To say a lot has happened since 2019 would be an understatement. 2019, you see, was not just your usual “five years ago” – it was the Before Times. Before transmission rates and isolation and lateral flows, before Volodymyr Zelensky was a household name, before
Twitter turned to X, before the
British public decided they knew what “lying-in-state” meant. And so it can be easy to forget that Emily Maitlis ’s cataclysmic interview with Prince Andrew about his friendship with the paedophile, rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – the same interview that caused his resignation from public duties and subsequent stripping of royal titles by his mother, the late
Queen Elizabeth II – was not some ancient event etched into a Wiltshire hillside but was, in fact, five years ago, too. This renders the creation of TV drama about said interview slightly strange. Recently, a trend has emerged for dramatising news rather quickly after the actual event, from
Brexit (2019’s Brexit: The Uncivil War , starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings) to Covid (2022’s This
England , following the events in Boris Johnson’s government during the first wave of the pandemic) to Wagatha Christie (2022’s Vardy V Rooney: A Courtroom Drama, plus a play, plus a book). And, as with those stories, the question remains what a
Netflix dramatisation starring Gillian Anderson , Rufus Sewell and Billie Piper could really add to a story that is still so raw, so relevant, and so readily available on
YouTube in all its glorious, squirming reality. Watching Scoop , which hits Netflix tomorrow – an
Amazon show starring Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson is also in the works – I’m still not quite sure of the answer. Based on one chapter of the 2022 book Scoops by Sam McAlister, the Newsnight producer who secured the exclusive interview, it takes us through the story of the story, with nail-biting calls, press meetings, the filming process and the fallout. To the extent that it offers new insight, it’s on the inner workings of broadcast journalism and the often stressy politics of public relations – the topics on which McAlister, in her book, is best equipped to comment. While these somewhat niche themes do come through, there are too many stories being told, and it’s difficult to know what to focus on. Is it McAlister (Piper), the plucky underdog who doesn’t fit in at the
BBC but is determined to prove her worth by securing the biggest story of the decade? Is it news journalism in the
Social Media age (in one of the film’s more subtle pieces of foreshadowing, Andrew is adamant that he doesn’t pay attention to Twitter, the same website on which the interview ultimately blows up)? Or is it simply the very story that was told in the first place by Maitlis, an expert journalist, and Andrew himself, a blustering irrelevance who has feasted exuberantly at the forbidden cookie jar and wheels out excuse after excuse with no idea he has chocolate all round his mouth? It’s clear that, it being her book, it’s McAlister, kitted out in Chanel and Louis Vuitton and played brilliantly by Piper in a blonde wig, who is the protagonist here. Yet confusion arises because it is the latter spectacle of Maitlis and the Prince that is most interesting, entertaining and revolting – and while there is a thrill in reliving it, it’s not a patch on the real thing. After much preamble – the buzzing of iPhones, frazzling of nerves and rehearsing of questions and answers – Anderson and Sewell sit opposite one another in that now-famous Buckingham Palace ballroom, hashing out sections of the interview transcript verbatim. But I would rather hear the real Maitlis spit the words “he was a sex offender” when Andrew tries to pass off Epstein as simply “unbecoming”, and I would rather hear the real Andrew dig himself into holes about Pizza Express,
shooting parties and an alleged inability to sweat. It is to Scoop ’s credit that despite these issues, it is still, in parts, gripping. There is a certain thrill in being party to Palace press politics, in seeing BBC staff at each other’s throats, and in watching people make fateful decisions of which we already know the consequences. A fragile camaraderie develops between the straight-talking, go-getting McAlister and Andrew’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes). (Thirsk was – one might say fairly – sacked after the interview aired, and had maintained a dogged faith in Andrew throughout: a few seconds before the cameras roll, she whispers in his ear to “just be yourself”.) They have a kind of parallel warfare during the interview scene, conducted via stares over the camera crew, in the certain knowledge that one of them is going down. Anderson, too, is predictably riveting as Maitlis. She is framed here as an untouchable, aloof goddess within her team, in almost exact parallel to Andrew in his (both are frontmen of their respective operations, and one is significantly better equipped to deal with the pressure than the other). Maitlis has since spoken of how she was so nervous before the interview that she hid in the loo in Buckingham Palace to collect herself, and Anderson does a stellar
Job at conveying the stakes: your palms are – unlike Andrew’s – sweaty, your stomach clenched in anticipation. At times, with Maitlis’s signature blonde bob and eyeliner, the resemblance is so uncanny you double-take. Read Next Gillian Anderson has never had a tougher role than Emily Maitlis Sewell is also resplendent as Andrew, with prosthetic double-chin and a single, somewhat gratuitous shot of his bare bum. But these impressive performances can’t override the feeling that Scoop doesn’t have much to say. It’s more than 90 minutes long, and I could have done without the shots of Palace staff hoovering the carpet. I also could have done without the dewy-eyed final scenes, in which McAlister finally gets her dues in a tweet by Esme Wren (Romola Garai), Newsnight ’s then-executive producer, and when Wren makes an inspirational office speech when Andrew resigns. It’s a little bloated, and a little self-congratulatory – two things it needn’t have been, given the strength of the original story. Scoop is, in large part, enjoyable. But McAlister pitched the interview to Andrew with one of the show’s less subtle pieces of foreshadowing – “an hour of television can change everything”. It’s certainly not going to be this one.