Those Arctic Monkeys will compete with Radiohead and British folk singer Linda Thompson for the pop prize at the South Bank Show Awards, which will take place in London on 29 Jan and will be shown on ITV on 3 Feb. The Joy Division film 'Control' is shortlisted in the Best Film category.
ITV will be screening that awards event though, as you may have seen, the British Comedy Awards, which took place in London this week, are unlikely to ever be aired, even though ITV paid for the exclusive rights to the show. The Comedy Awards have traditionally been screened live, or on a short time delay, but ITV pulled the plug this year after the dodgy phone vote scandal, because it transpired that a whole load of votes in the phone-voted People's Choice award at the 2005 awards were not counted, meaning those viewers were charged for nothing and Catherine Tate lost out on a prize that should have been her's, because many of the uncounted votes were for her TV show.
Even though 'X-Factor', which had its own voting flaws, has returned to our screens this year, and despite the fact the Comedy Awards would have worked perfectly well without the phone in component, ITV bosses decided it wouldn't be appropriate to air the Comedy Awards at all this year. In fact they felt it would be so inappropriate they not only decided not to air it themselves, but paid £750,000 to the awards organisers to stop them selling the rights to Channel 4 or Five.
The consensus is that that decision was made by top ITV execs because they were frightened they'd be heavily mocked by winning comedians for all the phone vote fuck ups. And that such mockery on such a high rating show would remind the general public and print media, who seem to have given the BBC the hardest time over all the corrupt telly goings on, that ITV's phone con crimes were much much worse.
Anyway, I'm only really mentioning the Comedy Awards here because there was a vaguely musical theme in that comedy pop quiz 'Never Mind The Buzzcocks' won two awards at the bash - it was named Best Comedy Entertainment Programme and its host Simon Amstell got Best Comedy Entertainment Personality. Well done him for being brill.