A reminder of what TV can be

Voting was individual and private, but there seems to have been some communal thinking among the electorate for this year's Bafta Television Awards (Sunday, BBC1), with a strong sense of messages being given, thinks Mark Lawson.

For example, a telegram was clearly sent to the newspapers and media outlets that dragged Paul Watson's documentary Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell into last summer's scandal over TV fakery. The presentation of a special prize to Watson signalled that the television industry sees a difference between robbing phone-in callers of their cash and finessing a press release. Intriguingly, the Daily Mail, which began the attack on Watson, also seemed to relent by commissioning him to write a post-victory piece.

Balloting in the fictional section can also be seen as partly an anti-war march, with the honouring of two post-9/11 pieces. Peter Kosminksy's Britz (Best Drama Serial) and Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain (Best Single Drama) are both high-class pieces of drama but, in choosing them over the thriller Five Days and the Down's syndrome play Coming Down the Mountain, voters may have given extra weight to political topicality.

Channel 4, which broadcast both, is often described as troubled. But the network also took five of the other major categories, including wins for the brilliant sitcom Peep Show and Molly Dineen's searing rural documentary, Lie of the Land. This is vindication for a policy of concentrating budgets on a low number of high-profile shows.

No admirer of factual film-making could argue with Dineen's award and, indeed, this ceremony was probably unique among handouts of cultural gongs in identifying and rewarding the year's best work, with the prize for Best Entertainment Programme actually going to the most entertaining programme: Harry Hill's TV Burp.

After a period of the worst publicity in the medium's history, this list of winners was a proper reminder of what TV can be.