The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has today announced the nominations for the forthcoming British Academy Television Craft Awards which will honour the unsung heroes behind the scenes of television and new media.

Leading the pack is Cranford which has an impressive seven nominations. Also, the brilliant Jimmy McGovern receives his seventh BAFTA nomination! Not only that, we have an online battle between Bebo and iPlayer… although I can only see one winner for that. So what else has been nominated? Read over and I’ll tell you all about it.

Leading the way with seven nominations is BBC One’s costume drama serial Cranford… however, hot on its heels with five nominations each are Channel 4′s unsettling single drama Boy A, teen slop Skins and sci-fi hit, Doctor Who. Channel 4′s China’s Stolen Children – A Dispatches Special has four nominations.

Jimmy McGovern who won for The Street at last year’s Television Awards, receives his seventh BAFTA nomination in the Writer category, again for The Street. He faces competition from five-time nominee Tony Marchant for The Mark of Cain, and from Steven Moffat for Doctor Who and Heidi Thomas for her adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s five-part drama Cranford.

Another multiple nominee is Adrian Shergold who receives his seventh nomination in the Director Fiction/Entertainment category for Persuasion, up against Boy A’s John Crowley, The Mark of Cain’s Marc Munden and Otto Bathurst for Five Days.

With three nominations, Bebo leads the way in the interactive arena which comprises three categories dedicated to new media. The Interactive Innovation – Service/Platform category sees the BBC iPlayer pitted against Bebo’s Open Platform and its Kate Modern Channel Profile, which enables users to interact with the cast of this first-ever episodic online drama series created specifically for broadcast on a UK-based social network site. Channel 4′s Big Art Mob completes the nominations in this category. Kate Modern is also nominated in Interactive Content, up against Spooks Interactive, Emmerdale Online and Skins.

The Break-through Talent category has seen an interesting turn of events; with a fresh approach to the creative process of script writing, the Skins ‘Writers Group’ includes a host of younger ‘contributors’, musicians, comedians and artists; at the other end of the spectrum is nominee Jezza Neumann, who almost single-handedly directed, edited, filmed and sound-recorded his undercover investigation into China’s Stolen Children. Also nominated is first-time television writer Mark O’Rowe, for his adaptation of Jonathan Trigell’s acclaimed novel Boy A about the attempted rehabilitation of a child murderer. The fourth nominee in this category is the writer/producer and director Patrick Reams, for his drama documentary A Very British Sex Scandal, based on the 1950′s homosexual witch hunts.

This year’s Special Award honours the dynamic writing duo David Croft and Jimmy Perry whose slate of work is testament to “their extraordinary creative contribution to television”. They are one of the most successful comedy sitcom-writing partnerships whose credits include such classics as Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Hi-de-Hi!