Richard Hammond's Awards and Recognition, Career-Wide

A BAFTA of his own, for a children’s show

The most individually-credited award on this list came not from Top Gear but from a children’s programme. Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab, a science-based game show for children that ran from 2009 to 2011 across four series and 52 episodes, won Hammond the British Academy Children’s Award for Best Presenter in 2009. It was a solo credit, not one shared with co-presenters. It continued the early-career science-television identity he first built on Brainiac: Science Abuse.

The format pitted two teams of children, the Red Team and the Yellow Team, against each other in science-based challenges. Recurring characters included a security guard nicknamed “Ninja Nan” and a group known as the “Lab Rats.” It moved across three BBC outlets during its run, starting on BBC Two, moving to the CBBC Channel, and later airing on BBC One. That migration is itself a small sign of how well the format was performing for the broadcaster at the time.

The Top Gear years: shared, but real

Most of Hammond’s other major recognitions came through Top Gear and were shared with co-presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May. They were credited to the show, not to any one of the three individually. The programme won an International Emmy Award for Non-Scripted Entertainment in 2005, then went on to win the National Television Award for Most Popular Factual Entertainment Programme multiple times across its original BBC run. The trio also picked up a Royal Television Society nomination for Best Presenter in 2007. Top Gear collected several Television and Radio Industries Club Awards too, between 2005 and 2011.

A Guinness World Record, sort of

In 2012, Top Gear was recognised with a Guinness World Records certificate as the most widely viewed factual television programme in the world. It is a record about global audience reach across the many territories the show was syndicated to, not a conventional industry award for craft or presenting. Once again, the credit belongs to the show and its whole presenting team, not to Hammond alone.

Reading the record honestly

Most of what appears on this page belongs to Top Gear as a production rather than to Hammond individually. That is the honest way to read almost any long-running co-presented show’s awards history. A National Television Award or an International Emmy for a series recognises the whole format: the producers, the format itself, and all three presenters together, not a personal accolade any one of them could claim alone. The Blast Lab BAFTA stands out precisely because it doesn’t follow that pattern. It is a credit that belongs to him specifically, for a programme he carried without Clarkson or May alongside him, on a channel and for an audience entirely separate from Top Gear’s.

Read together with the rest of this site, the pattern is fairly clear. Hammond’s individual recognition tends to come from the projects he ran alone: Blast Lab, and to a lesser extent Brainiac. The awards attached to his best-known work are, honestly, a reflection of a trio rather than of any one presenter. See the full TV career record for where each of these programmes sits in the wider filmography.