Review: Scoop, Prince Andrew's disastrous Newsnight interview reconstructed

To paraphrase his late sister-in-law, there are three princes in the sorry, disastrous story of Andrew does Newsnight.

There's the Duke of York in Netflix’s reconstruction of the interview, uncannily impersonated by Rufus Sewell, who’s watching it back later with mounting horror as Emily Maitlis spins her web.

And presumably with the release of the film - making a drama out of yet another Royal crisis - the real Andy is watching, too. Watching himself, watching himself.

So is he watching, like Sewell’s Duke of York, from the foot of the bed with his vast, crowded menagerie of teddy bears propped up on the pillow behind him? Well, maybe one bear is whispering to another: “We told him at the time, didn’t we? ‘Don’t bally well do this because you’ll only end up looking an even bigger idiot with even more insane self-perception and judgement.’”

Starring Gillian Anderson as Maitlis, Scoop is scripted by the Scottish dramatist Peter Moffat. Andrew didn’t figure overmuch in The Crown but he’s certainly got his own show now. He’s the only Royal to figure here, being very much left to his own terrible devices as he attempts to explain his association with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and refute the claims he had sex with the teenaged Virginia Giuffre.

This is a sticky situation for Andrew. As sticky as the mozzarella on the margherita available in all good branches of Pizza Express including Woking where he claimed he was dining with his daughters on the night in question so he couldn’t possibly have been at the Tramp nightclub with Guiffre.

And Sewell is tremendous as a man who inside must be turning and churning waterwheels of perspiration but of course this never shows on the outside because he doesn’t sweat.

It’s a performance deftly switching from entitled arrogance to desperate vulnerability. One minute the prince, rehearsing his denial with private secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) when he uses the language of Bill Clinton regarding Monica Lewinsky, is having to be reprimanded: “Please, don’t ever say ‘that woman’.”

The next he’s lost in a whispered memory of childhood and the morning the Queen packed him off to boarding school. “Mummy combed my hair,” he says. “It hurt, but I didn’t want it to stop.”

Thus the bar has been set high for Michael Sheen who later this year will deliver his own impression of Andrew for Amazon Prime. Further evidence that, post-The Crown, we serfs cannot get enough of Royal bin-raking with the aim of demonstrating that, underneath the ermine, the Windsors are not that much different from the rest of us.

Scoop, though, isn’t entirely Andrew’s show. It isn’t entirely his inquisitor’s either, with Maitlis - if this is accurate - revealed to be far less cool and poised than she appeared when fronting the BBC current affairs programme. In other words, under pressure at work, not that much different from the rest of us.

When the prince confirms he’ll submit to the interview - and when the Newsnight production team can forget about all the times Nigel Farage turned them down for a barney about Brexit because, get in there, here’s a world exclusive - editor Esme Wren (Romola Garai) warns how a Beeb-bashing press will be willing them to muck up. “If we get it wrong the story won’t be Andrew, it’ll be us,” she says. And Maitlis, aware that at 10.30pm of an evening she’s not everyone’s cup of Horlicks, interjects: “No it won’t, it’ll be me.”

There’s a case to be made for the most interesting figure being that of Billie Piper’s Sam McAlister, the producer who brought home the scoop. Every day leading up to that moment, with staffing cuts about to hit, she fears for her job. Almost every day she bickers with colleagues who think she’s a bit too tabloidy for it.

But McAlister is what old-school, hard-nosed journalists would term a “good operator”. She can sniff a potential story and be terrier-like in pursuit of it. She does all the research, all the leg-work (Maitlis meanwhile is described as having “the best knees on television”). But, once Andrew agrees, McAlister is excluded from the initial strategy meetings.

She and Maitlis have an awkward relationship. In the newsroom she mouths off about the presenter being the darling of the north London chattering classes unaware that Maitlis is standing right behind her. When Thirsk asks what the prince would be encountering in Maitlis, McAlister says: “She runs, she swims, she interviews. Nobody’s ever seen her eat.” But it’s McAlister who seals the deal. She gives it to Andrew straight. “You know how people see you,” she says. Andrew, seemingly unaware: “Spell it out.” McAlister: “Randy Andy, Air-miles Andy, sex, girls, private islands, money … ” With the stench of scandal enveloping the Queen’s favourite he can’t just say nothing. Maitlis to be fair is impressed.

Then there’s Andrew. “Can you see how good he is with people?” says Thirsk while watching a meet-and-greet. Actually, not really. He’s uncomfortable in his skin, permanently on edge, and little wonder. He tells his loyal servant: “I don’t know why everyone is obsessed with my friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. I knew Jimmy Savile so much better.”

When Maitlis arrives at Buckingham Palace for the interview and the famous knees are covered up he yelps: “Trousers!” When it’s all over he says to her: “I think that all went very well.” Before she leaves he suggests a quick tour of the gilded gaffe. The teddies must have been groaning in unison.