BAFTA TO INTRODUCE DAYTIME CATEGORY AND INCREASE PERFORMANCE NOMINEES

BAFTA has announced new guidelines for its TV awards to address a lack of diversity.

The number of nominees in performance categories will be increased from four to six and a new daytime category will be introduced, recognising the important role that daytime programming plays in the lives of viewers.

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.

"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."