Late Thaw up for viewers' Bafta

Thaw won the award last year for Inspector Morse

The late John Thaw could clinch a posthumous acting award as he goes head-to-head with fellow screen detective David Jason for a TV Bafta.

Thaw's ITV programme Buried Treasure is up against Jason's ITV show A Touch of Frost for the Lew Grade award - the only TV Bafta voted for by the public.

The award, voted for by the readers of Radio Times magazine, is intended to honour the year's most popular and significant programme.

Also up for the prize are three BBC One shows - the soap EastEnders, David Attenborough's natural history series The Blue Planet and the sitcom My Family, with Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker.

Sheila Hancock said Thaw had been on good form the day before he died

The awards ceremony takes place at the Theatre Royal, in London's Drury Lane, on 21 April.

Wartime drama Goodnight Mr Tom, starring the actor, won the award in 1999.

Last year's Lew Grade prize went to Thaw's long-running and enduringly popular series Inspector Morse.

In Buried Treasure, Thaw played a hard-nosed businessman whose heart was melted by a granddaughter he had not known for 10 years.

Shows starring David Jason have also previously won the title twice.

Jason's A Touch of Frost has won the award twice before

The long-running detective show A Touch of Frost won the Lew Grade award in 1998 and again in 2000.

Thaw died in February at the age of 60 after a long battle with cancer of the oesophagus.

On Saturday, it emerged that he had signed a new contract with ITV the day before he died.

He had been in "good nick" that day, his widow, the actress Sheila Hancock, told The Daily Mail newspaper.

"His death came very suddenly," she said. "He even signed a contract for ITV, for another year, the day before he died."

But she added that her husband of 28 years "never, ever took on board he was dying".

"He absolutely did not want to entertain the possibility that he wasn't going to get better," she said.