What the Huw Edwards scandal has revealed is that something is very rotten in ‘TVland’ and major broadcasters need to make big changes in how they choose future talent.
The BBC is in crisis after Huw Edwards was finally named, by his own wife, as the top news presenter at the centre of an alleged teenage sex pictures scandal.
Whilst no crime appears at this stage to have been committed, this latest scandal, coming hot on the uppity heels of the Philip Schofield scandal at rival station ITV, and in the distant wake of other, equally scandalised presenters, raises the question of why these grown men make the choices they do in the first place, which almost always end in scandal?
Full details of Edwards’ behaviour and actions are still emerging, so this is a live and fast moving story. Edwards is apparently in care and under supervision due to facing ‘serious mental health issues’. We hope he makes a full recovery.
Edwards and Schofield
Both Schofield and Edwards share a number of similar traits – both are very high profile TV names; both are men of a similar age; both were married and had children.
Both are also sexually interested in men, and young men in particular, and both have remained in the closet while pursuing glittering careers in their TV roles.
This is where everything falls apart. If they both were to be honest about their lives, they might both admit to having made decisions very early on in their lives to go into the gay closet and firmly shut the door.
The land of TV and radio presenting is a cosy, protective and privileged place to inhabit.
So, for a while this would be fine and everyone would marvel at the amazing talent of these presenters as they scaled the ladder of fame.
But the other personality, the one shut away in that dark closet, unseen, like a Dorian Gray painting, will eventually demand its moment in the sun, too.
So why not just come out from the start?
It was almost certainly impossible to hope for such as career in the 1980s and 90s, when both Edwards and Schofield were forging their careers. The ‘pink ceiling’ was real back then, more-so in the news gathering side of the BBC – and likely still exists in many other places and cases.
So to some extent, you can hardly blame these men for putting their careers first instead of their true nature.
Yet this is where the rot comes in. Few mention that, aside from the young men these presenters target, there are other ‘victims’.
The trusting and loyal wives, who suddenly realise that the man they married is not at all what he seemed, and then the children of these stars who are also, sadly, set to be scarred by the revelations of their father’s true nature.
When a young man on the cusp of life decides for whatever reasons, to remain in the closet, while he set out to achieve great things in his chosen field, he is sowing the seeds of a future, when it will all fall down around them. Only then will they discover their ‘fatal flaw’, which was to stand up and be counted as a proud gay man, to be true to himself and to live his life honestly.
The real scandal at the BBC and ITV is actually the fact that both Schofield and Edwards knew that being open at the start of their careers would not have been seen as acceptable by the ill-informed and perhaps homophobic bosses of the day.
And this is why the rot sets in and decades later a scandal emerges that threatens everyone’s future and leaves the broadcaster’s reputation in tatters.