BUSHELL ON THE BOX
December 27, 2025. The Bushell On The Box TV Awards for 2025. Best crime dramas: Blue Lights (UK), Task (US). Dept Q (Netflix). Best villains: This City Is Ours, The Gold 2. Best real crime: 24 Hours In Police Custody. Worst drama: Waterloo Road; runner-up: Trigger Point. Best reality show: The Celebrity Traitors. Worst reality show: Stranded On Honeymoon Island; runner-up: The Inheritance. Most clapped-out reality show: I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here; runner-up: Love Island. Best Comedy-Reality show: Last One Laughing. Best streaming shows: The Studio, Dept Q, Severance, Landman, Slow Horses, Wednesday, Adolescence. Biggest streaming turkeys: Kim Kardashian’s All Fair; With Love, Meghan. Best comedy: Would I Lie To You? Greatest comedy joys: Mick Miller, the Royal Variety show; Dave Allen: In His Own Words. Best sci-fi series: Pluribus. Worst sci-fi series: The War Between The Land & The Sea, a five-part environmental lecture, loosely inspired by a tiny Aquaman subplot, which featured sex between a fish-woman and an equally wet human (How was that possible? Mercifully they didn’t explain. Fishfingers anyone?). Most shocking TV drama moment: a mother giving birth to a terrifying flying bat baby on It: Welcome To Derry. Runner-up: Joel’s death, The Last Of Us. Most shocking reality moment: Contestant Montanna watching his girlfriend Anita cheating on him with another man on video in one of Spanish show Temptation Island’s live ‘bonfire’ scenes. That’s entertainment, 2025 – breaking people’s hearts for your enjoyment. The coveted and hotly contested Gary Lineker Biggest Own Goal award: The BBC blowing their multi-million-pound partnership with Disney by commissioning weak, woke scripts worthy of Greta Fun-Sponge. Runners-up: BBC1 filleting MasterChef and losing millions of viewers; and their totally even-handed Gaza documentary narrated by the 13-year-old son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. Biggest Letdown: season three of The White Lotus. Biggest Fake Cock: Jason Isaacs’s prosthetic (The White Lotus); runner-up: Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. The annual Citizen Smith award for best comedy revolutionary: Pascal Robinson-Foster, Glastonbury. Runner-up: Matty Healy, ditto. Best soap: The Waterfront. Worst soap: all the others. Best documentary: Mr Nobody Against Putin. TV show of the year: Blue Lights. Commended: Task. The Celebrity Traitors. Worst show of 2025: beating fierce competition, the Kim Kardashian ‘legal drama’ All’s Fair.
Jan 1 2025. It was the year that saw the end of Vera – tarrah, pet – the fall of Gregg Wallace and the rise of Chris McCausland, the quick-witted blind comedian who scooped Strictly’s treasured Glitter Ball trophy. Richard Gadd’s darkly comic Netflix stalker-drama Baby Reindeer attracted viewers, awards and a £133million lawsuit. And more BBC stars fell from grace, none more disgracefully than pompous news anchor Huw Edwards who pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children. Meanwhile, the streamers kept outperforming terrestrial telly whose execs seem content to stuff our screens with so-so quizzes, over-stretched soaps and half-baked cookery programmes.
Show of the Year: RIVALS (Disney+) a playful comic drama set amid a 1987 TV franchise war. On one level, it was trash – broad, filthy, and frequently in bad taste; but it was also engaging and funny, a soapy romp, like Dynasty crossed with confessions of a country squire. Disney’s lavish adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 bestseller packed in snobbery, lechery, and off-colour remarks guaranteed to horrify Gen Z bedwetters. Series two is in the works.
Best Docu-Drama: Mr Bates Vs The Post Office. The ITV mini-series blew the lid off the long-running Post Office scandal. In a true story worthy of Kafka, 736 postmasters were prosecuted for crimes they did not commit because of defective Horizon accounting software. The show, written by Gwyneth Hughes, outraged millions and galvanised the government into action. Yet disgracefully Alan Bates has yet to be compensated.
Best historical drama #1: Shogun. This spellbinding Disney+ series about rival warlords in 17th Century Japan was beautifully shot, faithfully adapted and, occasionally, realistically brutal. Best historical drama #2: Wolf Hall: The Mirror & The Light. Superbly written and acted, the fall of Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell was the BBC at their best.
Best Talking Point: Baby Reindeer, a torrid tale of stalking and sexual abuse inspired by Richard Gadd’s life. Gadd played Donny Dunn, a comedian so witlessly unfunny it’s a wonder he hasn’t been booked for Live At The Apollo.
Worst Drama: BBC1’s The Way. Michael Sheen’s deranged dystopian tale of a Welsh workers’ uprising featured a talking teddy bear and a Masonic orgy – that’s some initiation ceremony… Runners-up: Red Eye, Nightsleeper.
Best Contemporary Drama: BBC1’s backstabbing and debauched banking series Industry. Most Over-rated: One Day (Netflix). Best Game Spin-off: Fallout (Prime).
Best docu-series: Clarkson’s Farm (Prime). Worst: Gino & Fred: Emission Impossible. Best Reality: The Traitors (BBC1). Reality irritations: Cooking tasks on The Apprentice. Why does the ability to cook mean you’d make a great entrepreneur? Would Sugar have told a young Elon Musk: “Okay pal, you’ve got these ideas for Space X but I’m afraid your bangers were over-done and your mash was lumpy – you’re fired!”
Best Spy Drama: Slow Horses (AppleTV). Best Sci-fi: 3 Body Problem (Netflix). Complex and thought-provoking grown-up alien menace saga. Most over-hyped: Doctor Who. Ncuti Gatwa has the charm of a chorus line but the scripts constantly let him down. Worst Show of the Year: Smoggie Queens (BBC3).
Best Sitcom: Gavin & Stacey. Worst: Piglets. Most Missed: Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Best revival: Gladiators. Worst: Big Brother.
Best cops: BBC1’s Blue Lights. Runner-up: The Responder. Best villain: Homelander (Prime’s The Boys). Best Supernatural Crime Series. True Detective: Night County (SkyAt). Best vampires: What We Do In The Shadows.
Best Entertainment: Michael McIntyre’s Big Show. Worst Failed Comeback: Phillip Schofield, Cast Away. Saddest: Mike Tyson Vs Jake Paul. Worst satirist. Adam Hills. Best: Bill Maher. Worst Political Interviewer: Evan Davis. Smuggest: Justin Webb. Worst Commentators: Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart.
Most Unsavoury Image: Victor pleasuring his clone on American Horror Stories. Runner-up: Splinter’s “love train” of clones, The Boys. Best twist: Oz killing Vic, The Penguin. Best animation: Kite Man, Hell Yeah!
Best actor. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall). Runners-up: Gary Oldman (Slow Horses), Shaun Evans (Until I Kill You). Best actress: Cristin Milioti, The Penguin. Runner-up: Anna Sawai, Shogun. Star of the year: Chris McCausland.
TV irritations of 2024: Ed Balls interviewing his wife on Good Morning Britain. Celebrity Mastermind contestants who are neither. Sob stories on everything from SAS Who Dares Win to Dragon’s Den. The BBC inflicting ropey pop acts onto the Proms. Soaps’ tedious reliance on disasters – how many serial killers could live in walking distance of the Rovers? How many times can they destroy the Queen Vic?
Small joys of TV: The scenes on The Traitors where they all sit around that round table and convince themselves that they know who’s a traitor and who isn’t based on no evidence whatsoever. Michael McIntyre’s Midnight Game Show segment, with Bradley Walsh. Danny Dyer as Freddie on Rivals. Freddie Flintoff’s heart-warming Field Of Dreams. Rude and raucous pop comedy Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
Reasons to be cheerful about 2025. Must-see returning shows include Reacher (Prime, from Feb), comedy-drama The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic), this time in Thailand, Stranger Things (Netflix), Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+) and Charlie Brooker’s brilliant Black Mirror (Netflix) which includes a sequel to his Star Trek inspired USS Callister episode.
BBC1 has high hopes for period crime drama Dope Girls, there are more female hoods coming in Disney’s A Thousand Blows. Game Of Thrones fans will love Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms, a prequel set a century before House Of The Dragon.