Scoop

Netflix returns to Buckingham Palace to go behind the scenes of the interview that brought down a prince.

Obviously there were nerves on both sides. Attempting to pour balm on troubled waters, Emily Maitlis says to her producer, “Relax, I’ve got this. How difficult can it be talking to the Queen’s son about his friendship with a convicted sex offender?” Maitlis and her producer are in the Palace and are about to meet Prince Andrew to negotiate an exclusive BBC interview about his association with Jeffrey Epstein. When the Prince, or Randy Andy as he is branded in the press, agrees to the cross-examination, the heart rate accelerates in high places. There is a wonderful sequence when both Andrew and Maitlis rehearse what may come, interrogated by figures off-screen, as if the interview had already begun. This was a gladiatorial contest, and both opponents had to be battle-ready. Perhaps the worst advice was offered to Andrew by his private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes): “Just be yourself.”

One’s emotional investment in Philip Martin’s Scoop will largely depend on one’s tolerance for films about members of the royal family. Access to the Windsors seems to have become so commonplace that another on-camera royal showdown seems almost redundant. But this was big news in the world of journalism, and in particular for the future of the BBC, which at the time was on the brink of superannuating 450 members of its newsroom staff. And yet this is less the story of HRH Andrew, or even Emily Maitlis, than of guest producer Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) who, following some inauspicious comments about Maitlis, is on the verge of losing her job. And so there are some light narrative brushstrokes deployed to colour in her background, so that we know she has both a supporting mother (Amanda Redman) and a young son (Zach Colton) on the threshold of being attracted to girls. We also learn that Sam is a single mother and that her journalistic angle is more Daily Mail than Daily Telegraph. If only she could conjure up a headline-catching scoop for the BBC’s Newsnight…

As usual with this sort of thing, the devil is in the detail. The interview became a cause célèbre and the most-watched episode in the history of Newsnight – and it’s available in full on YouTube. More telling is the rage Andrew unloads onto his maid (Mia Threapleton, daughter of Kate Winslet) for placing a stuffed animal in the wrong place on the wall of stuffed animals on his bed. This decidedly odd episode has been confirmed to be accurate, although Andrew actually had 72 teddy bears, all of which had to be meticulously positioned. And then there’s Emily Maitlis herself, striding about the corridors of the Beeb with her whippet Moody in pursuit. The great and the famous inevitably have their eccentricities (although whippets and bears don’t come close to the quirks of Lord Byron and Winston Churchill).

Any exploration of the modus operandi behind the closed doors of an iconic institution is interesting, be it Buckingham Palace or Broadcasting House – but this is hardly new territory. There is a thin line between a half-baked Channel 5 documentary and Spitting Image, and in spite of the miraculous headway of prosthetics, Rufus Sewell does seem an odd choice to play Prince Andrew. While he nails some of the prince’s mannerisms, his unmistakable reedy voice comes nowhere near to replicating the velvet depth of his subject. More convincing is Gillian Anderson as Maitlis, adding to her rogue’s gallery that has included Margaret Thatcher, Wallis Simpson, Miss Haversham and Edwina Mountbatten. But if Billie Piper’s Sam McAlister is the film’s emotional heart (the film is adapted from McAlister’s memoir Scoops), she is merely sidelined by her more famous cast mates. There is an air of slick, eyebrow-elevated sensationalism, but this is no All the President’s Men.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Gillian Anderson, Keeley Hawes, Billie Piper, Rufus Sewell, Romola Garai, Richard Goulding, Amanda Redman, Connor Swindells, Lia Williams, Jordan Kouamé, Zach Colton, Alex Waldmann, Aoife Hinds, Paul Popplewell, Charity Wakefield, Kate Fleetwood, Colin Wells, Mia Threapleton, Timothy Bentinck, Gordon Warnecke, Christopher Fairbank.

Dir Philip Martin, Pro Radford Neville and Hilary Salmon, Screenplay Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, from the book Scoops by Sam McAlister, Ph Nanu Segal, Pro Des Stéphane Collonge, Ed Kristina Hetherington, Music Anne Nikitin and Hannah Peel, Costumes Matthew Price, Sound Paul Carter and Rob Turner, Dialect coaches Helen Jane Simmons, Penny Dyer and William Conacher.

The Lighthouse Film and Television/Voltage TV-Netflix.
102 mins. UK. 2024. UK and US Rel: 5 April 2024. Cert. 15.

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