UEA graduate wins industry award for best TV documentary
By: Communications
A UEA journalism graduate has won a prestigious industry award for his final project, a film about two bears who were rescued from Azerbaijan and rehomed in the UK.
Cameron Noble, who graduated just a few months ago and now works as a freelance journalist for BBC News, beat off fierce competition at the Broadcast Journalism Training Council (BJTC) awards in London on 20 November.
The event, which was held at Bauer Media Headquarters, celebrated the best in student journalism from all BJTC accredited courses.
Cameron worked on the project for two years but all the filming was crammed into the last two months of his course and he didn’t even know if he could get it finished in time to submit for assessment.
The filming for 'Saving Benji and Balu’ involved a mad dash to Azerbaijan with Cameron only being in the country for a few hours to film the bears being brought back to the UK.
This exclusive footage was shown on the BBC One Show and BBC Breakfast TV after they picked up Cameron’s story and used it in their programmes.
Cameron said the BA Broadcast and Multimedia course at UEA was integral to his success:
“To be able to produce a documentary which is self-shot, self-edited and self-directed if you’re doing all of that on your own you’ve got to have been taught by the best of the best and that is what UEA journalism is.
“I absolutely loved everything about the course. I would not be able to produce such high-quality work from start to finish if it wasn’t for the amazing dedication and work of the lecturers.”
Lecturer Julian Sturdy, from the School of Media, Language and Communication Studies, said: “This was a brilliantly executed project. Cameron worked tirelessly over the course of an entire year and we’re immensely proud of that his hard work it has been recognised by the judges.”
You can watch Saving Benji and Balu here: https://ueajournalism.com/2025/07/03/saving-benji-and-balu/
This was the most successful year for UEA at the BJTC Awards, with five finalists in total. Maddy McNiven was runner up for Best TV Feature for her film about a new treatment for Parkinson’s. Helena Griffiths was a finalist in the Best Radio Feature category. Emily Wallis won second place in the best TV Sports Journalism category and the 3rd Years website Live Blog newsday was also named as a finalist in the best website category.
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