Huw Edwards hates the TV dramatisation of his life. Maybe he should have thought of that before … you know | Marina Hyde

. UK edition

Huw Edwards arriving at Westminster magistrate's court for sentencing after he pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children, 16 September 2024.
Huw Edwards arriving at Westminster magistrate's court for sentencing after he pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children, 16 September 2024. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

He’s done it again. The convicted sex offender, creator of victims, has gone and created another one – himself, says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

I see Huw Edwards is still not the subject of any of his verbs. The BBC’s former iconic newsreader (trademark: Huw Edwards) has emerged from a minibreak in the wilderness to excoriate Channel 5’s forthcoming dramatisation of his downfall. “Mental illness is misunderstood by many but can never be an excuse for criminality,” Huw informed the public, the overwhelming majority of whom are already well across this particular point. “It can, however, at least help explain why people sometimes behave in shocking and reprehensible ways, and why things fell apart for me in the way they did.” Fell apart because of you, I think you’ll find.

Anyway, there was a lot more of Edwards’s lengthy statement. “I have been open about my struggle with persistent mental illness over a period of 25 years,” he continued. “What is less well known is the severity of that condition, which was managed successfully until the downward spiral which led to an appalling outcome.” Again, note the tragic passivity of “an appalling outcome”, as though a flow chart and not a person has led us somewhere we’d very much rather not be.

Failing to apologise for your interactions with a teenager and instead deploying mental illness as an explanation in the year 2026 would be more understandable if Huw Edwards had spent the last 18 months in solitary, or been cryogenically frozen, instead of passing the time as a free man in some nice Welsh village or other. Ironically, he seems not to have kept up with the news, in this case the development that this stuff doesn’t work like magic any more. Edwards first trotted this explanation out in the fag-end of the Peak Woke era, when casting various things as mental illness was still – just – an axiomatically unassailable form of victimhood. It’s why his defence was initially taken up with such mad enthusiasm by elements of the reflexively wrong Good Guys of the media when the Sun first started running stories about him secretly paying huge amounts of money to a teenager. First it was a private matter. Then it was a vile witch-hunt by the tabloids. Then it was a witch-hunt that had driven a vulnerable man into the protective care of medical professionals.

In the end, of course, it was a conviction for possessing multiple indecent images of children, including category A images, a crime that feeds on and perpetuates the suffering and sexual exploitation of children and traumatises those victims for life.

Edwards still hasn’t paid back a penny of the £200k of licence fee payers’ money he was happy to keep taking while on suspension from the BBC awaiting trial for a crime he would plead guilty to. He’d much rather talk about a different media organisation to the BBC – Channel 5, whose production values he has taken issue with. He doesn’t think the new drama is likely “to convey the reality of what happened”. Furthermore, he suggests producers “also refused to disclose whether any of those making allegations had been paid for their contributions”. Hifalutin words, particularly coming from someone who forked out over £35k to one teen who’d become homeless, before allegedly asking if there was something he could get in return (police said they found no evidence of criminality). Then again, most sex offenders have got some kind of screw loose, haven’t they? I’ve got a feeling “having a screw loose” is no longer deemed an acceptable term for talking about this stuff – and yet, it describes the mindset of all sorts of sex offenders so much better than “mental illness”.

At this point I should say I haven’t seen anything other than the trailer for Channel 5’s show, so have no idea what it’s like. I do have deep reservations about “true story” dramas, which have become a genre of their own and scripted TV’s most runaway success story in recent years. However, making shows about real-life criminals is hardly a new thing, and you can argue the Edwards drama sits more traditionally in that basket. It’s not a point Huw argues, inevitably, preferring to lambast Channel 5 for not checking its narrative with him at script stage. Again, TV producers tend not to bother asking criminals to give script notes. But Huw could definitely pitch the jump from sex offender to story consultant as one of those unfair barriers-to-entry in the creative industries if he’s after a new avenue for his victimhood.

That said, I can picture Huw handing down a lot of the classic executive notes that all writers love to hate. “Can we make the character more likable?” “I don’t get the ‘why now?’ of it all. Why not never?” “I’m not really feeling the stakes because at the moment the character returns inside of two years explaining he essentially didn’t have any agency at all?”

According to some very chatty publicist, Edwards plans to speak out further in the future. “I am making an effort,” Edwards himself declares, “to produce my own account of these terrible events.” No rush. “This is a slow process” – finally, some good news – “given the fragile state of my health.” There it is. A reminder that, for Huw, and indeed so many of the difficult men of television who have been forcibly resigned from our screens in recent years, their issues are much better clinicalised than owned. Yet are they all just victims of illness? Or are they, infinitely more pertinently, creators of victims?