Huw Edwards won't lose BAFTA for royal coverage after child sex images charges
The former newsreader pleaded guilty to several charges last week.
Huw Edwards will not be stripped of his awards, including his BAFTA for coverage of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, after pleading guilty to indecent child images charges.
BAFTA, the Royal Television Society, and the Television and Radio Industries Club confirmed to Deadline that Edwards would not be stripped of his awards, noting that the awards recognised the efforts of production teams and not just Edwards as a presenter.
BAFTA, however, is "reviewing seven individual prizes handed to Edwards by the BAFTA Cymru Awards".
"Like everyone in the industry and country, we were shocked by the news – given the seriousness of this abhorrent crime, we are reviewing," a spokesperson for BAFTA told RadioTimes.com.
A spokesperson for the RTS said: "Our Live Event category for the RTS Programme Awards is presented to a programme as a whole and the team behind it. We are therefore not reviewing or rescinding this award from 2023."
A TRIC spokesperson added: "The BBC Events team won the TRIC Award for Live Event coverage of The State Funeral HM Queen Elizabeth II [in 2023]. On the day Huw Edwards spoke on behalf of the team to accept the award."
The former BBC newsreader pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children on Wednesday 31st July.
Edwards was charged with having six category A images on a phone as well as 12 category B pictures and 19 category C pictures.
The category A images were mostly of children aged 13 to 15, the court heard, but prosecutors said there were two moving images of a young child, estimated to be between seven and nine years old (per Sky News).
The court was told that Edwards had been involved in a WhatsApp chat from December 2020 with an adult man, who sent him 377 sexual images, of which 41 were indecent images of children.
The court heard that in February 2021, the man asked whether those featured in the images he was sending were too young, to which Edwards told him not to send anything illegal. No more were sent, and the pair continued to exchange legal pornographic images until April 2022.
Edwards's defence lawyer, Philip Evans KC, said: "There's no suggestion in this case that Mr Edwards has... in the traditional sense of the word, created any image of any sort.
"It is important also to remember for context that devices, Mr Edwards's devices, have been seized, have been searched, and there's nothing in those devices. It is only the images that are the subject of the charges that came via a WhatsApp chat.
"Mr Edwards did not keep any images, did not send any to anyone else, and did not and has not sought similar images from anywhere else."
Edwards will be sentenced at Westminster Magistrates' Court on 16th September, where he faces possible jail time.
Authors
Katelyn Mensah is the Entertainment and Factual Writer for Radio Times, covering all major entertainment programmes, reality TV shows and the latest hard-hitting documentaries. She previously worked at The Tab, with a focus on reality TV and showbiz news and has obtained a BA (Hons) in Journalism.
