International Emmys bring success to Britain

Britain came out on top at the International Emmy TV awards in New York last night, winning four of the seven prizes.

An episode of BBC2’S The Kumars at No 42 featuring Richard E Grant and Michael Parkinson shared the Popular Arts prize with Channel 4’s Faking It, in which Gordon Ramsay helps a burger van cook pass himself off as an haute cuisine chef.

John Hay and Peter Tabern’s BBC adaptation of the classic Stig of the Dump - about a child that befriends a caveman – won in the Children and Young People category.

And the BBC also scooped the News award for John Simpson and Joe Phua’s coverage of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance advancing into Kabul in November 2001.

The Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the Slovak Republic won their first International Emmys.

Denmark’s Unit One, a gritty police drama, won the Drama Series prize, while the Slovak Republic’s , Nicholas Winton – The Power of Good, won in that documentary category. It tells the story of a man who saved more than 600 Czechoslovak Jewish children from the Nazis in 1939.

A German miniseries, Die Manns (The Manns), won the television movie/minseries award, and Canada’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, won the prize for Arts Programming.