The team responsible for editing the Baftas have an absurdly thankless task. In theory, the ceremony is supposed to start at 5pm and end around two hours later. They make a few judicious cuts here and there, and air the thing more or less as it happened on BBC One between 7pm and 9pm.
But that is never what happens. Awards shows rarely start on time, usually because the A-listers – permanently locked in a terminal status battle of red carpet chicken – don’t turn up until the very last second. And then things overrun. Speeches go long, unexpected winners have to clamber down from the back of the auditorium, so many people die during winter that the in memoriam segment takes up more time than anyone expected.
The result of this is that the editors have to chop out huge wads of the ceremony – a ceremony that is still going on as the broadcast airs – in a seemingly arbitrary fashion purely so it can end in time for Lord of the Flies at 9pm.
The end result is never particularly elegant, but last night’s Baftas really brought home what a bizarre system is in play. The edited broadcast still had plenty of the usual mistakes; 12 of the 28 awards handed out were crammed into busy little afterthought montages, while a full precious minute of the broadcast was spent watching the team behind Boong slowly make their way down a staircase towards the stage. This year, though, exposed the flaws even more profoundly.
One of the big winners was I Swear, a film about the life of John Davidson, who has spent his whole life at the forefront of Tourette syndrome awareness. As such, Davidson was invited to the Baftas, where his tics could be heard throughout the first half of the ceremony. He heckled host Alan Cumming’s monologue, which automatically made the crowd so tense that they stopped laughing at his jokes. He shouted “Shut the fuck up” to a couple of winners, yelled at Paddington and, regrettably, said the N-word while Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award.
It wasn’t until much later in the broadcast that an explanation was offered. First Robert Aramayo, who plays the lead in I Swear, did a tremendous job of pointing out that Davidson’s tics were involuntary and that people with TS are often defined by the reaction of others, and then Cumming gave a more careful, scripted explanation.
However, it put the show in a tricky situation. Clearly the editors had the ability to dip sound when necessary – when Paul Thomas Anderson said the word “piss” during one of his acceptance speeches, it was neatly censored – so they were faced with the conundrum of what to do about a series of involuntary but audible neurological tics. Whatever the reasoning, they chose to keep Davidson’s N-word shout in, but edit out the moment a winner used their speech to say “Free Palestine”.
Clearly, given the hot water that the BBC increasingly finds itself following the moment with Jordan and Lindo – the corporation apologised yet again this morning as the backlash continues to spread – one argument would be that a two-hour delay simply isn’t enough. Perhaps they should air the Baftas the following night, to give the editors chance to scrub every last trace of controversy from proceedings.
Or, as I have long maintained, they should go the other way and just air it live. As long and boring as the Oscars are, there is at least the thrill of knowing that it’s going out live. Sure, it means feeling your will to live drain away as one overlong acceptance speech bleeds into another, but once every couple of decades you get lucky and there’s an onstage slapping. Moments like that are electrifying, but you get the feeling that – had it happened during the Baftas – they would have snipped it out for time.
The Baftas in their current form are in a muddle, and it’s one that is easily solved. Just show the damn thing live, please. We’re all grownups here. If someone swears or makes a political statement, or if Paddington falls over and his head pops off and he runs around in a panic to horrified screams from the audience (which didn’t happen last night but a boy can dream), then we can handle it. Knowing that anything could happen would give the awards a frisson of excitement that has long been absent from the show.
And if it’s a matter of scheduling, then guess what? Fewer and fewer people are watching scheduled television. Would it kill the BBC to show the ceremony live on iPlayer, and leave the edited version for traditionalists?
Perhaps this is already moot. From 2029, the Oscars are abandoning broadcast television altogether, instead heading for the freedom (and larger audiences) of YouTube. Realistically, it can only be a matter of time before the Baftas follow suit. When that happens then, finally, we might find our way out of this mess.
