Huw Edwards has not sat at a newsreader’s desk since July 2023, when he was suspended by the BBC following a report in the Sun that he had paid a teenager £35,000 for intimate pictures and conversations. A 12 months later – when new BBC News at Ten anchor Clive Myrie introduced that his predecessor had been convicted of possessing indecent pictures of youngsters – the Welsh broadcaster’s profession successfully ended.
But on Tuesday the night time of 24 March Edwards is back on display, studying the information in the late-night slot he occupied for a long time. He is performed by the actor Martin Clunes and his BBC desk has been recreated in the London canalside information studio at Channel 5 by the producers of Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards.
“I don’t know because I didn’t ask but I bet Michael Sheen was offered this,” says Clunes cheerfully in an interview room in the constructing.
As Sheen is the market-leading actor-impersonator and likewise Welsh, this appears a good guess however the Channel 5 minder sitting in on our interview seems to be noncommittal. Edwards was sentenced for “making indecent images of children” (a authorized cost that features possession of digital pictures – seven of them class A, probably the most severe degree of depicted abuse), so did Clunes have any hesitation about playing such a infamous determine?
“No. Because it’s my job. Roles don’t take me over.”
Acting disagreeable or contentious individuals is a skilled problem. But Natalie Dormer lately introduced that she had donated her payment for playing Sarah Ferguson, the previous Duchess of York, in ITV’s The Lady to sexual abuse charities, feeling it fallacious to revenue from portraying an affiliate of the infamous paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. This virtuous gesture, if it grew to become routine, would result in actors having to play villains for free. Did Clunes really feel any strain to present his payment to a good trigger?
He deflects the query with a joke – “It’s Channel 5 so it isn’t that much!” – then provides extra reflectively: “I wonder if I will be attacked for being a straight man playing a gay man, which is very unfashionable these days?”
Clunes and the drama are cautious to tell apart between Edwards’s homosexuality (which he stated in a court docket medical report had lengthy been suppressed) and his legal sexual curiosity in kids. The former precipitated his first downfall – in the grooming of a younger man – however his spoil got here from the latter actions. The drama exhibits each side of Edwards’s life, together with a web based pursuit of a late-teenage boy, performed by Osian Morgan (element was offered to the author, Mark Burt, by the true youngster’s household) that led to conferences in individual. That was not unlawful however will be seen as an inappropriate use of his public profile by Edwards. “That’s why the drama is called Power,” says Clunes.
Since his ITV dramas Manhunt, in regards to the hunt for a assassin whose killings included Milly Dowler, and Out There, which checked out county traces drug gangs, Clunes has been playing hefty dramatic roles that followers of Men Behaving Badly and Doc Martin wouldn’t essentially have anticipated. The pattern continues with an impressively dissipated Mr Earnshaw in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights movie and now a very spectacular Edwards. I praise him on his film-stealing scenes as Cathy’s drunken, crafty father, which present his growing vary as an actor, however he replies: “After 18 years of Doc Martin, anything else would look varied!”
That’s too modest, and his dramatic versatility is additional proven by his Edwards, suggesting the volcanic pressures of public pretence whereas reaching a Sheen-like lookalike and soundalike efficiency. Makeup concerned “no prosthetics, just …” Clunes flattens his considerably outstanding ears towards the edges of his head. “I think they used some kind of putty. But, whatever they did, it was very clever because the camera comes right in behind me and you can’t tell my ears are stuck back.” The drama exhibits Edwards in the interval when he had misplaced a appreciable quantity of weight and grow to be chiselled and ripped by means of boxing and train. Did Clunes must do a lot of fitness center work?
“No. Obviously I’m just blessed with a really great body! I lost a bit of weight. And then they had to reduce my lippage a bit.”
With these cosmetically thinned-down lips, Clunes copied one other tic he had observed in Edwards, an occasional curl that seemed like a sneer: “It seemed to happen when he went for emphasis.” Another mannerism captured precisely is the left arm held away from the physique with the hand clutching the desk, as if the anchorman have been actually anchoring himself in the studio.
The drama is bracketed by Edwards’s announcement of the dying of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022, remarkably solely 10 months earlier than the beginning of his shame.
“I really studied that clip,” says Clunes. “It shows what a cornerstone of the British state he was and it is so well known that I had to get it exactly right.”
The result’s an uncanny copy of Edwards’s sober, sluggish tones on the final afternoon of the second Elizabethan reign, studying out the paragraph twice as if to present viewers a likelihood for it to sink in.
“They said did I want to practice with an Autocue. But I’ve done Have I Got News for You for ever. And I’ve even got my own Autocue at home.”
That appears one of many odder celeb confessions. Why?
“Oh, a lot of home recording during Covid. And, when you record things for charities, it’s often a long read.”
As analysis, Clunes chatted off the file to former colleagues of Edwards who, whereas by no means guessing on the interior darkness, recalled an outer coldness: “I spoke to a number of people who had come across him in a professional capacity. And they said a variety of things – I’m not going to badmouth him – but let’s put it this way: no one said he was fun.”
A sports activities broadcaster who typically co-hosted bulletins with the newsreader drew Clunes’s consideration to Edwards’s behavior, though all his phrases have been on Autocue, of hesitating and glancing down on the back-up script on his desk earlier than studying out a quantity: “As if pretending he wasn’t reading an Autocue! It helped that there is so much archive but what I wanted was to find the bits when he wasn’t on duty. I’ve seen performances of real people – especially politicians – where you only get the person they presented to the public rather than the underbelly or the real person. And, with this, I had to get the offscreen him as well. For example, he’s very slightly more Welsh when not presenting.”
Clunes was intrigued by the presenter’s appearances in the visitor seat on talkshows and podcasts, together with episode 232 of the BBC podcast Fortunately … With Fi and Jane [Glover and Garvey] that was taken down from BBC Sounds after Edwards’s conviction. He additionally intently studied some 24-hour information footage from exterior 10 Downing Street, in which, throughout one other broadcast, Edwards is seen on the fringe of the shot to current the 10pm stay information later: “While he’s waiting – rather unfortunately given what happened – he’s messaging on his phone!”
While the broadcaster’s digital interactions that day might have been utterly harmless, the clip of Edwards’s cellphone method was helpful for the various texting and scrolling sequences in which he’s grooming a younger man.
Because Edwards went from being the BBC voice of royal events to narrowly avoiding being detained at His Majesty’s pleasure (receiving a six-month sentence suspended for two years), there will be a temptation to see his TV persona as faux.
“I’m not sure fake is the right word,” says Clunes. “Performative but not fake. A sort of stepping up. My daughter says that when I’m acting, I have a different voice from the one at home.”
Indeed, his conversational tone is so comfortable as we speak that I push the tape recorder nearer to him. Also stored surprisingly quiet was the present itself: in a gossipy enterprise, it feels a enormous achievement to have withheld information of a drama about such a talked-about story. Had Clunes signed a non-disclosure settlement? “No. I don’t think so.” But he couldn’t have gone on Graham Norton and stated he was filming it? “I don’t know. No one told me not to.”
The Channel 5 minder explains that, unusually, the drama was not introduced till after filming was full and so was made in a covert way. While they have been filming, in December 2025, Edwards posted on Facebook a moody picture that seemed like a new publicity image, fuelling hypothesis that he was trying a comeback. Clunes says the event precipitated fascination on set: “We wondered: had he heard about the drama? But there’s no evidence that he had and he’s taken it down now.”
English libel is so extreme that – even in dramatising a convicted intercourse offender – the drama needed to be cautious to not counsel any motion or motivation not supported by the Sun stories or in court docket proceedings. One scene with a psychiatrist, utilizing a quote from the psychological well being report given to the Justice of the Peace, is as shut as we get to going inside Edwards’s thoughts.
“It was really useful,” says Clunes. “With that and the bits from factual WhatsApp messages in the dialogue, I did think: ‘Wow, this is what he really said. It isn’t speculation.’ So there’s an added weight to those scenes.”
Although largely a documentary drama, Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards has a unprecedented last fantasy scene in which the presenter reads from a newsdesk Autocue an account of his personal conviction: “And, finally, today I was sentenced …” Here, Clunes makes efficient use of that sportscaster’s tip-off about Edwards’s tic of emphasising figures, giving devastating influence to the variety of indecent pictures (41), the amount in probably the most abusive class (seven) and the age (between seven and 9) of the youngest kids in the paedophile materials he accessed.
In that epilogue – maybe seeming to counsel that Edwards bought off flippantly – would possibly it come as a shock to many viewers to listen to the unsparing particulars of what the previous broadcaster truly did?
Clunes nods: “Yes, I think that’s right. I think there was a video of a child of [about] eight being raped.”
Could he ever permit himself to replicate on what Edwards would possibly take into consideration the drama or did he have to shut his thoughts to that? “Well, I don’t think he’d like it. But I mean he shouldn’t watch it, should he? And he would have happily reported on other people committing similar crimes so that aspect doesn’t worry me. There’s no way back for him. People get forgiven for cheating on their wives and bit of tax evasion. But, this one, I don’t think you do come back. I don’t think we’ll get a second series.”
Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards is on Tuesday 24 March at 9pm on Channel 5.
