Entertainment winners announced for prestigious Peabody Awards

British talent and productions featured prominently in the announcement of the winners in the entertainment and children’s categories of this year’s Peabody Awards, live on NBC’s Today Show on 22 April. The Peabodys, regarded in the USA as the Pulitzer Prize of broadcasting, are doing things a little differently this year, having selected 60 finalists, from which 30 winners are being announced in three stages. It is testament to the current strength of television drama and comedy that 10 of those 30 are in the entertainment category.

BBC2’s Wolf Hall, starring Mark Rylance and directed by Peter Kosminsky, is one of the 10 winners in the entertainment category, while the only winning children’s programme this year is CBeebies’ Katie Morag, the charming series about a young girl who lives on a Scottish island. British actors also feature in other winning titles, notably Idris Elba in the Netflix drama Beasts of No Nation, and David Tennant in Marvel’s Jessica Jones (also Netflix).

Other standout titles among the winners include Mr Robot (Universal), Transparent (Amazon) and black-ish (ABC).

• View the full list of winners

Winners in the news, radio, web and public service categories, which included a Peabody for the BBC’s coverage of the European immigration crisis across all platforms, were announced last week, while the documentary winners will be unveiled on 26 April.

More than 1,100 television and radio programmes and news reports from 2015 were submitted for consideration by the Peabody board of jurors, and the winners must be unanimously approved by all 17 board members, so it is an exhaustive process to narrow that field down to 30, all of which richly deserve their awards. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in New York on 21 May.

Steve Bryant is the BFI’s head TV curator and serves on the Peabody board of jurors.