Channel 4’s joyful and stereotype-blasting sitcom about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band has won the comedy prize at the UK’s most eclectic arts awards.
The South Bank Sky Arts awards are unusual in that they reward the entire spectrum of the arts, including pop, opera, television and literature.
On Sunday the 2022 winners were announced, with We Are Lady Parts winning the comedy award from a shortlist that also included Rose Matafeo’s BBC One sitcom Starstruck and Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal on BBC Two.
Other winners at the awards ceremony held at the Savoy Hotel in London included Leeds-based Opera North, the rapper Little Simz and the novelist Monica Ali.
The awards are a Sky Arts reboot of the South Bank Show awards which were once part of ITV’s schedule until it controversially cancelled Melvyn Bragg’s long-running arts series.
Bragg’s series now also runs on Sky Arts, with Frank Skinner, Helen Mirren and Carlos Acosta his next subjects.
“While so much around us seems to be getting worse, the arts in this country continue to go from strength to strength,” said Bragg.
We Are Lady Parts is the creation of the writer and director Nida Manzoor and tells the story of a punk band called Lady Parts – “concocting”, viewers are told, “a confused mix of hash anthems and sour girl power. One part boredom, two parts identity crisis.”
The programme aired as a pilot in 2018 before it was a commissioned as a six-part series.
It has been wonderfully reviewed. “Truly, this is the British-Asian comedy series you’ve been waiting for your whole representation-starved life,” wrote Chitra Ramaswamy in the Guardian. “And yes, I am addressing my own young self here.”
The New Yorker praised it for tapping into so many aspects of the British Muslim experience “that it moves past sheer representation and into a fully developed, rich, silly world where the jokes land as crisply as the G chords”.
The show stars Anjana Vasan, Sarah Kameela Impey, Faith Omole, Juliette Motamed, and Lucie Shorthouse as the band and their veiled, vaping and foul-mouthed manager.
In November last year Channel 4 announced a second season had been commissioned.
Channel 4 also came out top in the TV drama category with Russell T Davies’s drama about London’s gay community in the 1980s, It’s a Sin, winning ahead of the prison-set Time and Adam Kay’s obstetrics and gynaecology comedy, This Is Going to Hurt, which were both shown on the BBC.
It comes after It’s a Sin gathered the most Bafta TV award nominations this year , but came away empty handed.
An outstanding achievement award was given to Tamara Rojo, for her 10 highly regarded, transformational years as artistic director of English National Ballet. She is soon to take on the same job at San Francisco Ballet.
The pop award went to the British rapper Little Simz for her fourth album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, praised in the Observer for its “soul-baring brilliance”.
James Graham’s play at the Young Vic, Best of Enemies, based on the 1968 TV debate between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley, won the theatre award.
The other winners were Michael Armitage (visual arts) for his show at the Royal Academy of Arts; Monica Ali (literature) for her novel Love Marriage; the Wayne McGregor-choreographed The Dante Project (dance) for the Royal Ballet; Opera North’s Rigoletto (opera); Rebecca Hall’s Passing (film); and Huw Watkins’s Symphony No 2 (classical music) performed by the Hallé.
Eddie Izzard presented a breakthrough award to Liz Kingsman for her One-Woman Show at the Soho Theatre.
The ceremony will be broadcast on Sky Arts, now a free channel, on Wednesday 13 July at 10pm.
Philip Edgar-Jones, the director of Sky Arts, said the channel was “committed to supporting the arts through the next few years, whatever life throws at us”.
