NTA:

For those not watching, Graham Norton got the Special Recognition award.

The irony this followed the day after possibly the worst ever episode!

It has been the strongest soap for a couple of years. Although I suspect under the new boss things will rapidly go downhill

I think Emmerdale will do quite well with awards this year mainly due to the Ashley dementia storyline.

That and I think day to day it is simply the best soap at the moment. I don't watch any of them regularly anymore but always find Emmerdale the easiest watch if I do end up catching one. Neither Corrie or EE have been capturing the imagination lately.


Overall though find the NTAs very repetetive now and really been put off watching them in recent years by the begging for votes by the nominated programmes - started with the ITV daytime shows but even saw Breakfast do it this week.

My problem is that it's bereft of the class it had during the Sir Trev era. Sure, you can argue that it's more entertaining with the singing and whatnot, but having Scarlett shoved down our throats is the epitome of how a pretty prestigious ceremony turned into outright crowd-pleasing populism... And I'm aware of the irony saying that given the awards are solely audience-driven.

Dermot O'Dreary was seemingly tripping over his words every other sentence last night.

I don't think the NTAs have every been 'pretty prestigious'.

They were certainly a bit more watchable with Sir Trevor! But then you could argue TV back then was of a slightly higher standard too...

Does anyone still have any footage of the time that Sir Trevor himself won the Special Recognition award?

It wasn't. And if it was it didn't show at the NTA's. Not sure where this daft belief that the NTA's were once considered "prestigious" and has recently gone downmarket came from. They've always been the crowd pleasing & populist alternative to the Baftas. 20 years ago winners included The Bill, The Rikki Lake Show and Stars In Their Eyes!

Didn't the NTAs used to feature Caprice for a couple of years during Trevors era?

I have the book for the 1997 Edinburgh TV Festival and the advert for Grampian (because, of course, it was initially a Grampian presentation for ITV) crowing about the success of the NTAs, features a huge picture of Caprice. I think she appeared one year at the height of her Wonderbra fame, and got all over the papers for wearing a spectacular dress, so they got her back on every year to wear another spectacular dress and do a bit of co-presenting. Caprice was dead famous in those days, mind, it was around the time she presented The Big Breakfast for a week. The most memorable thing about that was her pronunciation of the "Daily Meer" in the paper review, and the Mirror got her to do some adverts for them based on that. Simpler times.

Obviously it stopped being a Grampian presentation after a bit when programmes didn't need a specific region to present them. I do remember in 1999, the Scottish regions actually showed it on a delay after ten o'clock, because they were showing Rangers live in the Champions League.



Well, indeed, and to suggest the National Television Awards have ever been prestigious, or that they should be highlighting more important and credible programmes, is to suggest it should be something that it was never intended to be. The NTAs are first and foremost a TV show, devised and produced by ITV with the intention to entertain the primetime ITV audience, and that means featuring programmes and personalities that the primetime ITV audience like and know. It's never had any intention of being definitive, it's a popularity contest. There are other awards that honour different programmes.

They've always been quite a bad show as well. I remember the morning after the first show Keith Chegwin and Paul O'Grady slagging it off on The Big Breakfast, O'Grady said Eamonn Holmes (who did the first one, of course) was a rubbish presenter who just read the autocue and all his jokes died on their arse, while Cheggers said it was a really boring programme.

The BAFTAs aren't all that either, sometimes they go to far the opposite way where the winners are an obscure programme the majority of the audience didn't even know existed. Shows that Channel 4 sometimes do that almost look like their main role is getting a BAFTA.

Trevor McDonald often seemed a bit awkward on the NTAs. He was a very serious newsreader, he wasn't the sort who'd do a dance routine on Children in Need of turn up reading a spoof report on an entertainment show. He'd long since left behind his Tiswas persona and probably hadn't let his hair down on TV since that point, therefore you often had the impression he'd never even heard of half the mainstream light entertainment he was talking about on the autocue.