BAFTA has announced new rules and guidelines for its TV awards to address a lack of diversity and better represent the industry.
The number of nominees in performance categories will be increased from four to six and a new daytime category will be introduced.
The BAFTA television committee said the new award will recognise the important role that daytime programming plays in the lives of viewers and in providing a pipeline for new and underrepresented talent.
Idris Elba was the Special award winner at the virtual awards this year
Hannah Wyatt, chair of the committee, said: “We are expanding the number of nominees for the performance categories and that is largely a reflection of the huge volume of fantastic drama that is being made by British creatives at the moment.
“We have had year-on-year increases in the number of entries and so it seemed to make sense to reflect that by allowing more nominees, which also hopefully will reflect more diversity and a wider range of people who are coming through the industry.”
She added: “We had a really good year this year, I think if you look at what happened in the last lot of awards we were up by about 22% in our diversity in the performance categories and that’s fantastic.
“I think we want to ensure we keep that going, this is one of the measures.
Sian Clifford won an award for her role in Fleabag
“We are bringing in other things as well, in terms of unconscious bias training, asking broadcasters to consider diverse entries in the categories where they are entering a performance, it’s part of a range of things we want to do.
“It’s not targeting anything specifically, a lot of it is about reflecting the fact that we just had lots of entrants, but of course it would be fantastic if that is also part of what we managed to achieve.”
The new criteria follows the BAFTA 2020 Review, which was introduced to address a lack of diversity across BAFTA’s different awards.
The 2020 television awards took place behind closed doors, with winners accepting their awards virtually.
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The film ceremony has also announced a raft of changes including expanding the nominations for director, actor and actress from five to six, while the outstanding British film category will be expanded from six to 10 nominations to increase the focus on British work.
The total number of nominees in all non-performance categories will remain at four, however the number of named nominees or production company representatives for each entry will increase from four to six.
The British Academy Television Craft Awards will take place on 24 May 2021, while the Television Awards will be on 6 June.