Bookmakers' favourite Mark Leckey, a filmmaker from Birkenhead and a professor of film studies at Frankfurt's Städelschule, has won the 2008 Turner Prize. Singer Nick Cave announced the award in a ceremony at London's Tate Britain tonight.

Leckey beat fellow nominees Goshka Macuga, Runa Islam and Cathy Wilkes to the £25,000 prize for an artist under 50 working in Britain. In the Turner Prize exhibition, Leckey showed a film called Cinema-in-the-Round, in which he lectures on the nature of images in popular culture.

'I'm chuffed to bits', Leckey said in his brief acceptance speech. 'It's great to do something that has some effect on British culture.' Obliquely referring to the calls for the prize to be scrapped (which Sir Nicholas Serota dismissed in his introductory speech), Leckey said simply: 'This is a good thing.'

Speaking to Channel 4 news afterwards, Leckey elaborated: 'Critics like middle brow. The worst place to be for criticism is Britain. Elsewhere you get a fair reception.' He concluded: 'I don't live in the artworld.'