PICS: Baz Ashmawy and his mammy Nancy show one way to win an Emmy
The pair’s show, 50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy, won the Non-Scripted Entertainment award at the International Emmys — and afterwards they celebrated in style by having chicken wings in an Irish bar.
“We had a big auld shindig and won an Emmy,” Baz Ashmawy told RTÉ’s radio’s The Ryan Tubridy Show. “It’s an amazing result and Nancy played a blinder, looked beautiful on my arm, and then went in there and stole the show — which I was a bit annoyed about. She was brilliant, just brilliant and it was her Emmy, she deserves it.”
He described the moment they realised they knew the prize was theirs.
“As soon as they mentioned that 50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy was the one that won, she said she just [could] not remember anything, it was like floating,” he said. “Then she went up onto the stage and we said a few words and she spoke to a crowd of very sophisticated television people from all around the world and she nailed it. I’m just so proud of her to be honest.”
Asked what he thought the award was for, he said: “It’s a few things. It’s Nancy for one, this amazing 70-year-old doing these insane things and just being a complete inspiration. It’s the story of a mother and son; people can relate to it wherever they are from. A lot of luck goes into it as well.”
Sky television, which broadcasts the show, said it had been a huge success not only in Ireland and Britain, but also the rest of the world, having been acquired by broadcasters in more than 100 territories.
50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy is the second Sky-commissioned programme to win at the Emmys, following another Irish Sky 1 hit, Moone Boy, by Chris O’Dowd and Nick Vincent Murphy winning the 2013 International Emmy for Best Comedy. And it’s only the third ever Irish win at the International Emmys.
Also at the ceremony, Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes was presented with the honorary Founders Award.
He received the trophy from one of the show’s stars, Elizabeth McGovern, who played Countess of Grantham Lady Cora Crawley in the hit ITV period drama.
McGovern was joined by the programme’s executive producer, Gareth Neame, to hand over the prize.
More than 8m fans tuned in for the finale of Downton Abbey last month. The show will conclude with a special on Christmas Day.
Britain led the nominations at the awards ceremony at the Hilton in New York but was defeated in all but one category, marking an end to its dominance at the show, created to honour excellence in television programming outside the US.
This year, 40 nominees from 19 countries competed in 10 categories.
France was the big winner, taking home three awards, led by the hit crime thriller Engrenages, which won for best drama series.
Brazil received two Emmys, while the best actor award went to Maarten Heijmans of the Netherlands for Ramses, which chronicles the rise and fall of the Dutch singer Ramses Shaffy.
Norway’s Anneke von der Lippe won the best actress Emmy for Eyewitness, in which she plays a police chief in a small town caught in the middle of a murder investigation.
Engrenages, which airs on BBC Four under the title Spiral, has been nominated for an International Emmy before, but won for its fifth season in which detectives try to unravel the double murder of a mother and child as they plunge into a world of organised crime, drugs, and girl gangs.
The other French winners were Illustre & Inconnu: Comment Jacques Jaujard A Sauvé Le Louvre (The Man Who Saved The Louvre), which won for arts programming, and Soldat Blanc (White Soldier), for best TV movie or mini-series.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
