Ofcom opens fairness probe into Channel 5 Huw Edwards drama

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Ofcom to probe Huw Edwards drama after disgraced BBC star complained dailymail.com

Ofcom has opened an investigation into the Channel 5 drama 'Power', which portrays Huw Edwards, the former BBC newsreader whose career ended in disgrace. The trigger for the probe was not a viewer campaign or a broadcaster complaint — it was a fairness complaint filed by Edwards himself, the man the drama depicts. The Broadcasting Code's fairness rules exist to protect people who participate in programmes: the interviewee misled by an edit, the contributor whose words are repurposed, the ordinary person dragged into a documentary without consent. They were drafted on the assumption that the person with grievances is the weaker party, and the broadcaster holds the microphone. Edwards inverts that assumption. He is not a participant in 'Power' but its subject — a public figure whose crimes and downfall were among the most covered media stories of recent years. Yet the fairness framework gives him the same formal channel that a manipulated contributor would have, and the regulator has judged the complaint serious enough to open a formal investigation rather than dismiss it. The precedent cuts both ways. If the investigation proceeds, every living public figure portrayed in a docudrama gains a cost-free instrument against the dramatist: file a fairness complaint, force the broadcaster through months of regulatory process, and let the prospect of that process shape what gets commissioned in the first place. British television has built decades of docudrama on precisely this territory — political scandals, newsroom failures, institutional cover-ups — nearly all of it involving living people who would prefer a different portrayal. Channel 5, for its part, must now defend a work of drama under rules written for something closer to journalism. The regulator's eventual finding will determine whether dramatic licence about living figures remains a broadcaster's judgment call or becomes a negotiation conducted in advance with whoever is being portrayed. Edwards has already lost his career, his reputation and his BBC pension position. What the complaint seeks is something different: a say, after the fact and at public expense, in how his story is told.