Cinderella story in Scoop shines light on unsung hero
Booking is the black art without which mustsee TV interviews would never happen. The booker’s job is to beat out rivals to coax a subject to appear on camera. The only cardinal rule, especially in news journalism, is that nobody is paid for an interview.
Instead the booker builds a personal rapport, offering a chance to set the record straight and the oxygen of publicity. Bookers are sometimes seen as not as important as editors and presenters. And yet behind every famous presenter is a Rottweiler of a booker.
Scoop is a kind of booker’s Cinderella tale, with the under-appreciated booker of the famous Newsnight Prince Andrew interview emerging as the heroine of the story.
Billie Piper plays Sam McAlister, a working-class single mother who has ascended to rarefied heights in the BBC, the Newsnight production team. Her colleagues feel iffy about her – too blonde and brassy and “a bit Daily Mail”, as one of her colleagues bitches.
The feeling is mutual. Sam finds the nightly Punch and Judy show between two people talking about the news boring and she actually respects tabloid journalists and their scoop rate. As with all booking success stories, the stars have to align somewhat and in McAlister’s case this comes in two ways.
First, the endless drip-drip of Jeffrey Epstein stories about Andrew has made the royal feel he has to do something. Second, Sam has the self-possession to face down his PR handlers’ attempts to tame her into an Andrew-friendly poodle.
She wants an interview and won’t accept any questions being off the table. As more allegations about Andrew emerge, she turns the screw by using an old booking tactic – leveraging the star power of the presenter.
She brings Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) to the palace to impress Andrew and they and Princess Beatrice gang up on him by insisting the villagers – in the form of Twitter users – are at the gates.
As the BBC, they will be fair and not sensationalist, they tell him. It’s never in any doubt that Andrew is thick enough to fall for this and there is a split in his PR team, with his well-meaning right-hand woman overruling her younger male colleague, a former hack.
The interview itself is not a patch on the real thing. Best (worst) moments videos crowd YouTube, and though Rufus Sewell masterfully delivers Andrew’s repertoire of hesitant and haughty verbal tics, the scenes never rise to the sheer fist-biting horror of the interview itself.
All this time later, it might have been interesting if Scoop humanised its villain but it is remorseless with Andrew. As the scales fall from his eyes, he has just got out of the shower and is pictured from behind, soaking wet, part exposed amphibian, part emperor with no clothes.
Anderson plays Maitlis somewhere between an impudent Thatcher and a prosecutorial Queen’s Counsel and is leagues too posh. This leaves Piper as the heroine of not just the story, but the cast.
As she showed on I Hate Suzie, she excels at playing frightened women wading through bullshit. Her eyes scanning somewhere over the shoulder of the viewer and a rictus grin fading from her face, she is a tremulous and magnetic underdog.
The best line of the whole thing is when Maitlis and Andrew are talking about how it went afterward and Maitlis comments that it was “a walk in the park”. That’s a reference back to the real moment that Andrew’s world began to unravel, when, in 2010, journalist Annette Witheridge and photographer Jae Donnelly of the News of the World got the real scoop on which everything else was built– Andrew’s Central Park stroll with Epstein.
The pair are barely sketched in this film, which shows that, even after the dust has settled, there are still unsung heroes in journalism and lionising tabloid hacks will have to wait for another day.