Ray Galton and Alan Simpson are to receive a BAFTA Fellowship.

The prestigious accolade is the highest awarded by BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. It comes as the BBC is planning its own season of programming this summer to mark 60 years since the duo's first and most influential sitcom hit, Hancock's Half Hour, moved from radio to television.

Galton and Simpson will be presented with the award this Sunday, 8th May, at London's Royal Festival Hall during BAFTA's annual British Academy Television Awards, sponsored by House of Fraser. The ceremony will be broadcast on BBC One from 8pm.

Following the success of Hancock's Half Hour, the writing duo went on to create another landmark sitcom, Steptoe And Son. They created and wrote many other comedy programmes on both television and radio, as well as a number of film scripts. Their credits range from two Steptoe spin-off movies to the adaptation of Joe Orton's Loot; Casanova '73 for Leslie Phillips; Clochemerle; and The Bargee.

The pair also wrote for some of the most successful comedians of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, including Bernard Braden, Les Dawson and Frankie Howerd.

Speaking about the BAFTA Fellowship, Galton said: "We are happy and honoured to accept this award on behalf of all the blood donors, test pilots, radio hams and rag and bone men of the 20th century without whom we would probably be out of a job."

Simpson added: "We are extremely delighted to receive the BAFTA Fellowship. We always wanted a fellowship, even though we did not know what a fellowship was. Not the sort of thing one associates with a couple of cockney lads, apart from Alfred Hitchcock of course."

Anne Morrison, chair of BAFTA, says: "Having created some of the most iconic characters and programmes over the past few decades, it comes as no surprise that Alan Simpson and Ray Galton will be receiving the BAFTA Fellowship this year. Alan and Ray have had such successful careers spanning over 60 years, with credits such as Steptoe And Son and Hancock's Half Hour, two hugely popular sitcoms. They are rightly considered the trailblazers of the situation comedy format."

Hancock's Half Hour is often named as Britain's first sitcom. Whilst this is not correct, it was certainly one of the first to capture the imagination of the public and perhaps the earliest big sitcom success on television, and in turn helped create the sitcom format that survives to this day.

Famously, the duo began writing together when they met a tuberculosis sanatorium in Surrey in the late 1940s. The subject of their meeting was itself the subject of a sitcom, 1997 comedy Get Well Soon.

A full list of comedy nominees for this year's BAFTA Television Awards was announced in March.