The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as:  ‘the unhappiness or discouragement that results when your hopes or expectations have not been satisfied, or someone or something that is not as good as you had hoped or expected’

Disappointment can enter our lives at any point, sometimes in a minor way and sometimes in ways so fundamental that we are affected on a deep personal level which can totally change our worldview or our belief in a situation, or person can be altered forever.

I guess this is what has happened with Huw Edwards. A bastion of BBC news for nearly 40 years starting as a news trainee in 1984.

Now I’m not here to discuss the actual story that has placed Huw in the situation he and the BBC find themselves in, the police have decreed there is no case to answer and the BBC investigation has just restarted.

Can Huw return from this, frankly it would be lovely to assume he could but is it possible in a landscape that has totally changed for him?

Many of his viewers may be disappointed in him, he has fallen off the pedestal that he has been placed on. But in truth, it isn’t Huw the man who was on the pedestal in the first place it was ‘him off the telly’.

We create images of celebrities that suit our needs. We don’t know them, not the real person. Yet their familiar presence in our lives means that we begin to feel that we do. 

The rise in social media has enhanced that, we read their tweets and posts and tick-tock, I used to think that such familiarity diminished the star image, they began to sound and feel all too human. But in fact, being now privy to their thoughts and feelings makes them seem not only familiar but accessible.

But we still only see the projections of their life and thoughts that they want us to see, what they choose to share with us.

There is still the unknown quantity of their real lives, the real person. For at the heart of it, that’s what they are, real people, we don’t really see that or sense it but behind our familiarity is a person often far removed from the image, and its when that reality starts to be suddenly accessible, the façade slips, we can find they are not who we built them up to be.

So we become disappointed in them and we find it hard to rebuild that image. But Huw read the news and did correspondence on big events such as the Coronation, he didn’t do self-help books or lifestyle videos only for us to find he didn’t practice what he preached. It seems to me that weren’t actively deceived by him we just didn’t know him.

But what of Huw himself? If the news is to be believed he is less than impressed with how the BBC have handled this. Allegedly the Director General hasn’t even spoken to him and it’s said he isn’t happy with the reporting from the newsroom either. 

In short, it appears he is disappointed with how the BBC, his employer for almost 40 years, has treated the situation, and him.

This could amount to a fundamental breach of trust between him, the employee, and the BBC, the employer which in turn has the possibility to be a breach of contract on two levels. By way of the implied term of mutual trust and confidence and the psychological contract, that unspoken and unwritten agreement between the two parties.

Both breaches are extremely difficult to come back from, these are fundamental principles at the heart of the employment relationship, and with such potential damage, only time will tell where it will leave them both.