Director tells British TV awards: ‘Stand up and fight!’

LONDON – Rarely has an awards show begun on such a rousing note.

Sunday’s annual British Academy Television Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Emmys, gave the night’s first prize for best drama series to BBC’s “Wolf Hall.” The director, Peter Kosminsky, seized the moment for a celebrity call to arms against a Conservative government keen to shift taxpayers’ money away from the publicly funded broadcaster.

Kosminsky said Culture Secretary John Whittingdale was only half-joking when he quipped this week that the demise of the BBC was “a tempting prospect.”

To rising cheers, the director declared that the quality of British broadcasting was “the envy of the world and we should stand up and fight for it! Not let it go by default. If we don’t, blink and it will be gone.”