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.
