Branagh earns two shots at Bafta best actor award

Kenneth Branagh has received a double nomination for best actor at this year's Bafta television awards for his acclaimed performances in Shackleton and Conspiracy.

The nominations announced today also include three for The Kumars at No. 42 and one for John Pilger's documentary on the Middle East that incurred the displeasure of Michael Green, the chairman of Carlton Television, which made the programme.

Branagh is the only person to receive two nominations in the best actor category since the awards – now officially named the British Academy Television Awards – split from the film section in 1998.

His portrayal of Sir Ernest Shackleton in the £10m production for Channel 4 provided one of the network's great hits of the year. It chronicles the explorer's escape after the failure of his 1914 expedition to Antarctica. The actor has already won an Emmy for playing SS General Reinhard Heydrich in BBC2's Conspiracy, which dramatises the meeting at which leading Nazis worked out how to rid Europe of Jews.

Branagh's nominations pit him against Albert Finney, as Sir Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm, and James Nesbitt in Bloody Sunday.

The awards, held on 13 April and hosted by Anne Robinson at the London Palladium, will be broadcast on BBC1.