Content warning: mentions of child abuse
The BBC faced a crisis in 2023 when Huw Edwards, the lead presenter for the channel, was accused of sexual misconduct. This was very serious sexual misconduct—he was accused of grooming a 17-year-old and buying “sordid images” from him. Edwards resigned from the BBC, and the situation snowballed. In 2024, Edwards was found guilty of making indecent images of children.
This horrified the whole of the U.K., who’d come to see Edwards as a comforting figure in their living rooms. He was the man who announced the death of the Queen, and he’d even had a voice cameo in the wildly popular, family-friendly Doctor Who.
Edwards showed up in the season 2 episode of NuWho, “Fear Her,” which was released in 2006 and set during the then-future 2012 Olympics. The episode deals with child abuse and treats it with the seriousness it deserves.
The story focuses on a little girl called Chloe, the victim of an abusive father, who has the power to make things disappear when she draws them. The Doctor and his companion Rose investigate missing children in her area and eventually realize Chloe has formed a bond with an alien who just wants a friend. Chloe draws all the people in the Olympic stadium and makes them disappear, and that’s when Huw Edwards comes in. “My God, what’s going on here? The crowd has just vanished right in front of my eyes,” he says. The episode ends with David Tennant’s Doctor picking up the Olympic Flame and running with it into the stadium, and Edwards gets a few lines of dialogue there as well.
Obviously, the episode couldn’t remain on BBC iPlayer with Edwards’ voice in it. Everything involving him needed to be pulled. So by August 2024, it had gone, with reassurances that it would be back as soon as Edwards’ voice was dubbed over with another actor. It’s taken a while to do this, and some Doctor Who fans wondered if it would take years, as the BBC probably had other things on their plate in the wake of the scandal. But “Fear Her” has now returned to the Doctor Who collection on iPlayer, and Edwards has been dubbed over with the voice of an actress named Becky Wright. There are also some slight, very slight, changes to the dialogue. (For example, “Bob? Not you too?” is now “Not you too, Bob.”)
Not all Doctor Who fans like “Fear Her” (it suffers from being a break before an explosive, dramatic finale), but it’s a perfectly solid little episode, and it’s good to see it back. As for Edwards, his legacy is irreparably ruined, and deservedly so.
Published: Feb 13, 2025 09:59 am