Friendly rivals
After another stellar year of British drama, Baby Reindeer, Slow Horses and Rivals each took two trophies apiece at the BAFTA TV Crafts Awards 2025. DQ was backstage at the ceremony to chat to the winners about their work.
After a hugely competitive year in British television in 2024, it seemed only fair that the prizes at the BAFTA TV Craft Awards 2025 were evenly split, with three series each taking home a pair of the famed golden masks.
For Netflix’s breakout hit Baby Reindeer, creator and star Richard Gadd won the Writer: Drama category while Weronika Tofilska won for Director: Fiction.
Jill Sweeney, Abi Brotherton, Natalie Allan, Tifanny Pierre, Franziska Roesslhuber and Martine Watkins won the Make-up and Hair category, and Dominic Hyman won for Production Design for Disney+ series Rivals, the 1980s-set show based on Jilly Cooper’s novel of the same name.
Then for the fourth season of Apple TV+ spy thriller Slow Horses, Andrew Sissons, Martin Jensen, Joe Beal, Alex Ellerington, Duncan Price and Abbie Shaw won in Sound: Fiction, while Robert Frost collected the award for Editing: Fiction.
All three shows will be hoping to add to their haul at the BAFTA Television Awards 2025 on on May 11, where acting prizes and the shows taking the statuettes for Drama Series, Limited Series and Scripted Comedy, among others, will be announced.

Other fiction winners at the Craft Awards held last night in central London include Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who collected the BAFTA for Writer: Comedy for Inside No. 9.
Suzanne Cave won Costume Design for Eric; Scripted Casting was won by Isabella Odoffin for Supacell; Tim Phillips and PJ Harvey won Original Music: Fiction for Bad Sisters; Christopher Ross won Photography & Lighting: Fiction for Shōgun; and Peter Anderson Studio won for Sweetpea in the Titles & Graphic Identity category.
Jason Smith, Richard Bain, Ryan Conder and Chris Rodgers collected the award for Special, Visual & Graphic Effects for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, while writer Lucia Keskin won Emerging Talent: Fiction for her BBC comedy Things You Should Have Done.
Meanwhile, the Television Craft Special Award went to EastEnders, with BBC Studios head of genre Kate Oates and executive producer Ben Wadey collecting the award for the soap, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025.
As the celebrations continued into the night, DQ was backstage to speak to the winners about their prize-winning work.
Costume Design: Suzanne Cave
After winning in 2019 for A Very English Scandal, Cave won this category for her work on Netflix series Eric, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Vincent, a puppeteer who launches a search for his missing son in 1980s New York with the help of the titular giant blue monster.
“It was set in the mid 80s in New York, but we referenced much earlier periods because not everyone wears clothes from that year. So there was definitely a 70s tone to it and certainly in Cassie [Gaby Hoffmann]’s costumes, she was definitely a throwback to early Meryl Streep, Kramer vs Kramer and those kinds of films. But the beauty of the scripts was that you have a New York nightclub in 1985 so you can really go to town on that and really get the big shoulder pads and the hair. Lucy [Forbes], our director, one of the first things she said to me when I met her was, ‘You know we’re not doing big hair and big shoulder pads. It’s not that.’ It was more real.
“Vincent was also a bit of a throwback. He’s a Frank Oz type character, definitely one foot in the 70s. And that was reflected in his costume. He even wore a corduroy jacket and printed shirts and then the sneakers-and-jeans look. He has this big coat that he wears and ends up essentially living in.
“It was prepped and shot in Budapest, so I was working with an entirely new team there, and they were all amazing, with really amazing local talent and artists who collaborated on certain costumes. We had this drag queen who was on the door of the nightclub, and we made this white dress and I wanted to do graffiti all over it, so we got a local graffiti artist to basically go to town on this dress. That was really special.”
Titles & Graphic Identity: Peter Anderson Studio
A winner in 2023 for Bad Sisters, the team from Peter Anderson Studio – Michaela Socova, Vacharin Vacharopast, Chloë Hastings and Peter Anderson – collected this award for the opening sequence to Sky drama Sweetpea, a ‘coming of rage’ series in which Ella Purnell plays a serial killer, based on the novels by CJ Skuse.
Peter Anderson: “The most satisfying thing is probably that we worked with a team that trusted us and wanted to listen to us. And when that happens, we do better work. That was with Ella Jones and Serana Piggott and Sky, and they’re fantastic to work with. They believe in titles, they’re behind titles, and it makes us do better work.
“The industry’s grown a lot bigger and, particularly because execs are in title sequences, execs are paying attention [to title sequences]. But because of the competition internationally, they’re probably needed more than ever because people are making decisions very quickly [about what to watch] and we’re summarising 10 hours into a minute, so an audience is getting a pinch of what the drama is going to be. I guess what I would say is if you don’t like the titles, don’t watch the show.”
Vacharin Vacharpoast: “Well, the brief we got from our client was really interesting – this idea of comic book style but not actually being a comic book and doing this really nice graphic treatment. Every single member of the team added their own spin, so it is truly this amalgamation of everyone’s visual style to create this sequence. It comes from a comic book vibe but really it’s not, and that’s what is great about visual communication as a whole, where you can take something, move it forward and produce something really interesting and hopefully people enjoy it.”
Editing: Fiction: Robert Frost
In a category that also included The Day of the Jackal, Mr Bates vs The Post Office and Baby Reindeer, Frost came out on top for his work on opening episode of the fourth season of Apple TV+ spy drama Slow Horses.
“I was a fan of the show beforehand so to be able to get involved is super exciting. It’s based on a series of books, so they’ve got great stories. And to be working on something that’s got great writing and amazing actors is a dream for an editor.
“It’s season four. If you read the books, it’s a darker story and the scripts reflected that as well. It’s a more personal story for River [Jack Lowden], the main character, so we knew it was a chance to try to do something different. I could look at what was done before [in previous seasons] and we could see the mix of humour and drama and just try to take it to a different level.”
“The most fun part of the editing process is when you’re almost rewriting the story in the cutting room. I worked alongside another editor, Harrison Wall, who edited the other three episodes [episodes two, four and six] and we were sharing scenes and moving things back and forth from day one, discussing the best way to tell the story [which in season four follows a non-linear structure] because there’s a bit of a cheat in episode one as to a character being killed. That was a real challenge for us to work out together.
“I put a lot of pressure on myself because I’d seen those earlier seasons and I loved it and I’d read the books, so I was really into the world of it. I love doing thrillers and this is the peak of that, really. Weaving the comedy into that was also one of the most challenging things about Slow Horses, because you don’t want to undermine the drama. It’s a mixture of both.”

Special, Visual & Graphic Effects: Jason Smith, Richard Bain, Ryan Conder & Chris Rodgers
After missing out on the nomination in 2023 for its first season, Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power scooped the prize this year for its second season, against competition from 2023 winner House of the Dragon, double category nominee Silo and Masters of the Air.
Moving production from New Zealand to the UK for season two “was pretty astounding actually,” said senior visual effects supervisor Jason Smith, who has worked on both seasons of The Rings of Power. “It was surprisingly smooth. New Zealand is an amazing place with a lot of history in this franchise. But coming here, the [effects] talent pool that’s here, it’s really amazing. Even things like the aerials we shoot [in New Zealand] and the beautiful landscapes there, coming here it was amazing to see that this area has the same kind of things to offer. It’s really beautiful
“Ryan does the special effects part, so he’s the practical side. I would say we’re in contact almost every day, because the way we approach things is we like as much to be real as possible. Everything that can be real, we want it real, and we’ll only change the things that we have to change. So we’re always kind of collaborating about, ‘Well, what can you do and what can we do?’ Sometimes it has to be a giant troll, and that’s just going to be us. But other times, Ryan and his team get really creative.
“Season two, we were introducing more creature work because the first season we were introducing everybody to the world and who the characters are. That’s a big task, right? Then in season two, we got to have a little fun. We got to meet some really neat creatures that some of us were really close to as young people [reading JRR Tolkien’s novels]. I wanted to make [humanoid tree creatures] Ents forever and so every time I go on a hike, I’m taking pictures of the trees and my kids are like, ‘Oh, please no. The tree has a face again.’
“At the end of the day, this is a story that is really deep and really interesting and it’s going to interesting places and dark places and places where we all have something to learn. We say sometimes that on our best days, people don’t notice us. Even when we’re making somebody look like a hobbit and somebody else look taller. On our best days, people don’t notice us and that’s kind of the funny thing. If we’re helping to tell the story, I’m really happy.”
Original Music: Fiction: Tim Phillips & PJ Harvey
Bad Sisters composing team Phillips and Harvey reunited for the second season of Apple TV+’s dark comedy drama and came away victorious in the show’s only BAFTA nomination this year, having collected a hat-trick of gold masks for season one (Drama Series, Supporting Actress for Anne-Marie Duff and Titles & Graphic Identity).
“It’s obviously amazing to have the score recognised. I felt we really broke ground on season one. Polly [Harvey] and I worked pretty hard to try to find something that was standout and iconic, and that would have a very particular sound. We’re far enough from the premiere of season one that it feels like, ‘Yeah, we did it.’ I’m very proud.
“We hadn’t met before. We spoke once and then we met in the studio and we just did it, and now, two-and-a-half years later, we’re excellent friends. It was pretty clear from about seven seconds in that we were going to be fine.
“Season one was self-contained, so season two was how do we bring this flavour forward, and also progress it? Polly and I sat and said, ‘How are we gonna do that? What else do you play?’ She had a whole bunch of stuff that she brought to the table, and then I had ideas about how to work the narrative that I brought to the table and, together, we just made it work. It was basically bringing the language from season one two years on.
“We created an instrument [for season one] called the ‘Polytron’ [or Polly-tron] and then we had the ‘Windfinitron’ on season two. We sampled her playing saxophone, clarinet and harmonica. There’s a concertina and then we both tried to play the drums really badly and then made it work. But the thing is with percussion instruments, you can reinterpret those and you can cut those into size after the fact.
“The Polytron was a vocal instrument. It was basically an insanely huge sample library of her singing every possible syllable and sound that she could do, and we made it really quick. We made it in a day. We expanded it a lot in season two. But there is no other rock-star level artist in the world who’s just going to give you their voice and go, ‘Show me what you can do with it.’ The magic of that experiment was the level of quality she delivered and then the level of trust she allowed around it. I sent her everything I was working on, and it was just great feedback and great collaboration all the way.”
Photography & Lighting: Fiction: Christopher Ross
Ross set the scene for Disney+’s acclaimed historical drama Shōgun, working on the first two episodes of this series set in 17th century Japan where Lord Yoshii Toranaga is battling against his enemies on the Council of Regents as a mysterious European ship runs aground in a nearby fishing village.
“I was working on a film called The Swimmers in Turkey when [director] Jonathan van Tulleken got approached to direct the pilot [of Shōgun], and we started talking about what it would be to see a Western tale of political intrigue through the eyes of a Japanese audience, and a Japanese tale of loyalty and treason shot through the eyes of a Western audience. So we thought it would be a lot of fun to smash some samurais together and see how much death we could bring to the screen. Jonathan got the job and then met the producers. We saw the show in a complex way, in a similar way, and then embarked upon the adventure.
“The thing that’s really important, particularly about Shogun, is that actually we had pretty much the 10 scripts, so when embarking on episode one I was able to see that small peripheral characters like Mariko in the first episode, she is a monumental figure in the show itself. One of the things we have to try to do when setting up a show is take it from zero to 100 and lead the subplot intrigue. The script pretty much tells you what you should be showing on screen, but what it doesn’t show you necessarily is the subtext and the subplot that is being led to in episode four, episode nine and so on. So what I really hope is that the groundwork we laid in episode one and two pay off in episode nine when Mariko has this incredible moment.
“We wanted it to feel very first-person, so we wanted you to be in the seat of the characters. Episodes one and two are predominantly wider-angle lenses, close proximity to the cast, with the blocking designed in such a way that we stack as many faces in the frame [as possible]. The idea being that you pile upon pile of humans and you’re being confronted by character after character. One of the lessons I’ve learned from previous shows of this sort of scale is a lot of the work is in a close-up. And so, if in the close-up you can also deliver the scale, then every shot has scale. And if you can keep the camera moving, if you keep the intrigue going, if you keep the scale in every frame, then maybe audiences will respond. I’ve been lucky to shoot the pilots and/or the first few episodes of a number of seasons, and every show it’s roulette, it’s a roll of the dice.”

Make-Up & Hair Design: Jill Sweeney, Abi Brotherton, Natalie Allan, Tiffany Pierre, Franziska Roesslhuber and Martine Watkins
The hair and make-up team behind 1980s-set Disney+ drama Rivals – one of the most nominated shows for the 2025 BAFTA awards – were victorious in this category ahead of Bridgerton, Joan and Mary & George.
Jill Sweeney, hair and make-up designer: “First of all, I got the script. When you do an interview you only get one script and the script was fantastic. And then the director, Elliot Hegarty, and [producer] Eliza Mellor said, ‘We’d really like you to do it, but first of all you’ve got to meet [exec producers] Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Alex Lamb.’ So then I thought I really need to read this book. But I only had a day to read Jilly Cooper, which is 700 pages, so I did. Then Dominic asked me what I thought of the book. And I said, ‘Do you know what? It was a really good book.’ And it went from there. We got all the other scripts. Then it was about placing the characters – some you want to feel sorry for, some you want hate – and it’s about pushing them visually in the right direction.

When it came to the 80s setting, “I always said when I first met them [Treadwell-Collins and Lamb], ‘Go big or go home.’ It was a case of not being afraid that sometimes we looked awful in the 80s. I was in my 20s in the 80s and it was all about the hairspray and the back combing, and hair wasn’t always great. It’s about keeping it real and sometimes you want to make things perfect all the time but that made our characters more accessible to the public.”
Working with a small team of artists, “some days we had 41 main cast [to prepare], so to get ready before 8am, we were starting at 4.30am, which is why in my speech I said thank-you to Gary [Matsell, head of production] for signing off the huge amounts of overtime because he said to me, ‘I’ve never signed that much overtime. Why didn’t you get more people in?’ I said because there’s a relationship with the actors and if you then decide on a busy day which one isn’t important enough, it’s like which one of your children are you going to throw out with the bath water. So because the actors are fabulous and we really had great relationships with them all, we didn’t want to not make them feel special.
“One of the biggest challenges is that sometimes we didn’t get the actor until the day of the shoot. With David [Tennant], we had to get a wig on him and dye his hair and then everybody was there, all the execs were there because it was so last-minute, and then he was on camera at 8am, so this team really had to hit the ground running. Normally you get wigs made for people but we couldn’t, we didn’t have that luxury, and that was a huge challenge and such a testament to how creative my team are.”
Production Design: Dominic Hyman
A first BAFTA win for Hyman and a second for Rivals, with the designer responsible for bringing to life the luscious locations and landmarks used in this 1980s drama set in the fictional English county of Rutshire.
The ambition was “just to try and capture a completely believable version of the mid-80s that I remember so well ,being a teenager at that time. But to just elevate it, give it a little bit of heightened reality, but not too much. You always had to believe you were there. The most important thing, because the characters were larger than life, was to let the world be completely immersive, but not too powerful because in the end it’s for the actors to do that to give us their story. All the things that I love, chintz, post-modernism, the different design ideas of the 80s – we had an opportunity to bring all that to the table and we were so encouraged by all our team to enjoy it. It was so wide-ranging, all these different characters and [moving] from the corporate world to the studio world, the domestic world and all these houses. It was a joy to do.”
An airplane toilet cubicle in the show’s opening scene “was the smallest set I’ve ever done, but it was probably the most impactful. It was just a joy to do, and we’re doing season two now, so the significant goal for me is to keep this standard up.
“Budgets are tight but I’ve got a great team and we will we will stick together, work together and just really examine every decision closely. The trick is to really examine everything, to never say, ‘That’s good enough.’ It’s always got to be the best version of it. You’ve got to push as hard as we can and that’s what we’ve done so far. It’s all about the detail. That’s why people like Rivals because they see things and they go, ‘I remember that, I know that, that sparks this memory for me.’”

Sound: Fiction: Slow Horses: Andrew Sissions, Martin Jensen, Joe Beal, Alex Ellerington, Duncan Price and Abbie Shaw
A second consecutive triumph in this category for the sound team behind Apple TV+’s witty spy thriller, based on the novels by Mick Herron and featuring an ensemble cast led by Garry Oldman as Jackson Lamb and Jack Lowden as River Cartwright.
Joe Beal, supervising sound editor: “The whole tone of the show is such a delicate balance between being action-driven and comedy-driven, so we feel like we can bring so much to that. In the action moments we can really ramp up the intensity, ramp up impact, but in those subtler, quiet moments we bring so much of the comedy and that’s why it’s such a satisfying project to work on, because we can take those tiny moments that otherwise wouldn’t mean that much and inject some comedy and inject some action into it.
“A lot of credit has to go to our production sound mixer, Andrew Sissons, and his team of amazing boom ops and recordists and everyone who slogs it out on set. They capture us absolutely perfect, pristine audio every single time, which allows us to then build up the atmosphere that we want in post, so a big shout out to the production team.”
Writer: Drama: Richard Gadd
Gadd follows up his Emmy win last year with the BAFTA for drama writing for his semi-autobiographical Netflix drama Baby Reindeer, in which he also stars as Donny Dunn, a stand-up comedian forced to confront a dark trauma while also dealing with a female stalker.
Gadd: “I take writing very seriously; I write all the time. Even when I don’t have something to write for, I’m writing. It’s been the only outlet I’ve ever had in my life, the only way of understanding things and channelling things and giving myself even something to do. I take it very seriously, so the writing awards always mean so much to me. It’s been a hell of a journey to get here. I sometimes feel like I’ve spent my life living behind a laptop and I’ve spent my life digging up some really difficult things but it’s these moments where you’re holding big awards like BAFTAs and Emmys that really makes it all worth it. It makes you think that it wasn’t all for nothing because there’s been times when I’ve sat in front of a laptop, days are going by and I’m not seeing anyone. I’m just behind a laptop, so it’s a really great moment.
“The thing that always annoyed me about stalking [on TV] is when I was actually getting stalked, shows on television sex it up a bit – ‘sexy stalking’ – and to me it was actually a really tedious, laborious thing to go through. You can’t put tedious and laborious on TV, but you can put all the other complexities that come with it, the empathy, the suspense, the fear for your own life, so I just wanted to do a nuanced look at stalking, because it’s a very complicated thing.
“It was a big risk for Netflix, I will always be grateful to them for that. They took such a risk on it, this show about stalking and sexual abuse. There were times during it where I thought, ‘Are they really actually going to do this?’ They didn’t need to take this artistic risk, but they did, and that meant a lot. But there were always nerves around it, there were always discussions, but I’m really proud of where we all got to.
“I really hope Baby Reindeer bucks the trend and paves the way for more risk-taking. We’re seeing that a bit with [fellow Netflix series] Adolescence now as well. That’s not mainstream subject matter in any way, shape or form, shot in a unique way, but it’s gone on to have huge mainstream success like Baby Reindeer did, so I’m hoping this is the start of a turning point in the industry. I understand the cautious commissioning, but I really do think you don’t get out of a difficult period without taking risks and that’s not just in the industry, that’s in life.”

Writer: Comedy: Reece Shearsmith & Steve Pemberton
The long-time comedy partners and League of Gentlemen favourites capped the ninth and final season of their comedy horror anthology Inside No 9 with this prize, having won the same category in 2018. They also took home the Scripted Comedy mask in 2021, while Pemberton won Male Performance in a Comedy Programme in 2019.
Pemberton: “Inside Number 9 is really a show about ideas, different ideas every single week and the writing is at the heart of it. Sometimes if you’re a writer-performer, the performer is the showier side that gets the attention and it’s great to be honoured in this way for the real hard work that goes into making every single episode. We have to start every episode with a blank piece of paper, and that’s been really challenging over the past 10 years. We’re just elated and over the moon.”
Shearsmith: “We’re thrilled to get this for season nine of a thing. It’s amazing to still be recognised. Even the nomination was great; we didn’t even expect that. So to win it, we are genuinely quite shocked.”
Coming up with so many new ideas year after year “began to feel like hard work, because we knew how successful it was going down with the audiences,” Shearsmith said. “When the IP of the show became apparent that, ‘Oh, there is this great surprise in this,’ they’re ahead of you a little bit, and it became harder to think, ‘Well, how do we keep being ahead of the audience?’ But we just enjoyed the fact that we were able every week to tell a story, and with the medium of television, we began to enjoy playing with the audience and having fun with them not expecting what we were going to do. It became a little bit of a game with us trying to trick the audience. It was hard work but it was very fulfilling as writers because we did get to do pretty much everything.”

Pemberton: “We’d sometimes start with a setting, sometimes start with an ending. But more often than not, it just came out long conversations that we’d have. This is one of the joys of having a writing partner. We are able to meet every day. We have our cups of coffee. We have a little gossip. We have a chat. And we just start talking. We’ll do that process, and we’ve done it now for years, going back to The League of Gentlemen days. It’s not always fun. You will have days when you’ve achieved very little, but you don’t get stuck in your own head because you’ve got somebody to bounce ideas off.”
Shearsmith: “If we laugh at the same thing, or we have an idea that tickles us both, we think, ‘Well that’s it.’ That’s a nice arbiter to know, ‘That’s going to be in,’ because it tickles our funny bone.
“Because we’re in it, we can’t see what it is on the outside of it [now it’s finished]. But sometimes you do step outside of it and think, ‘Well, yeah, that was quite something to do all those seasons.’ It’s just been our lives year upon year, but it doesn’t feel for us like we’d be doing the same things for 10 years. It feels like we’ve explored everything, which has been great as writers and as actors as well. We write ourselves these parts that no one else would.”

Television Craft Special Award: EastEnders
In its 40th anniversary year, this award was presented in honour of the BBC soap’s long-term commitment to nurturing new talent through their production process, which has enabled the development of many of the UK and international film and television industry’s top behind-the-camera talents.
BBC Studios head of genre Kate Oates: “Viewer habits change and there’s always a lot of talk about soaps being on the decline, whereas actually the figures are strong in as much as everyone’s viewing figures have changed. Viewing looks different, and we remain really strong and central with that, but what we give the industry is so unspoken about. We do give people their first jobs, we do train people up, we do get people a chance to really hone skills over a period of time. And storytelling, unless you’re born with an amazing skill, it’s like a muscle and it gets better the more you use it. You just don’t get to do that over one, two, three, six-part dramas in the same way as you do over years and years of storytelling. We’re really pleased to be recognised like this because what we offer isn’t something that isn’t necessarily thought of industry-wide.”
Airing multiple episodes a week, “you’ve got to love it [working on a soap] and the team really love it and the cast love it,” Oates continued. “They really protect it, they want to bring their A game, so people just always work really hard. But other than that, it’s a lot of coffee. It’s turnover as well, it’s different voices, diverse voices. Some people are there for a really long time, many years, and some people pass through but they bring their skills with them and then they leave their great ideas and we learn from that and then move on and we get another influx. So there’s turnover but there’s also continuity and that helps.”
Executive producer Ben Wadey: “That’s what’s so nice about getting this. I think we’ve got writers sitting at story conferences who have been there for 20 years alongside somebody who is their first day writing on the show. It’s the same across the board with directors and the training programmes we have. That combo of skills is what allows us to keep going and keep on breaking barriers.”
Although it’s a tough time for soaps, with some being cut back or axed altogether, Oates said: “We offer people a training ground, but then that just creates a huge watershed elsewhere in the industry and people who know what they’re doing. Someone like Sarah [Phelps, The Sixth Commandment] who can just come along with authority and confidence because she learned everything that she learned on the show. She still champions it. Soaps are vital to the industry and when they are threatened, I think the impact will be felt. It might not be felt the following month, but it will be felt the next two or three years, because it is those first writers, those first directors, who don’t get on the ladder.
“At EastEnders, what’s brilliant is that we are in a strong position and we’re in a place where we can say we can take a lot of that training on, which is what we do, and BBC Studios invests in it. Chris Green. who runs our training programmes. is always finding partners to create opportunities with, and it’s a huge endeavour but one we take really seriously, and we are super proud of it.”
tagged in: Baby Reindeer, Bad Sisters, Bafta, BAFTA TV Craft Awards, EastEnders, Eric, Inside No 9, Reece Shearsmith, Richard Gadd, Rivals, Shōgun, Slow Horses, Steve Pemberton, Sweetpea, The Rings of Power



