When the BAFTA Television Craft Awards take place on Sunday 26 April, the Sound: Fiction category will pit two of the most technically audacious television productions of the past year against each other. In one corner: Adolescence, the Netflix single-take drama whose sound team had to capture every whisper and scream across hour-long unbroken takes. In the other: Andor, the Disney+ Star Wars series whose designers built an immersive sonic universe from scratch in Dolby Atmos.

It is a genuinely fascinating contest — and one that says a great deal about where the craft of television sound stands in 2026.

Adolescence: Sound Without a Safety Net

Director Philip Barantini's four-part limited series was filmed entirely in single continuous shots — no cuts, no pick-ups, no second chances. For the sound department, that meant no punch-ins, no room to fix a fluffed line in isolation, and no opportunity to reset gain between scenes.

Production sound mixers Rob Entwistle and Kiff McManus, who had previously worked with Barantini on the continuous-shot film Boiling Point (2021), devised an extraordinary workflow to meet the challenge. Each actor wore Wisycom MTP61 miniature bodypack transmitters paired with DPA lavalier microphones. Crucially, the MTP61 units record internally at 32-bit floating-point resolution — a format that captures an enormous dynamic range and allowed McManus and Entwistle to set a single gain level for an entire hour-long episode.

"The gain has to be set for the entire length of the episode," McManus told Mix magazine. "Since there were so many characters and a huge dynamic range, 32-bit float allowed us to set the gain at a level that worked for the quietest bits up to the noisy parts."

As the production moved through multiple locations within each episode — from a family home to a police station in Episode 1, through a school in Episode 2 — equipment left at each location was simply abandoned. "You lose kit for every movement, so the kit count just keeps going up and up," McManus said. Between them, the two mixers deployed an arsenal of Sound Devices recorders (633, 688, 888, and Scorpio models), Schoeps CMIT boom microphones for exteriors, and Sennheiser MKH-50s for interiors.

Supervising sound editor James Drake, working with the post team on set during filming, ensured recordings were usable in real time. "It was really about trying to find those emotional beats," Drake told IndieWire. "And then giving the sound space so those really big, heightened moments feel heightened."

Adolescence arrives at the BAFTAs as part of an eleven-nomination juggernaut across both the Craft and Television Awards — the most of any programme this year.

Andor: Building a Galaxy You Can Hear

The challenge facing the Andor sound team was of an entirely different order. Where Adolescence demanded raw, captured-in-the-moment authenticity, the Disney+ Star Wars series required supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer David Acord and supervising sound editor Margit Pfeiffer to construct an elaborate, layered soundscape from the ground up.

The result, mixed in Dolby Atmos, ranges from "brutal hand-to-hand combat to haunting silence, immersive crowd scenes, and intentionally fuzzy radio transmissions," as described by the Dolby Institute. Andor earned six Craft nominations in total, including nods for Editing, Production Design, and Visual Effects — a reflection of the series' meticulous approach to world-building across every department.

Celebrity Traitors: The Factual Challenge

Over in Sound: Factual, The Celebrity Traitors represents a quite different discipline. Capturing clean, broadcast-quality audio across the unpredictable chaos of a multi-camera reality format — where participants may whisper conspiratorially in one moment and erupt in theatrical accusation the next — demands its own brand of technical ingenuity. The show collected five nominations in total across both ceremonies.

Why the Sound Categories Matter

The BAFTA TV Craft Awards sound categories carry particular weight because they are voted on by specialist craft chapter members — working sound professionals judging their peers. It is, as the industry saying goes, the award you win from the people who truly understand what you did.

For the Adolescence team, a BAFTA would crown what has already been a remarkable awards season run. For Andor, it would be recognition that crafting the sonic texture of an entire fictional civilisation is every bit as demanding as capturing reality.

The ceremony, hosted by Maisie Adam, takes place at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 26 April. We will bring you full coverage of the winners.

GlobeLink News will publish a follow-up piece after the ceremony with winner reaction and analysis.