BRADFORD: A documentary about integration in multi-cultural Britain that drew criticism from community leaders has won a leading international TV award.
Channel 4’s Make Bradford British won the Rose d’Or for best reality and factual entertainment series. Broadcast in March 2012, the two-part series was accused by one councillor of portraying the city in a bad light. Channel 4 defended the show, saying it aimed to overcome preconceptions about people from different ethnicities.
The programme looked at how people from different backgrounds lived together in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and filmed them as they shared their lives. Its triumph at the ceremony in Brussels came at the expense of Apocalypse, another Channel 4 nominee, which starred the illusionist Derren Brown.
Other British winners at Thursday’s event included Sky comedy Spy, which was named best sitcom, beating the BBC’s Twenty Twelve and The Thick of It. In the arts category, The Great Pretender - a BBC documentary about Queen frontman Freddie Mercury - was favoured ahead of the Julien Temple documentary London: The Modern Babylon and a third nominee, Just Ballet from Austria. More than 300 entries from more than 30 countries were submitted for the 2013 awards, which were held outside Switzerland for the first time in 52 years.
The ceremony, held as the final event of the 2013 Media Summit, was hosted by Dutch TV personality Lucille Werner in the presence of Princess Astrid and Prince Lorenz of Belgium.–BBC