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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 images and conversations. A year later – when new BBC News at Ten anchor Clive Myrie announced that his predecessor had been convicted of possessing indecent images of children – the Welsh broadcaster’s career effectively ended.
But on Tuesday the night of 24 March Edwards is back on screen, reading the news in the late-night slot he occupied for decades. He is played by the actor Martin Clunes and his BBC desk has been recreated in the London canalside news 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 building.
As Sheen is the market-leading actor-impersonator and also Welsh, this seems a good guess but the Channel 5 minder sitting in on our interview looks noncommittal. Edwards was sentenced for “making indecent images of children” (a legal charge that includes possession of digital images – seven of them category A, the most serious level of depicted abuse), so did Clunes have any hesitation about playing such a notorious figure?
“No. Because it’s my job. Roles don’t take me over.”
Acting unpleasant or contentious people is a professional challenge. But Natalie Dormer recently announced that she had donated her fee for playing Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, in ITV’s The Lady to sexual abuse charities, feeling it wrong to profit from portraying an associate of the notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. This virtuous gesture, if it became routine, would lead to actors having to play villains for free. Did Clunes feel any pressure to give his fee to a good cause?
He deflects the question with a joke – “It’s Channel 5 so it isn’t that much!” – then adds more 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 careful to distinguish between Edwards’s homosexuality (which he said in a court medical report had long been suppressed) and his criminal sexual interest in children. The former caused his first downfall – in the grooming of a young man – but his ruin came from the latter activities. The drama shows both sides of Edwards’s life, including an online pursuit of a late-teenage boy, played by Osian Morgan (detail was provided to the writer, Mark Burt, by the real child’s family) that led to meetings in person. That was not illegal but can 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, about the hunt for a murderer whose killings included Milly Dowler, and Out There, which looked at county lines drug gangs, Clunes has been playing hefty dramatic roles that fans of Men Behaving Badly and Doc Martin would not necessarily have expected. The trend continues with an impressively dissipated Mr Earnshaw in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights movie and now a very impressive Edwards. I compliment him on his film-stealing scenes as Cathy’s drunken, cunning father, which show his developing range as an actor, but he replies: “After 18 years of Doc Martin, anything else would look varied!”
That’s too modest, and his dramatic versatility is further shown by his Edwards, suggesting the volcanic pressures of public pretence while achieving a Sheen-like lookalike and soundalike performance. Makeup involved “no prosthetics, just …” Clunes flattens his somewhat prominent ears against the sides 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 shows Edwards in the period when he had lost a considerable amount of weight and become chiselled and ripped through boxing and exercise. Did Clunes have to do a lot of gym 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 those cosmetically thinned-down lips, Clunes copied another tic he had noticed in Edwards, an occasional curl that looked like a sneer: “It seemed to happen when he went for emphasis.” Another mannerism captured exactly is the left arm held away from the body with the hand clutching the desk, as if the anchorman were literally anchoring himself in the studio.
The drama is bracketed by Edwards’s announcement of the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022, remarkably only 10 months before the start of his disgrace.
“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 is an uncanny reproduction of Edwards’s sober, slow tones on the last afternoon of the second Elizabethan reign, reading out the paragraph twice as if to give viewers a chance 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 seems one of the odder celebrity confessions. Why?
“Oh, a lot of home recording during Covid. And, when you record things for charities, it’s often a long read.”
As research, Clunes chatted off the record to former colleagues of Edwards who, while never guessing at the inner 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 broadcaster who often co-hosted bulletins with the newsreader drew Clunes’s attention to Edwards’s habit, although all his words were on Autocue, of hesitating and glancing down at the back-up script on his desk before reading out a number: “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 guest seat on talkshows and podcasts, including 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 also closely studied some 24-hour news footage from outside 10 Downing Street, in which, during another broadcast, Edwards is seen at the edge of the shot to present the 10pm live news later: “While he’s waiting – rather unfortunately given what happened – he’s messaging on his phone!”
While the broadcaster’s digital interactions that day could have been completely innocent, the clip of Edwards’s phone technique was useful for the many texting and scrolling sequences in which he is grooming a young man.
Because Edwards went from being the BBC voice of royal occasions to narrowly avoiding being detained at His Majesty’s pleasure (receiving a six-month sentence suspended for two years), there can be a temptation to see his TV persona as fake.
“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 soft today that I push the tape recorder closer to him. Also kept surprisingly quiet was the show itself: in a gossipy business, it feels a huge achievement to have withheld news of a drama about such a talked-about story. Had Clunes signed a non-disclosure agreement? “No. I don’t think so.” But he couldn’t have gone on Graham Norton and said 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 announced until after filming was complete and so was made in a covert way. While they were filming, in December 2025, Edwards posted on Facebook a moody image that looked like a new publicity picture, fuelling speculation that he was attempting a comeback. Clunes says the development caused 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 severe that – even in dramatising a convicted sex offender – the drama had to be careful not to suggest any action or motivation not supported by the Sun reports or in court proceedings. One scene with a psychiatrist, using a quote from the mental health report given to the magistrate, is as close as we get to going inside Edwards’s mind.
“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 an extraordinary final fantasy scene in which the presenter reads from a newsdesk Autocue an account of his own conviction: “And, finally, today I was sentenced …” Here, Clunes makes effective use of that sportscaster’s tip-off about Edwards’s tic of emphasising figures, giving devastating impact to the number of indecent images (41), the quantity in the most abusive category (seven) and the age (between seven and nine) of the youngest children in the paedophile material he accessed.
In that epilogue – perhaps seeming to suggest that Edwards got off lightly – might it come as a shock to many viewers to hear the unsparing details of what the former broadcaster actually 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 allow himself to reflect on what Edwards might think about the drama or did he have to close his mind 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.
