Channel 5’s Huw Edwards drama is too soon and too risky ...Middle East

There is no incident in British current affairs that will not be seized upon for TV drama.

It used to be tolerable, when it was the odd miniseries about some figure from decades past, that shed light for a new generation or retold history with purpose and reflection. And it is legitimate public service broadcasting when a drama holds powerful people to account – as in the case of programmes like Mr Bates vs the Post Office, or Three Girls, about the Rochdale grooming gangs.

But it has spiralled into every serial killer, every politician, every weird news story in living memory getting a commission. Even the Wagatha Christie trial got a run on Channel 4 (and a stage play).

I thought this absurdity had reached breaking point when two different dramatisations of the Emily Maitlis Prince Andrew interview were broadcast within months of each other, and yet the uninspiring trend continues apace – and never with enough distance to make the argument for good taste or with enough time to reflect and offer fresh insight. It has started to feel like we are witnessing everything multiple times, first as an event dominates the news cycle for six months and then immediately all over again with some famous actor cast as the panto villain.

And so I am unsurprised that the sorry Huw Edwards affair is to be retold by Channel 5, with Martin Clunes at the helm, even if it does sound like something a random programme idea generator might have thrown up five years ago.

This week, the channel announced that it has commissioned a two-part series about the former BBC presenter’s fall from grace in 2024. Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards will explore “how a vulnerable 17-year-old was groomed by one of the most powerful figures in television” and the newsreader’s “double life as it spirals out of control, leading him to make the greatest announcement of his career – his total exit from public life following his conviction for serious child sexual offences”.

The news comes with a photo of Clunes behind the news desk with an unnervingly accurate combover and Edwards’s signature, authoritative lean.

It’s the gig of a lifetime for Clunes, who has probably been aching to get his teeth into some serious material after all those years as grumpy GP Doc Martin, playing detective, or heading out on travelogues, and who you can tell – from his many appearances hosting Have I Got News for You – is much spikier than his cosier jobs in the past couple of decades will let on.

He’ll probably be quite good in it, and people will probably watch it precisely because his familiar name lends integrity to a project some may take issue with (though he is hardly Steve Coogan, who recently played Jimmy Savile on the BBC).

Channel 5’s commitment to original drama in the past few years has turned its reputation around: it now attracts top talent and big audiences. So this commission is not the immediate sign of crassness or low quality it might once have been – indeed this is to be directed by Michael Samuels, creator of the Bafta and Emmy-winning The Windermere Children and who before that won a Bafta for his adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart.

The problem is, how can any two-episode drama, no matter the research and talent and experts involved, possibly wrangle responsibly with the complexity of an issue so conflicting that I’m not sure even the public quite know how they feel about it yet?

This isn’t a straightforward story of one evil man who did horrible things to long-dead victims – as in the case of so many true crime dramas about, say, murder, which are already often ill-conceived.

This is a very grim, very recent, very sad story about grooming, child pornography, mental illness, national treasures, public shaming, abuses of power, the BBC, and many other uncomfortable issues besides. The Huw Edwards story was, and continues to be, uniquely shocking not only because of the crimes committed but because of all the ways it challenges our perceptions of trust, and confronts us with the truth that you just never know the darkness that can lie beneath the surface.

I’m not convinced a brief scripted drama will do it justice. If Clunes plays the role with too much compassion he risks minimising the trauma of victims, but too little and he does away with its necessary psychological depth.

The audience’s existing feelings about the actor come into play too. The public never saw the sinister side of Edwards. A familiar face in the role may invite involuntary sympathy from the audience, which would be knotty indeed. Actors have a much easier job of communicating the darkness of outwardly unsavoury figures than that of respectable ones who kept theirs hidden.

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And how can this drama be taken seriously if – as Channel 5 is claiming – it will not venture into the failures by the BBC to investigate Edwards? That is an enormous part of why this story is so incendiary, and yet this series will not go there, or portray other BBC figures. If you cut out the vital context from a divisive story, you reduce it to pure fiction. And given the legal quagmire of portraying still-living people and real events, I imagine there will be plenty of fiction anyway.

A drama that intends to keep the focus on one man’s personal and catastrophic undoing can only be made properly with access to that one man or those close to him. I can’t imagine any of them are in a hurry to offer that. And besides, this is not the story of only one man.

Without the boldness to tackle the story in its fullest, this drama will only appeal to our very lowest instincts and invite voyeurs to gawp and speculate about a deeply troubled man. There is quite enough of that on TV already.

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