Britain dominates Emmys

2008-11-25 09:00

New York - The time-travelling detective show Life on Mars picked up its second International Emmy for best drama series, leading a British sweep of seven of the 10 awards handed out on Monday night at a ceremony that also honoured Law & Order creator Dick Wolf.

Sam Waterston, who has appeared as prosecutor Jack McCoy in more than 325 Law & Order episodes since 1994, presented the special International Emmy Founders Award to Wolf whose shows are seen in their original or locally produced versions in almost every corner of the globe.

He was joined onstage at the New York Hilton Hotel by his co-star Linus Roache, as well as Dann Florek, Tamara Tunie and Michaela McManus from the spin-off Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

David Suchet took home the best actor Emmy for his portrayal of Robert Maxwell in the biography series Maxwell about the scandal-plagued final stages of the British media mogul's life.

The best actress honours went to Lucy Cohu for her role in the true-life drama Forgiven about a suburban housewife who reports her husband to authorities for sexually abusing their daughter and later decides to rebuild their lives together.

IT Crowd centres on geeks

The IT Crowd, which centres on the world of socially-awkward information technology geeks working for a British corporation, received the Emmy in the comedy category.

Life on Mars, whose US version premiered on the ABC network this year, also won the Emmy for best drama series for its first season in 2006.

The latest Emmy was for the show's second and final season which wrapped up the mystery of how time-travelling detective Sam Tyler, played by John Simm, ended up trapped in 1973 after a car crash.

The other British winners included Strictly Bolshoi (arts programming), the story of the first Englishman, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, to create an original work for Moscow's famed Bolshoi Ballet; Shaun the Sheep (children & young people), about a mischievous sheep who exasperates the sheepdog assigned to watch the flock; and The Beckoning Silence (documentary) depicting a mountaineer's tragic battle for survival on the Eiger in the Swiss Alps.

Excellence in TV

The winners were chosen from among 40 nominees from 16 countries competing for International Emmys, honouring excellence in TV programming produced outside the United States, in 10 categories.

The British monopoly was broken in the non-scripted entertainment category where the Emmy went to the controversial Dutch hoax-reality show, The Big Donor Show.

The programme sparked an outrage that reached the Dutch parliament when the producers announced a terminally ill woman would decide on television to which of three patients in need of a transplant she would donate her kidney.

It turned out the woman was not dying of a brain tumour and the exercise was intended to pressure the Dutch government to reform organ donation laws.

Jordan and Argentina made their mark by picking up their first-ever International Emmys.

Jordan was the surprise winner in the newly established telenovela category with Al-Igtiyah (The Invasion), a love story about a Palestinian caught up in the chaos and destruction of the large-scale 2002 Israeli military incursion into the biggest West Bank cities.

- AP