BRITISH TELEVISION had a hugely successful night at the International Emmy Awards in New York, winning six of the seven categories.

Channel 4's innovative all- female comedy show, Smack The Pony, was voted best popular arts programme. The channel also triumphed with part three of its fly-on-the-wall account of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, The Phil, which won the arts category.

The news category, awarded for the first time, also went to Channel 4 for Dispatches: A Witness to Murder, which gave eyewitness accounts of a Kosovo atrocity when armed Serbs rounded up ethnic Albanians and murdered the men in earshot of their relatives.

Granada Television's Born in the USSR - 14 up, took the Emmy in the documentary category. The programme revisited 20 children aged 14 seven years after they were last filmed. The drama award went to Lost for Words, by Yorkshire Television, about an eccentric elderly woman who is silenced by a stroke.

More British success came for a stage production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, shown on Sky, which shared the performing arts category award.