Arriving ahead of Channel 5’s one-off, ripped-from-the-headlines dramas about Kate McCann and murderer Tracie Andrews is Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards, a lurid Goosebumps tale about Britain’s most famous disgraced newscaster. Tacky channel? Shot under a veil of secrecy before its announcement? Angry statements by Edwards to the Daily Mail condemning it? Check, check, check. But Power isn’t quite as lowbrow as you might imagine.
Star Martin Clunes is in total go-for-broke mode in the title role, uncannily furrowing his brow to just the right degree and bringing overqualified Welsh-accented gravitas to a script that asks him to repeatedly sink to all kinds of mucky carnal urges. The project he’s in, though, doesn’t match him: it’s the kind of rush-job TV lobotomy that satisfies nothing but a viewer’s baser instincts. Likely out of legal necessity, Power doesn’t illuminate as much as it recites, running down the gory basics of a too-recent news story that – at least based on Edwards’s peeved statement – isn’t resolved enough to sufficiently narrativise.
While a caption at the top of the show makes clear that “some scenes, characters and text messages have been dramatised” in Power, it’s a largely by-the-book affair, one informed by court evidence and extensive interviews with the Sun journalists who first reported the story, as well as the then teenager to whom he paid £35,000 in exchange for sexual images and videos. Here, the teenager is named Ryan (played with skittish naivety by Osian Morgan), who connects with Edwards at the prompting of another teenager he meets on a dating site. That teenager is Alex Williams (played by Joseph Loane), who was already exchanging pornographic material with Edwards over WhatsApp – Williams was later handed a 12-month suspended sentence for possessing and distributing images of child sex abuse, including to Edwards.
Power depicts Edwards as a prickly and aggressive benefactor to a confused teenager, sending him gifts and buying him hotel stays. Edwards’s emotions can turn on a dime. He chastises Ryan’s grammar, throws a strop when asked about his relationship to his sexuality, and is quick to weaponise his fame and status whenever he feels cornered: “Earn your keep and know your f***ing place,” he shouts down the phone. Reporters at The Sun are included to relay drab exposition and the legal ins and outs of investigative journalism (it’s very “Spotlight for Dummies”), while Williams is nothing if not a horror movie-style paedophile, sitting alone at his computer screen and cast in moody shadow, transferring photos to Edwards while dramatic music plays.
It’s all, weirdly, a bit silly – the sordid details of this saga meshing uneasily with the demand to make Power entertaining television. A handful of moments seem included solely for the giggles they might inspire, from Edwards limply encouraging Ryan to call him “daddy”, to Ryan’s horrified stepfather exclaiming, “You’re telling me f***ing Huw Edwards off the telly is gay for Ryan?” Hilarious! But this is, fundamentally, a story about men sending and receiving images of children being sexually abused. It requires a sensitivity that Power occasionally gestures to, but can’t sustain for the entirety of its 90-minute runtime.
In his statement this week, Edwards expressed sorrow for his involvement with Williams and reiterated that he had pleaded guilty to his crimes. But he notably didn’t express sorrow for his interactions with the 17-year-old, while stating that he is “making an effort to produce my own account of these terrible events”. Which is just what we need. He also claimed he wasn’t given enough time by Power’s production company to comment on the show (a caption at the end of the programme reads that Edwards “declined”), while calling into question the legality of its existence. “It is difficult to see how this approach can be considered remotely responsible or fair, or be in compliance with key sections of the Ofcom code on broadcast standards,” he wrote. (In its own statement, Channel 5 said: “Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards is based on extensive interviews with the victim, his family, the journalists who revealed his story, text exchanges between the victim and Edwards, and court reporting. It has been produced in accordance with Ofcom’s broadcasting code. All allegations made in the film were put to Huw Edwards via his solicitors six weeks before transmission.”)
But the back and forth, and Edwards’s claim to have “his side” of the events, leaves the story suddenly feeling unfinished, or at least more icky than it is already. And you can’t help but wonder what the use is of shows like this, which sift through publicly available information but can’t (or won’t) place it in a wider context or do anything beyond relay the facts – all for an audience asked to gasp and be disgusted. A quality Martin Clunes performance or not, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
