Chris Packham wins the Critical Award in Television 2024
Chris Packham’s documentary Is it Time to Break the Law? has won the Critical Award in Television (CATS) for its ability to draw attention to the climate crisis. Addressing the audience at Edge Hill University, Chris Packham thanked his director Adrian Sibley, the team at Proper Content and Channel 4 for their support in bringing the documentary together. The programme asks difficult questions about what can be done to get the message across that we need to do more about climate change.
Chris Packham highlighted that he thought television could do more to drive the message home, including through drama and other genres, and he called on the students to press on: ‘I’m very much of the mind that the future belongs to those young people, and we should give it to them. That doesn’t just mean listening to them in a patronising way; it means directly empowering them. I have enormous faith in youth. Youth is clear thinking. Youth is clear speaking and youth, importantly, is not risk averse.’
The Critical Awards in Television also celebrated students who had made their own films on climate change. The best 2-minute programme made by a school student was won by now 16-year-old Thomas Grindy who emphasised the importance of growing your own to more sustainable ways of living. He was given his award for a film that made ‘brilliant use of the apocalyptic, the intergenerational, the poetic to provide us with something like hope, a mix, something like despair’ as Head of Department of English & Creative Arts, Matthew Pateman, stated.
Thomas Grindy’s Help the Community, Safe the World won the student production category.
The third award, aimed at students at universities across the world, looked at the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals more widely and celebrated student work that recognised the need to create a more equitable, sustainable and collaborative future. The award was judged by Lyndsay Duthie, CEO of the Production Guild of Great Britain. She said, ‘it was a tough decision to choose the winners’ as the entries all showed significant technical competence and engaged in a myriad of ways with this important topic.
The winners of the award were Mariam Ahmed, Habiba Ahmed, Donia Ali, Donia Anter, Fatmaa Atef and Fatma Mohamed from Ahram Canadian University in Egypt for their production Salha which addresses ‘a difficult topic in a sensitive way’ as Lyndsay Duthie highlighted. Maria Conlon from Keele University came second with the passionate and poetic film Wake Up, highlighting climate change. George Donaldson from the University of the West of Scotland came third with the programme Kick Mental Health ‘that could be shown on television today’, according to Lyndsay Duthie. The production told the story of an initiative based around football that addresses the mental health crisis in young men.
Poster for Salha
The Awards were organised by the Television Studies Research Group at Edge Hill University in conjunction with SustainNET, the journal Critical Studies in Television and the Production Guild. Head of the Research Group, Elke Weissmann, explained: ‘We wanted to draw attention to the value and importance of television in all our lives. This was the second time we celebrated television in a way that is different from its technical qualities such as acting or music. While we focused on the role of television during Covid in 2021, we wanted to draw attention to its role in communicating climate change this time.’
Still from Wake Up
