The Fall of the Silver God
Some thoughts on Huw Edwards and the British love of scandal
Where else but in Britain would sex pest allegations against an anonymous TV news presenter blaze from the front pages of newspapers and all across news websites? I can’t imagine anything like it happening in America, for example. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this sort of thing occurs frequently in some far-off land of which I know little. But this particular obsession with a relatively unimportant story does for some reason feel peculiarly British to me.
Now that Huw Edwards has been named as the presenter in question, I feel safe enough from the libel laws to write about the whole kerfuffle. And what an odd story it is. A tabloid newspaper publishes allegations from parents who claim that a BBC presenter solicited explicit photos from their child and that the contact between said presenter and the kid may have begun when the latter was 17. Fearful of violating the presenter’s privacy (and falling afoul of the libel laws), the media shows only ominous silhouettes next to headlines like ‘Unnamed BBC presenter faces fresh allegations’.
Not until Edwards’s wife reveals that her husband is the man in question do those sinister shadows disappear from the front pages, to be replaced with shiny images of the beloved Welshman’s silver-crowned visage. Well, everyone pretty much knew it was Huw anyway. It’s just that nobody could say the name (unless you were a fellow BBC presenter prone to slips even old Sigmund would be proud of1). And now Edwards is depressed and in hospital, the police have announced that they don’t think a crime has been committed2, and we can all move on with our lives.
Poor Huw. His pleasant tones and silver fox appeal made him one of the BBC’s highest-paid presenters. For his solemn and respectful coverage of the Queen’s death last year, he was given glittering prizes. He was assured of a place of honour in the starry firmament above Broadcasting House. And now, like another formerly adored silver-headed presenter, he is disgraced. Like Philip Schofield, he will probably never recover. How the British love to gaze and grin and gossip as our angels fall to earth; we do so love to desecrate. A legacy of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries—and destruction of their libraries—perhaps?
(And what is it right now, anyway, with all these silver-haired old gods being found to have snuffled at the buttocks of teenagers like randy dogs?)3
Like everyone else, and to my shame, I obsessed over the story, so I can’t claim to occupy any high ground. And there are important questions to be asked about the Sun’s publication of the allegations and the BBC’s response to them4. But it is such a non-story, in the end. If Huw was, like Phil, legally creepy rather than criminally creepy, why all the fuss? Did we really need a media bombardment that made the bombing of Dresden look like a quiet game of bowling? And is it fair to hound the alleged creeps to the point of depression or even suicide? They’ve suffered enough and have probably lost their careers, and whether they broke the law or not is not for us to decide.
In other words, wasn’t it all a bit much? The British used to be thought of as repressed stiff-upper-lippers, yet we’ve always had an appetite for scandal5. I think we love nothing more than to gawp and sneer and judge when our angels lose their wings. And it is quite enjoyable, I admit, to see nauseatingly beloved public figures revealed as the dirty, horny dogs they are. The vapid belief that the so-called stars are ‘just like us!’ is never really believable (or, I think, truly believed) until scandal hits. Perhaps, for all the judgement heaped upon the disgraced, we actually prefer them this way because we see more of ourselves revealed. Our gleeful judgement, our delight in tearing public transgressors down, might just be a way of avoiding this truth.
It’s not peculiar to the British to enjoy tabloid junk in huge portions. My pseudo-psychology above could apply just as much anywhere else. But why was the Phil and Huw show such a showstopper? (‘Newsstopper’ might be more accurate—while Ukraine sought to join NATO and its war for democracy and self-determination against Russia raged on, we speculated and tittered about the identity of an alleged sex pest.)
Perhaps it blew up because it involved the BBC, our national broadcaster—but then that wouldn’t explain the earlier obsession with Phil. Perhaps the Huw scandal was given a little more piquancy by his association with the loss of the Big Mama last year—her awful death, now made even more unbearable for being forever tainted by the thought of old Huw with his trousers down! (When they show archive footage of Huw sadly announcing the passing of the Queen in years to come, how many will think instead of that shudderingly awful image?)
I confess I don’t really have an answer to my question. Why, Britain, why? As I said, I doubt any American presenters could so fully take over the media cycle for days on end. That’s not because Americans aren’t fond of the crazy and the hysterical (certainly not!6). But: just what is it that is so damned British about the frenzied exhilaration of our nation as we leered and laughed at the fall of the silver god?7
In a nice little twist, it turns out that the Freudian slipper Victoria Derbyshire was investigating Huw even before the Sun broke the story. Perhaps old Sigmund had nothing to do with it.
It’s interesting that the age of consent in Britain is 16 but the age of sending or receiving explicit images is 18. So Huw could quite legally have had sex with the 17-year-old, but they couldn’t send each other naughty pictures. Perhaps there should be a bit more consistency in the law here.
Now, this is in bad taste, but this whole bloody story is, so forgive me. I just can’t help imagining a police officer gravely intoning to a handcuffed Huw, “All well and good to bugger the boy, Mr. Edwards, but sending him a photo of your bare arse? No, sir, oh no, we can’t have that.”
(Everyone seems to know that the alleged victim was male, yet the BBC and others keep referring to him as a ‘them’, as some kind of neuter—admittedly, I’ve mostly done the same, just to be safe.)
Yes, yes, fine—allegedly.
There are other complications too. The alleged victim’s lawyers have called the story nonsense, while other stories of Huw’s creepiness towards junior BBC employees have come out.
And now it seems the parents of the alleged victim have been paid quite a lot of money for a TalkTV interview. What does all this signify, I wonder?
Also, as the BBC put it:
The initial allegations, first reported by the Sun online on Friday evening, were that the news presenter paid a young person for sexually explicit photos, beginning when they were 17.
In later versions of the story, the Sun changed the wording of this allegation to "it is understood contact between the two started when the youngster was 17".
So perhaps Huw did just bugger the boy—and waited for him to turn 18 before sending nudes! (See footnote 2.)
The earliest example that comes to mind immediately is the ruthless satire of the delinquent George IV in the 19th century.
Even then, American media tends to be about something. Even if it’s only Tucker Carlson slobbering over Putin, it’s still about something that matters. Hell, even the Q-Anon story is about something that would matter very much if it wasn’t so crazy. Why the narrowness, even the parochialism, of the Brits?
I see that Kevin Spacey’s alleged transgressions (which are far worse than those of Phil and Huw) are also in the news again, but he isn’t silver-haired or British so he’s irrelevant here. Also, I just cannot be bothered.