Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I aimed to be just like Line of Duty’s Kate with Andrew
Maitlis tells of prep for TV chat
EMILY Maitlis has said she channelled DCI Kate Fleming from police drama Line of Duty as she grilled Prince Andrew in his car-crash TV interview. The BBC Newsnight presenter, 49, said she wanted to use the “forensic approach” of Vicky Mcclure’s anti-corruption cop. The chat last November, in which she tackled Andrew on sex allegations and his friendship with paedo Jeffrey Epstein, has won two Royal Television Society Awards. Emily said: “I was channelling DCI Kate Fleming. There’s something so calmly forensic about the way she does it. It’s unemotional, calm, quiet, but you know she’s done her homework. “That was what I wanted. I’d have shown myself up if I’d got dates wrong, names wrong, said something he’d had to contradict because I’d mixed things up.”
The interview was a PR disaster for the Duke, 60, who has denied all allegations against him.
His bizarre comments included insisting he could not have been a sweaty man his sex accuser told of being in a club with because “an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War, when I was shot at” meant he could not sweat. Emily, speaking on the Table Manners podcast, said it was prompted by her telling of her own love of a rush.
She said: “I am quite adrenaline-driven. I am fascinated by adrenaline. Weirdly, that is what I said to him when he said, ‘I must tell you about why I don’t sweat because of the adrenaline’. I said ‘I am fascinated about adrenaline’. Then he told me about the no sweating thing.
“I thought I hated it [adrenaline] and now I have had to recognise it is a part of what I do and what I need. I know I need my highs and know I have to expect my lows.
“So there are crashes but all that is done away from the cameras and away from the interview. I try not to bring that into work.”
The full interview is on the new episode of Jesse Ware’s Table Manners podcast.