zuhair Hussain, who surprised many by winning two awards on the night (for his entertaining, anarchic cookery show Big Zuu’s Big Eats) and delighted all with his joyful speeches. In his first, he thanked his mother, who came to Britain as a refugee from Sierra Leone when she was four months pregnant with him.

Another winner, the proudly working class actress and comedian Sophie Willan, whose comedy-drama Alma’s Not Normal attracts Bafta awards like iron filings to a magnet, thanked the grandmother who raised her. Willan’s own past, fictionalised in Alma’s Not Normal, includes a mother who was a heroin addict and a period working as an escort.

In the evening’s surprise win, the Welsh drama In My Skin beat Vigil to Best Drama Series (and hallelujah to that, say I). Kayleigh Llewellyn’s magnificent, acutely observed series (also semi-autobiographical) is a raw coming-of-age story about a teenage girl living in poverty, struggling to cope with a feckless, drunk father and a mother with serious mental health problems. Llewellyn described herself as a “benefit-class woman from Cardiff” when accepting the best writing award at the Bafta Craft Awards last week.

When Time won Best Mini Series tonight, its (very much working class) star Stephen Graham praised the cast of young, working-class men. This was the salt-of-the-earth TV Baftas. Host Richard Ayoade (educated at St Joseph’s College, Ipswich) may have been forgiven for staring at his bicycle clips nervously.

Salt of the earth: winner Stephen Graham with his wife, Hannah WaltersCredit:Mike Marsland

As for the acting awards, the Oakham School alum Matthew Macfadyen (a deserving Best Supporting Actor winner for his tremendous work in Succession) looks out of place among Jodie Comer, Sean Bean and Cathy Tyson (Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress). We could play Four Yorkshireman with the upbringings of these three (Bean’s father, for instance, was a business owner) but they all have the same grassroots appeal that someone like Christopher Eccleston possesses and someone like, say, Benedict Cumberbatch does not.

Have we fallen out of love with the posh star? Not so long ago, it seemed that a few years at Eton and double-first from Magdalen College were a prerequisite to picking up any acting work – the credits were stuffed with Cumberbatches, Redmaynes, Hiddlestons and Colmans. Scratch beneath the acting CV of any half-successful thesp and you’d find a prestigious private school. At London’s Royal Festival Hall on Sunday night, however, they would have seemed out of place. These stars are now, of course, the darlings of the film industry, but British TV is made of earthier stuff.

It may not have made for the most entertaining two hours of TV (nothing could have made that happen, bar a Will Smith-style punch-up), but it did serve as an amiable Sunday-night celebration of the splendidly perse and occasionally chaotic fabric of British life. Eton, Harrow, Westminster. Your boys took one hell of a beating. (Until next year, probably.)