IT DOESN'T have a lavish budget or big-name stars, but Gavin & Stacey is being tipped to steal the show at tonight's Bafta Television Awards. The gentle comedy about an Essex lad falling in love with a ditzy Welsh girl has gone from being a cult hit to one of the nation's best loved comedies.
The sitcom, a slow-burning word-of-mouth smash that first appeared on BBC3, has been nominated for a prestigious Audience Award for programme of the year – while star and co-writer James Corden, who plays the loveable 'Smithy', is up for Best Comedy
Performance.
Corden – who shot to fame in ITV drama Fat Friends – is also on the brink of making it big in the US and landing a £2m windfall with the sale of the rights to Gavin & Stacey to American TV giant NBC.
Costume drama Cranford is also expected to shine. Two of its stars, Dames Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins, both 73, who played sisters in the adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's 19th-century novels, are contenders for Best Actress, while the show is up for Best Drama Serial.
Dench and Atkins' rivals for Best Actress are former winner Gina McKee, this time for BBC1 drama The Street, and Kierston Wareing for It's A Free World (Channel 4).
Other nominees include Britain's Got Talent, the talent show series won last year by opera singer Paul Potts. It goes head-to-head with the three-times nominated Strictly Come Dancing. EastEnders, Emmerdale, The Bill and Holby City are all up for Best Continuing Drama.
In the Features category, chef Heston Blumenthal is hoping to scoop his first TV Bafta for Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is his culinary opponent, alongside The Secret Millionaire and Top Gear.
All the Best Actor contenders are first-time nominees. They are Andrew Garfield for Boy A (Channel 4), Tom Hardy for Stuart: A Life Backwards (BBC2), Matthew Macfadyen for Secret Life (Channel 4), and Antony Sher for Primo (BBC4).
Veteran entertainer Bruce Forsyth will return to the London Palladium to receive an Academy Fellowship for a lifetime of outstanding work.
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