Channel 5 Boss Would Not Have Commissioned a Sarah Everard Drama

Channel 5 boss Ben Frow said he would never have commissioned a drama about Sarah Everard for his network.

Jeff Pope is penning a drama about the investigation into Everard’s 2021 murder for the BBC.

Frow, chief content officer at Paramount-owned public service broadcaster 5, said that while he was sure Pope would do a “great job of it” and it’s “a very important story to tell” he would not have commissioned that story.

Explaining his touchstones for commissioning, Frow said they consist of “would I watch it?” then “Is it more trouble than it’s worth?” and finally, “Why am I doing it?”

“There are some things I just wouldn’t do,” he said, pointing to the Everard drama as one of them.

While the BBC show will not dramatize Everard’s kidnap and murder by an off duty policeman during the Covid lockdowns, instead focusing on the investigation, the network has been criticized for selecting a male screenwriter to pen a drama about a murder that was viewed as deeply personal to women across the country and prompted protests at the time (even Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge was spotted laying flowers at a memorial for Everard at the time).

However Frow has not stayed away from controversial topics, including a drama about Huw Edwards, the BBC newsreader convicted for downloading images of child sexual abuse, and another about Madeleine McCann, the toddler who infamously disappeared in 2007 in Portugal during a family holiday. She has never been found.

“The McCanns’ press guy… he was across the whole thing,” Frow said. “They didn’t want to take part in it, but they knew we were doing it.”

Frow went on to say that contributor welfare and privacy is a much more important consideration today than it was ten years ago. “I think the big message that we embrace is that we have to have people on board, and we want to be able to tell their story, and we want to do it in a responsible way, and not in a sneery, jeery, horrible way,” he explained.

Touching on a lawsuit filed recently by production company Blackbox Media against 5 over a shelved drama series, Frow said he couldn’t take in depth about the legal dispute but added: “What I can say is I can reiterate that we take contributor welfare very, very seriously, and if somebody calls and says, ‘I have a problem with that,’ we listen to them.”

“And in some cases, that means that you just you decide that you can no longer do that program,” he continued. “And there are programs that I have written off because it turns out that somebody feels very strongly that we shouldn’t be doing it, or it’s been done in the wrong way. So it’s something to be very mindful of.”