The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War. The formidable Miss Deborah Jenkyns and the kindly Miss Matty's days revolve around card games, tea, thriftiness and an endless appetite for scandal, until change comes into their world - whether it is the modern ideas of Captain Brown, a bank collapse, rumours of burglars or an unexpected reappearance from the past. One of Elizabeth Gaskell's most beloved works, it centres on a community dominated by women and governed by old-fashioned ways. It will compete with Andrew Marr's History of Britain, The Apprentice, Britain's Got Talent, Gavin & Stacey and Strictly Come Dancing in an online public vote.'Just at this moment he passed us on the stairs, making such a graceful bow, in reply to which I dropped a curtsey - all foreigners have such polite manners, one catches something of it'Ĭranford is an affectionate and often moving portrait of genteel poverty and intertwined lives in a nineteenth-century village. Editions of Panorama and Dispatches are up against China's Stolen Children and Honour Kills, the first such nomination for BBC3.Ĭranford is also up for the Sky Plus audience award for programme of the year.

The current affairs category, which was dropped last year, has been reinstated. The comedy programme category is also made up of first-time nominees, with The Armstrong & Miller Show and Russell Brand's Ponderland competing with Star Stories and Fonejacker. The 19th Century novelist wrote Cranford, North and South, and Wives and.

Unusually, four first nominees made up the list for the best actor prize, including Matthew Macfadyen's tortured portrayal of a paedophile in Secret Life and Andrew Garfield's depiction in Boy A of a 24-year-old released after being imprisoned for killing a child in his youth. The Manchester home of the Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell opens to the public on Sunday after a £2.5m restoration. In the single drama category, three acclaimed Channel 4 programmes - The Trial of Tony Blair, The Mark of Cain and Boy A - will go up against Coming Down the Mountain, the first attempt at a TV drama by Mark Haddon, author of the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Dame Judi Dench, who played Miss Matty Jenkyns in the Elizabeth Gaskell adaptation, received her 12th Bafta nomination and will go head to head with her screen sister in Cranford, Eileen Atkins. Gina McKee, who won a Bafta for Our Friends in the North in 1997, was nominated for her performance in The Street. Life on Mars, the time-travelling 1970s police drama, also received another nomination alongside the BBC/HBO epic Rome and Channel 4's teen drama Skins. After a surprise victory last year, when it beat Life on Mars, it was again nominated in the best drama category. Coronation Street missed out but The Street, Jimmy McGovern's northern kitchen-sink drama for BBC1, gained plaudits.

Cranford author elizabeth