The Huw Edwards story is grubby, depressing and hard to understand without immersing yourself to an unpleasant degree in the psychology of sexual compulsion. So it makes sense that Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards — Channel 5’s ripped-from-the-headlines drama, based on the BBC newsreader’s tabloid exposure for paying a 17-year-old boy for sexual images and his eventual conviction for making indecent images of children — is grubby, depressing and… well, you get the picture.

We live in a boom era for real-life drama. While legacy broadcasters flounder against the streaming sites, these stories have proven to be winners in both ratings and awards, as demonstrated by ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office in 2024. That series also brought mass attention to the outrageous abuse of the subpostmasters in the Horizon scandal, giving it genuine public interest heft.

Power’s greatest asset is Martin Clunes’s extraordinary performance as Edwards. It’s genuinely chilling watching him snarl “earn your keep and know your fucking place” at his teenage victim (played by Osian Morgan). But it lacks the moral urgency of Mr Bates. After all, Edwards has already been found guilty. His career, which took him to the pinnacle of British broadcasting, is over. There is little wrong here left to be righted.

Unsurprisingly, Edwards himself was less than thrilled about Power coming to screens. He huffed this week that the drama was “hardly likely to convey the reality of what happened”. And much as I hate to agree with a sex offender about anything, he has a point. Turning real life into entertainment means some things are inevitably misrepresented.

Some of Power’s false notes are strictly trivial. It’s hard not to laugh at a scene in which Sun journalists cluster around a Huw Edwards investigation pinboard in the open newsroom, covered with photographs and post-its. Yes, that’s exactly how reporters would handle the material for a legally contentious story: by leaving it on show for the cleaners.

But there’s a more serious way in which Power tends to distort reality. The programme, beginning with its title, suggests that Edwards’s career helped him to exploit young men, a conclusion which seems far from certain. Of course, it’s true that his position was relevant to the story: it is obviously a big deal for the man who anchored coverage of Elizabeth II’s funeral to be exposed as — to quote the victim’s stepdad in Power — “a fucking nonce”.

However, in contrast to Jimmy Savile’s crimes (similarly dramatised in 2024 miniseries The Reckoning), there’s little to implicate the BBC in what happened here. Edwards didn’t meet his victim through his job. According to Power, they were introduced by a mutual friend who was already sending Edwards explicit videos of minors. Indeed, it was that same friend, Alex Williams, whose conviction for crimes related to indecent images of children would eventually lead the police to Edwards’s own offences.

Power suggests that Williams and Edwards originally made contact on Instagram, where Williams’s boxing-powered midlife body transformation had made him a surprise star. Meanwhile, Edwards’s offences took place on the Meta-owned messaging service WhatsApp. In other words, this is an old-media story about a new-media kind of wrongdoing. All Power’s questions about safeguarding are aimed at the BBC, but they might be better put to social media companies.

The most shocking thing about Edwards’s case is how banal it actually is. In 2024, police recorded 51,672 crimes concerning online child sexual exploitation and abuse in England and Wales. Edwards’s actions are only a small part of a horrifying picture of male sexual malpractice, enabled by the internet and the companies that run it. And confronting that is much more than the work of a two-hour prestige drama.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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