TV review: Hugo Rifkind on the National Television Awards

Never mind the men. From the host Dermot O’Leary upwards and downwards, the men are all dressed as Paul Daniels, as per usual. Perhaps there’s a higher incidence of waistcoat depending how low they are on the creative scale (dramas, no waistcoats; soaps and TV presenters, some waistcoats; reality TV, ubiquitous waistcoats), but that’s about it. The sole meaningful objection to this rule that I noticed seemed to be Adrian Dunbar of Line of Duty, who wore his dinner jacket with a scarf, to show he was a thespian. Misjudgment. No, for the perfect NTA tone, I’d refer you to Jodie Whittaker, the new Doctor Who, who wore a . . . a . . . a perfectly acceptable black thing. Is this what my fashion colleagues would call it? I feel so. A perfectly acceptable black thing. The sort of dress one might wear to the barmitzvah of the son of a colleague, if one were planning on leaving a bit early.

Or there was Suranne Jones, who also caught the understated vibe by dressing like an insane gothic matador who was about to go foxhunting. Which, I’ll grant you, doesn’t sound too understated, put like that, but these things are relative. The blackness, as with Whittaker, was obviously a nod to the feminist statements of the Golden Globes, but everything else was pure NTA. You take the risk, because this is not a night for a couture Cinderella. This is not a night on which you think about Vogue. This is a night on which you think about the listings pages of the Radio Times. It’s all so broad. And whoever you are, most people watching are not watching for you.

Obviously I’m focusing on the dresses because the alternative is focusing on the programme. And that was hard, because my mind was turning to goo. The National Television Awards is an event designed to make you feel as though you don’t watch enough television. Which, personally and professionally speaking, is a somewhat alarming realisation. Who are all of these people, though, who watch enough television to always — always — know who the hell they are looking at in such a programme, and why? Who watches Doctor Foster and The Great British Bake Off and The Island with Bear Grylls and Top of the Lake and Line of Duty and Broadchurch and Coronation Street and The Voice and The Voice Kids and The Crown and Liar and Victoria and Gogglebox and Planet Earth II and Love Island and Poldark and Doctor Who and Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross and Ant & Dec and Blind Date and Transparent and Benidorm and EastEnders and Emmerdale and oh my God, how, how, how? To which the answer, obviously, is “nobody”. Everybody is lost, because it’s like a food award ceremony that has to take in the Ivy and my local McDonald’s in Archway all at once.

Jones was the evening’s big star, I think, probably because Doctor Foster is one of those rare programmes that anybody who watches literally anything else might watch too. She won best drama performance. Every time there was a lull the camera panned to her, although that may have just been a function of the cameraman thinking: “Is that one bow tie, or, like, nine bow ties? I must figure it out!” A sort of NTA godhead, she has almost usurped Ant & Dec, who have been all over these awards for so long it’s embarrassing for everybody.

They won three this year, one for being a TV presenter (nobody cares that they are two TV presenters), one for being the hosts of I’m a Celebrity, and a third for being the late Bruce Forsyth. Not quite sure what that was about. I looked it up on the website and since 2001, including awards for I’m a Celeb, they have won 36 of the things. I thought it was only 31 at first, but then I was fascinated to discover that they’re “Ant & Dec” as a duo, but their show is called Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. You see how bored I was?

Stacey Dooley is fantastic. In 2014, when the BBC announced plans to take BBC Three off air, one wag’s quip that “I don’t want to live in a world that Stacey Dooley isn’t investigating!” went viral. The idea, I suppose, was that there was something lowbrow and slightly silly about Stacey Dooley Investigates . . . , her youth-focused documentary series. Whereas it’s always been fierce and thoughtful, and the woman has balls of steel.

BBC Three went online only instead, and nobody really noticed the change, and Dooley kept plugging on. If a vague sense of her being amusingly miscast was mistaken when she started off, as a wide-eyed 20-year-old, then it’s all the more nonsensical now she’s in her thirties and a veteran of a score of documentaries about everything from child prostitution to homelessness. Now she’s in Florida, looking into what happens to sex offenders when they get released from prison.

Nothing good, is the answer. Stringent residency laws mean that they can’t live near schools, playgrounds or bus stops. Often this means they end up homeless or, even more weirdly, pretend-homeless, sleeping in tent cities at night before going home during the day to their families in locations where they can only spend a few hours a day. In an attempt to deal with the problem, whole sex offender communities have sprung up. Miracle Village, a small settlement roughly in the middle of nowhere, houses a couple of hundred, making up more than half of the population. Others have spilt over to nearby Pahokee.

Dooley gets to know a few of them. Some have child pornography convictions, some once had underage girlfriends, and a few are your out-and-out, zero-nuance abusers of children. “Not all these offenders are the same,” she says, carefully, “but the law treats them as if they are.” The set-up is frankly weird, with sex-offender social circles, as seen when one of them invites a bunch of friends over for a barbecue. “Most are sex offenders from Miracle Village, but he’s also invited two female friends from work,” says Dooley, not leaving you in much doubt about just how bonkers she regards that sentence to be.

You couldn’t call her non-judgmental, exactly, but who would be? What she is, though, is thoughtful, wondering how much good it really does anybody that they are forced to live these lives. This doesn’t make her soft. When one of them lies to her about his past (he says he had sex with a 16-year-old; it turns out he abused a great many under-16-year-olds) she goes proper Donal MacIntyre on him, until he runs away. Yet she is also grappling with the hardest morality there is, which is the morality we have towards marginalised people we despise. The question she doesn’t quite manage to answer, but at least knows she ought to ask, is how much difference it really makes if we have marginalised and despised them for a bloody good reason.