Huw Edwards

[Mark Connolly]

1 minute ago, welshbairn said:

I can't really imagine what it must be like to be a high profile TV personality, it doesn't appeal, but it's weird that seeking danger sex seems to be such a common side effect. 

I think it's listed as "desirable" on the job description

[Monkey Tennis]

26 minutes ago, Rugster said:

I saw that, but on the BBC News channel they were matter of factly discussing that he sent abusive messages to current and ex BBC staff lording it up over his salary and criticising their dress which is absolutely news to me? 

Yes, I saw that, but are you sure about the "lording it up over his salary" bit?

I thought they were just implying that his salary and status placed him in a powerful position in any such exchanges.

[Binos]

2 hours ago, Musketeer Gripweed said:

Well done to that fucking rag. A man with mental health problems andnot guilty of any criminal activity whose life has been ruined for the sake of a headline.

Time that kind of journalism came to an end in this country.

Well done to his wife for not being the one in hospital with mental health problems 

[Boo Khaki]

I can't really get my head around why, in particular, any BBC employee would be so daft as to do anything like that given recent history.

There are certain things I can't do online because of my job, certain things I have to report including just randomly bumping into people in supermarkets, certain streets etc, so I can't fathom how someone with that profile can think they won't end up massively in the shit, even if they are just acting a bit irresponsibly rather than anything criminal. Boggles my mind.

I suppose I do understand the correlation between mental state and decision making, but even then, as far as I know Edwards wasn't in a perpetual state of depression, so there must have been times when he was fully aware of how foolish and ill-advised his behaviour was.

Edited July 12, 2023 by Boo Khaki

[Theyellowbox]

41 minutes ago, Boo Khaki said:

Is it not possible that when the parent first contacted the BBC, they've come to the obvious conclusion that if the complaint was genuine and not just a crank, the parent should be going to the Police first of all, and then the Police contacting the BBC and Edwards?

I mean, if I'm an employer, and I get a random communication claiming that one of my employees is guilty of criminal conduct my first response would be to tell them to contact their local Police, no to go to the employee in question and immediately start quizzing them about it.

Exactly this. The BBC, as far as I can tell from what we know, has acted exactly as they should have.

On the assumption that the met police continue to think no laws have been broken, then the BBC probably don't have much more to investigate. The Sun may well find themselves being the big losers in all of this. Probably another nail in their coffin. Sure Murdoch would be much more open to completely shutting it down now than say 10 years ago given the shift from news print.

I don't see Edwards being back on the news any time soon, if at all. Not because anything he has done would mean he should lose his job, but could he be impartial now on anything involving the sun and many of the Tory MP's who have piped up and would he want to? 

[Rugster]

2 minutes ago, Monkey Tennis said:

Yes, I saw that, but are you sure about the "lording it up over his salary" bit?

I thought they were just implying that his salary and status placed him in a powerful position in any such exchanges.

To be honest I couldn’t really believe what I was hearing and John Bolton seemed to be the same, so I may have misremembered a bit of it. It just seemed a bit left field and despite their assertions of him being a friend, that the presenters involved may well have had an axe to grind. 

[Rugster]

3 minutes ago, Boo Khaki said:

I can't really get my head around why, in particular, any BBC employee would be so daft as to do anything like that given recent history.

There are certain things I can't do online because of my job, certain things I have to report including just randomly bumping into people in supermarkets, certain streets etc, so I can't fathom how someone with that profile can think they won't end up massively in the shit even, if they are just acting a bit irresponsibly rather than anything criminal. Boggles my mind.

100%. Said to the wife the other night. The amount of high profile people who think they can get away with things like this is incredible. Surely you’d think “ah wait, someday someone might be after me for money or expose this?”  I guess they must live in some alternate bubble. 

[Soapy FFC]

1 hour ago, carpetmonster said:

To be fair to Huw, when it’s a monthly occurrence for those on the right to jump up and down about BBC salaries (Lineker particularly) that’s a hell of a redistribution of wealth. His contract’s listed at 440k, so that’s a tiny bit short of 8% of his income he’s given to the geez. 
 

Or in P&B terms, yon Hearts fan paying you 72p per hour to get the old chap oot. 

I read on here he's religious. Just as well he's not Mormon or he'd have to give up a tenth (at least) of his income to the Church to remain a member. That would be a huge whack on top of this 8%.

[Boo Khaki]

3 minutes ago, Rugster said:

100%. Said to the wife the other night. The amount of high profile people who think they can get away with things like this is incredible. Surely you’d think “ah wait, someday someone might be after me for money or expose this?”  I guess they must live in some alternate bubble. 

The wee bit I tacked on to the post you quoted is significant. When you have an altered mental state, it often does dramatically affect your ability to make reasonable and considered decisions. That's true of both elevated and depressed states, and I've been there personally, and witnessed it countless other times in other individuals. The problem sometimes comes when you are in a reasonable mental place, and you still have to deal with the consequences of your 'crazy' persona.

The only thing I can really liken it to for people who have never been there, is if you've ever been out, got completely rat-arsed drunk and made a fool of yourself, woken up and spent the next week with beer-fear and making all sorts of promises that you'll never act like that again, then imagine that happening repeatedly, over a period of weeks, months, or years even, and that can be what it's like living with the consequences of a mental illness, mood disorder etc etc

[welshbairn]

3 minutes ago, Rugster said:

100%. Said to the wife the other night. The amount of high profile people who think they can get away with things like this is incredible. Surely you’d think “ah wait, someday someone might be after me for money or expose this?”  I guess they must live in some alternate bubble. 

I'm guessing that having everyone pointing at them saying 'It's that bloke off the telly.' every time they leave the house that sends them bonkers. 

[Binos]

13 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

I'm guessing that having everyone pointing at them saying 'It's that bloke off the telly.' every time they leave the house that sends them bonkers. 

Anyone who would want that to be their life, is bonkers and therefore susceptible to doing bonkers things

[Lurkst]

1 hour ago, Musketeer Gripweed said:

Could someone decide a random user name on here was John Craven and say he had been sending abusive messages to them in private?

Oddly enough back in the day my pal clocked John Craven thumbing his way through the John Menzies top shelf in Aviemore. 

 

[Hedgecutter]

1 hour ago, Rugster said:

I’d be flabbergasted if anyone truly suspected Huw Edwards of being a wrong ‘un prior to the last few days. He’s always come across a good sort, in my opinion anyway. 

I've not been bothered by this whole thing, but seeing him named had me saying "ooft ya f***er" out loud.  The surprise is the massive element.

[effeffsee_the2nd]

2 hours ago, Sergeant Wilson said:

I would like to think you'd get more than that for £35k in the real world. I'd expect the works and the body disposed of for that kind of money.

Fuckin hell have you not been paying attention to the cost of living crisis 

35k - 20 year ago maybe

[Boo Khaki]

5 minutes ago, Hedgecutter said:

I've not been bothered by this whole thing, but seeing him named had me saying "ooft ya f***er" out loud.  The surprise is the massive element.

It was seeing the photo on Sunday night that elicited that response from me. (no in a pervy way FFS).

[throbber]

Has it been confirmed the money for nudes is nonsense or was it just that he was of legal age when it happened?

[Theyellowbox]

49 minutes ago, Boo Khaki said:

The wee bit I tacked on to the post you quoted is significant. When you have an altered mental state, it often does dramatically affect your ability to make reasonable and considered decisions. That's true of both elevated and depressed states, and I've been there personally, and witnessed it countless other times in other individuals. The problem sometimes comes when you are in a reasonable mental place, and you still have to deal with the consequences of your 'crazy' persona.

The only thing I can really liken it to for people who have never been there, is if you've ever been out, got completely rat-arsed drunk and made a fool of yourself, woken up and spent the next week with beer-fear and making all sorts of promises that you'll never act like that again, then imagine that happening repeatedly, over a period of weeks, months, or years even, and that can be what it's like living with the consequences of a mental illness, mood disorder etc etc

I wonder too if there wasn't a part of him that would want to be 'caught' while he was in that state.

I'm sure they are not the priority in all of this, but it must be really difficult for a lot of the BBC journalists and former BBC journalists to report on this. I'm sure a lot of them will both have worked with him for many years and class him as a friend. Kudos to them for the professional way they are covering this. 

[GordonD]

The Sun has form for this sort of thing. About twenty years ago they took the piss out of Frank Bruno when he was suffering from mental health problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bruno#Personal_life

[Boo Khaki]

2 minutes ago, Theyellowbox said:

I wonder too if there wasn't a part of him that would want to be 'caught' while he was in that state.

Thrill-seeking to alleviate the mundanity and drudgery of a life you are completely unfulfilled by I can relate to, even if it involves really destructive behaviours that are only going to end in emotional disaster for you, and more especially your family. It's the inability to rationalise the impact of the consequences that causes the lousy decision-making. It's almost like you 'don't care', but not really, because you still love your loved-ones to bits and hate the thought of doing them harm, but at the same time, you don't really care about the consequences for yourself, including driving your family to a point where you've destroyed your relationship with them. I was so deep in a pit of depression at one point that I took a calm, rational decision to slowly kill myself. I'm not talking about an active suicide, more that I was going to deliberately embark on a slow path of self-destructive hedonism and nonchalance that I knew would inevitably kill me, likely through drugs and alcohol. I realised that would inevitably mean the destruction of my relationship with my partner, but I rationalised that away as inconsequential because I was going to end up dead anyway, so meh.

That's the sort of fucked up thinking that means I can totally understand why a homosexual man, married with children, might decide to go on online dating apps and act in a way that was always likely to lead to complete ruination of both his reputation and his relationships, because at the point when you are in the grip of an illness, your thinking and decision making is so disordered that you don't make normal, sensible decisions the likes of which most people, and even you yourself would, when you are well. 

It's the most viciously nasty thing about Depression. It completely robs you of your objectivity in every regard, even to the extent that you are often unable to even rationalise that you are, in fact, ill, which is why so many people spiral and never recover. If you can't conceive of the fact you are ill, you can't address it and recover, but it's the illness itself that removes your ability to rationalise, so it's the depression that prevents you from realising and accepting you are depressed, because you have no powers of objectivity. Round and round you go.

Apologies for the wall of text.

I think you are probably correct, in that I suspect he probably wasn't giving much of a shit whether he was caught or not, because again, if he's depressed, he probably couldn't really be objective about the consequences of being caught.

[pozbaird]

Police saying there was no criminal act, so they aren’t doing anything.

Sun failing to provide proof of the allegations, which seem to be that Edwards paid £35k to someone in exchange for explicit photos of them, and sent this person a photo of themselves in their underwear. 

Edwards, having previously admitted mental health problems, has went off-grid and is receiving further treatment for said issues.

 

Have I missed the big ticket points? Seems to me while there are questions to be asked about the BBC, the two biggest issues are - 1. The Sun, provide proof or face the consequences. 2. Huw Edwards, criminal act or not, if proven to be true (the 35k for explicit pics and swanning around in yer’ keks), then your career is over. If it’s true that is.

If the Sun cannot provide proof, and it transpires the whole thing was bullshit, then that’s a different ballgame.