There were more plaudits for Stephen Graham and Warp Film’s all-conquering Netflix drama, Adolescence, at the Bafta Television Awards on Sunday as the show scooped a further four awards – a record in a single year – to add to its hefty global tally, with Scottish reality TV hit Celebrity Traitors and celeb game show Last One Laughing also scooping a pair of prizes each.
Graham’s drama, which became a national, and global, talking point on release in March 2025, was named best limited series, and there were acting honours for its stars Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper and Christine Tremarco.
At 16, Cooper was the youngest ever winner of the award for best supporting actor, and can put the award on his mantelpiece next to his Emmy, Golden Globe, National Television, Royal Television Society and Actor Awards he has already won for playing a boy accused of murdering a female classmate.
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In his acceptance speech, the rising star from Warrington nodded to the Beatles, a refererence that was later picked up by Graham in his own acceptance speech: “In the words of John Lennon, you won’t get anything unless you have the vision to imagine it,” Cooper said. “So in my eyes I think you only need three things to succeed: one, you need an obsession; two, you need a dream; and, three, you need the Beatles.”
Graham, named best leading actor for playing Cooper’s on-screen dad, ran with the theme later in the evening, telling the audience as he picked up his own Best Actor prize: “The kid’s already said it, but in the words of the Beatles, all we need is love.” This was Graham’s first Bafta win after seven previous nominations.
The Celebrity Traitors, the most-watched programme of last year with more than 15 million viewers, won Best Reality , which host Claudia Winkleman dedicated it to the show’s “extraordinary cast,” while Alan Carr,who honed his comedy skills on the Manchester stand up circuit in the late 90s and early 2000s, landed most memorable TV moment for the show – the only award of the night to be voted for by the public.
Middlesbrough comic and all-round national treasure Bob Mortimer’s efforts to make his rival comedians crack a smile while he kept a straight face in Last One Laughing bagged him the Bafta for best entertainment performance, while the ever-reliable Mancunian comic Steve Coogan won best actor in a comedy for How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge).
He said: “Doing comedy in these troubled times is so important. It’s a privilege to make people laugh after all these years. I will keep on doing it. If anyone wants to know when Alan Partridge is going to die, it’s about the same time that I am going to die.”
There was also a spot of predictable controversy for the BBC, which was screening the ceremony, when the current affairs prize went to Gaza: Doctors Under Attack after it was pulled by the BBC last year over impartiality concerns. It was later shown by Channel 4 instead.
The documentary’s reporter and producer spoke about the numbers of women, children and healthcare workers who have been killed in Gaza and added: “These are the findings of our organisation that the BBC failed to show but we refused to be silenced and censored and we thank Channel 4.”
Ben de Pear, the founder of Basement Films behind Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, added: “Given you dropped our film, will you drop us from the Bafta screening later tonight?”
When the BBC shelved the documentary, it said in a statement “it was determined to report all aspects of the conflict in the Middle East impartially and fairly.”
