You’d be forgiven for thinking that the disgraced Huw Edwards would never again appear on our TV screens. But Channel 5 has announced that the ex-BBC newsreader and convicted paedophile will be the subject of a drama, Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards. This shameless show should never be broadcast.
The ex-BBC newsreader and convicted paedophile will be the subject of a drama, Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards
Edwards will be played by Martin Clunes in the production that has been a year in the making and is expected to be released later this year. Going from Men Behaving Badly to another behaving very badly indeed seems something of a stretch for an actor generally best known for light comedy. But the first pictures of Clunes-as-Edwards – showing the actor silver-haired, slimmed down and sinister – indicate at least an impressive physical transformation, whatever the questionable merits of this show.
For all Clunes’s uncanny and surprising physical resemblance to Edwards, the question is why Channel 5 has bothered. The sordid events that led to Edwards’ downfall and conviction are still fresh in public memory. The two-part series will struggle to bring anything new to either our understanding of the fallen journalist or the circumstances that led to his conviction in 2024 for accessing indecent photographs of children as young as seven.
Ben Frow, Channel 5’s chief content officer, has tried to justify the timing of the programme, insisting that: ‘This is an important and shocking story of how a man in a position of power and trust betrayed that status. By gaining exclusive access to the key individuals involved and those who investigated the story, we explore the human cost behind the headlines’. Yet there is more than a hint of disingenuousness here. Unless Edwards himself – who is currently believed to be in hiding in rural Wales – was somehow coerced into cooperating with the programme’s makers, which seems unlikely, the show will be heavy on prurient speculation and light on genuine insight into what made the man who was once the poster boy for the BBC fall so spectacularly from grace.
In any case, Power, or whatever it ends up being called, will join a small and pungent sub-genre of factual dramas that feature well-known actors playing some of Britain’s most odious individuals. In recent years, we’ve had Steve Coogan depicting Jimmy Savile in the near-unwatchable The Reckoning; the unusual but effective stunt casting of Dominic West giving us his Fred West in Appropriate Adult; and Kenneth Branagh caked in latex and make-up to play, of all people, Boris Johnson in This England – a peculiar account of his personal and political struggles in the pandemic. Most egregiously of all, we’ve had two separate dramas about Prince Andrew and Newsnight-gate, in which those estimable actors Rufus Sewell and Michael Sheen played Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as, respectively, a priapic buffoon and a vicious, entitled narcissist.
While none of the living real-life characters are likely to be flattered by their screen incarnations, the makers of these programmes would insist – as Frow has done – that they are not designed to be entertainment, but hard-hitting, unvarnished accounts of depravity. This, I am afraid, will not wash. The reason these true-life dramas keep on getting commissioned, and watched by millions, is because they shamelessly pander to the basest aspects of human nature. Aristotle might have defined tragedy in his Poetics as being the elicitation of pity and fear from an audience, usually derived from watching the downfall of a great man. Yet in the case of dramas like Power, the typical reaction among viewers is closer to the cackling of Madame Defarge at the guillotine, rejoicing as yet another decadent aristocrat figuratively loses their head.
Few would have any sympathy for Edwards, any more than they might for Savile, Fred West or the former Duke of York. This means that Channel 5 are able to portray him in as nefarious a fashion as they please. While Clunes has traditionally been regarded as a light-hearted presence on screen, he has been venturing into darker waters as an actor recently – not least in the 2019 true-crime series Manhunt, and last year’s rural drugs drama Out There. Understandably, he sees the challenge of portraying Edwards as one that an actor should embrace, rather than shy away from. His physical transformation alone is impressively chilling.
Yet it is hard not to feel that the motivations for the show are a good deal less noble than they initially appear. If the drama was to offer a measure of sympathy for Edwards – highly unlikely in this climate – then it would attract opprobrium from all sides. As a result, it is likely to stick instead to the party line that he was a deeply depraved individual who got what was coming to him. That old-fashioned desire to see our flawed public figures shamed is an unedifying, if enjoyable, spectacle. But pandering to these base instincts is rather grubby. Power’s gasping audience might convince themselves that they’re educating themselves. The reality is that many viewers will just be eager to be titillated with the details of Edwards’ malfeasance.
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