The car-crash interview that rocked the ROYALS
Rufus Sewell plays Prince Andrew and Gillian Anderson is Emily Maitlis in a drama telling the full story of the prince’s catastrophic TV encounter
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SCOOP Netflix, from Friday
It was the excruciating television interview that hurried the downfall of a prince and put Pizza Express in Woking on the map. Now Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 showdown with Emily Maitlis about his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has sparked two new dramas.
First out of the blocks is Scoop, a breezy Netflix film telling the back story of how the interview came about from the point of view of Newsnight’s down-toearth producer and booker, Sam McAlister.
She’s played in shades and snakeskin boots by Billie Piper. Gillian Anderson heads the rest of the impressive cast looking uncannily like Maitlis, while Rufus Sewell plays Andrew, and Keeley Hawes his private secretary, Amanda Thirsk.
The film focuses on the negotiations, spurred along by the sassy McAlister, and how the Palace was convinced to go ahead, with a script by Peter Moffat (who also wrote legal dramas North Square, Silk and Your Honor, starring Bryan Cranston).
It then recreates parts of the at-times surreal interview and the aftermath as a happy, but deluded, Prince Andrew invited Maitlis to a guided tour of Buckingham Palace.
A few days later he would step back from royal duties and find himself stripped (literally here) of his titles.
McAlister has since left the BBC and teaches negotiating at the LSE Law School. She has talked of wanting the film to celebrate tenacious journalists working behind the scenes, and in particular women journalists. The show’s producers also hope that the film will give a voice to the voiceless women victims in the Epstein story.
Still to come later this year is A Very Royal Scandal, a three-part series from Amazon, with Maitlis herself as executive producer, telling the story from her point of view. Ruth Wilson plays her, and Michael Sheen is the prince.
It’s debatable whether we need two more stokings of the fire. And it’s hard to beat the sheer drama of the original. Watching it now (it’s still available on YouTube), even though you know what’s coming – ‘It was just a straightforward shooting weekend’, ‘I didn’t sweat at the time’, or ‘He has quite obviously conducted himself in a manner unbecoming’ – it’s still hard to believe he’s actually going to say what he does.