Naked and shamed, this is Andrew’s hubris laid bare
LESS than five years after Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis grilled Prince Andrew about his friendship with the paedophile sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the specific claim that a 17-year- old girl was forced to have sex with him on three occasions (allegations he has repeatedly denied), the infamous interview and events leading up to it have been dramatised by Netflix. No surprise there.
After all, following that special edition of Newsnight on November 16, 2019, one royal commentator tweeted that he had expected the interview to be ‘a train wreck’.
But for Andrew it was more seismically disastrous than that, he added. It was ‘a plane crashing into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami, triggering a nuclear explosion’.
Well, I can think of dramas about plane crashes, tsunamis, nuclear explosions and indeed the misadventures of oil tankers, so – even metaphorically – all those things combined with the Royal Family were certain to end, sooner or later, in a feature film.
No less surprisingly, Scoop boasts a topquality cast. A jowly Rufus Sewell plays Andrew and, if you squint quite a lot, you can just about believe it’s him.
Maitlis is portrayed by Gillian Anderson as stick-thin, brittle and imperious, which seems about right, marching through the BBC’s offices with her pet whippet, intimidating everyone.
KEELEY Hawes is Andrew’s mumsy private secretary, Amanda Thirsk. Romola Garai plays the fierce Newsnight editor Esme Wren. And brassy Sam McAlister, the programme’s interview booker whose tenacity landed the prize catch, is played, splendidly, by Billie Piper.
The film begins in New york in 2010, when photographer Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells) takes the now notorious snap of Andrew and Epstein strolling through Central Park, in earnest conversation. It then whisks us forward to 2019.
The BBC is deep in the mire, facing massive job losses, and McAlister fully expects the chop.
Moreover, she is not a natural fit at Newsnight. The BBC’s daily current affairs programme is staffed by middle- class liberals driven by notions of their own importance but, more especially, that of their ‘flagship’ show, which they consider to be woven into the very fabric of the nation.
McAlister is a working-class single mum who eats kebabs, travels by bus and relies on her own mother (Amanda Redman) to care for her teenage son when she’s at work. She is not part of the club.
‘I’m not a snob but she’s very Daily Mail,’ observes executive producer Stewart Maclean (Richard Goulding), snobbishly, of McAlister. And so she is. She is a Mail reader, fully in tune with the Mail’s values, with a tabloid nose for news that her colleagues only belatedly come to appreciate.
She begins to woo Buckingham Palace, forging a strong working relationship with Thirsk, who has Andrew’s ear. When Epstein is arrested, and later found dead in his prison cell, further details of his heinous crimes begin to emerge. An interview duly becomes more urgent on both sides. Andrew seeks, and gets, the approval of ‘Mummy’ (the Queen), to whom he is clearly in thrall.
Peter Moffat’s script is at its most mischievous with its depiction of an emotionally arrested prince, obsessing about his teddy bears, and guffawing about the media interest in his dealings with Epstein, when ‘I knew Jimmy Savile so much better’.
like Netflix’s The Crown, director Philip Martin’s film deftly mixes historical truths with dramatic licence. But fiction can’t compete with fact. Scoop is never more electrifying than when it finally arrives at the only part of the story we already know intimately, the interview itself, with all its extraordinary minutiae about Pizza Express in Woking and Andrew’s supposed inability to sweat. It is very carefully and convincingly recreated.
After the recording, Andrew is cock-a-hoop. He, and his advisers, all think it’s gone exceedingly well. But when Newsnight airs two days later he steps out of his bath to receive the barrage of phone messages confirming the absolute opposite.
Martin shoots him from behind, flabby and bare-bottomed as he silently confronts the implications of a royal life imploding. The imagery could hardly be less subtle but is all the more powerful for it: Here he stands, in the lap of privilege, completely exposed and entirely alone.