Scoop (TV)
Philip Martin (2024)
Jeffrey Epstein committed abominable crimes but the 2019 Newsnight interview between Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis had a strong element of farce. The Prince meant to draw a line under the matter of his friendship with Epstein and the allegations made against him (Andrew) by Virginia Giuffre née Roberts. In the event, the interview was the nail in the coffin of his royal career: stripped of his HRH, Andrew withdrew from public duties and no longer receives taxpayer funding. In Scoop, Netflix’s entertaining dramatisation of events around the Newsnight fiasco, Philip Martin negotiates well the chasm between the serious matters underlying the interview and the comical downfall that it brought about.
Scoop’s screenplay, by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, is adapted from Sam(antha) McAlister’s Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews. McAlister was part of the Newsnight production team involved and claims chief credit for securing the interview. Most of the story’s main players in BBC news are women: as well as Sam (Billie Piper) and Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), there’s Esme Wren (Romola Garai), Sam’s boss and the Newsnight editor. Fran Unsworth (Lia Williams) is the Corporation’s Director of News and Current Affairs. (All four are now doing other things, by the way.) Esme Wren’s right-hand man Stewart MacLean (Richard Goulding) is a minor character. I’m guessing from his lack of surname that Freddy (Jordan Kouamé), whose spats with Sam register more strongly, is an invented one. The worrying context of Newsnight operations is looming BBC cuts – in an early scene, Fran Unsworth announces the impending loss of 450 jobs. Once this is established, the workplace tensions play out unremarkably: Freddy wants news items, especially Brexit items, more politically substantial than the kind Sam seems to be after; Sam is vexed by high-profile Emily, whom she thinks a prima donna, and so on. But the female dominance of the set-up influences and benefits Scoop’s tone. Because the victims of Epstein et al were girls, it’s poetic justice that women make the Prince Andrew interview happen. It’s also, it seems, a fact – one the film-makers consider too important to obscure in a flip, smug treatment of events.
The narrative alternates chiefly between the Newsnight office and Buckingham Palace, with the addition of scenes of Sam’s home life, with her young son Lucas (Zach Colton) and her mother (Amanda Redman), who looks after Lucas when single-parent Sam’s at work. These latter are well enough played though there’s a bit too much about Sam’s self-doubt, soon to be banished by the journalistic coup heading in her direction. At Buck House, Andrew (Rufus Sewell) does jokey presentations to Pitch@ Palace (some kind of entrepreneur-connecting outfit), erupts at a maid who fails to arrange part of his large collection of teddy bears properly, and is looked after by his adoring private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes). She’s in no doubt about his vast reserves of personal charm and, dismayed by the Epstein connection’s effect on Andrew’s public reputation, runs with the idea of TV viewers getting to experience his charm, too. Jason Stein (Alex Waldmann), recently recruited as the Prince’s PR manager, is, to put it mildly, less sure and miffed that he’s getting sidelined. Jason gets ignored by the film as well as by the Prince – he just disappears from it.
In contrast, Sam McAlister gets more screen time than she merits but Billie Piper is likeable in the role. There’s good work in smaller parts from Romola Garai, Lia Williams, Jordan Kouamé and Connor Swindells, as the New York-based paparazzo who snaps Andrew and Epstein (Colin Wells) walking in Central Park at the start of the film. Keeley Hawes does the best she can with her somewhat puzzling character. But Scoop is – has to be – all about the two actors playing Andrew and Emily Maitlis. Gillian Armstrong and Rufus Sewell both benefit from first-rate make-up. They both deliver some high-class impersonation of the real people’s mannerisms, especially the way they hold and move their heads. Beyond that, though, one performance is a lot more successful than the other.
Emily Maitlis was forty-nine in 2019; Gillian Anderson is only fifty-five now but she seems a lot older than the woman she’s playing. The same thing happened in The Crown: Margaret Thatcher wasn’t yet sixty when the events dramatised supposedly took place but, in Anderson’s interpretation, she seemed ancient (at least a generation older than Olivia Colman’s version of the Queen). Anderson is so intent on perfect vocal mimicry that she gives the impression of checking how she sounds as she delivers her lines; at any rate she speaks too slowly and her imitation thereby loses technical accuracy. There’s a bigger problem, too. Scoop presents Maitlis in ways that justify Sam McAlister’s perceptions of her. Emily, who regularly brings her dog to the office (it’s a whippet, echoing its owner’s sleek, streamlined look), is calmly full of herself. But when she takes Andrew apart, it’s proof to Sam that the colossal ego of Newsnight‘s senior anchor is well worth putting up with. It’s not too hard to imagine that Emily Maitlis doesn’t lack for self-esteem; the trouble is, the same goes for Gillian Anderson as a performer – transparently so. If you watch the real interview, you notice that Maitlis sometimes seems sympathetic to Andrew – enough anyway to lull him into a false sense of security (or complacency). She varies the pitch and tempo of her questions; she occasionally gives little half-smiles. Anderson, by comparison, is gimlet-eyed and intimidating throughout, stressing the importance of what she’s doing. Unable to mask her self-regard as an actress, she sacrifices the means whereby Maitlis masks her formidable qualities as an interrogator.
When I read that Rufus Sewell had been cast as Andrew, I smiled – simply because Sewell’s an actor whose versatile, good-humoured animation tends to make you smile whatever he’s in. Even so, I did wonder if he was the right man to play well-fed, pompous Prince Andrew. It helps, of course, that the actor is encased from head to toe in ingenious prosthetic (including a briefly glimpsed fake backside, ‘specially shipped in’, according to what Sewell told Radio Times); but would he be submerged, as well as enlarged, by this? It turns out not at all. Sewell uses his native wit both to make Andrew quite droll in his blokeish way and to bring out the comic aspect of the car-crash interview. Emily has given plenty of thought to how she should dress for it; when Andrew sees her entering the room, his first word to her is ‘Trousers!’; Sewell manages to make the exclamation jocular yet misogynistic, which feels perfectly right. He’s a wonderful blend of rebarbative and ridiculous when Andrew blathers that he couldn’t have bought Virginia Roberts drinks in Tramps nightclub because he doesn’t know where the bar is there, and besides he was at a Pizza Express in Woking with his children on the evening in question.
Philip Martin, who has directed almost exclusively for television hitherto, does a good job throughout but his film suffers from one frustrating oversight. Scoop is soon to be followed by Amazon’s A Very Royal Scandal, based on the same events: the former is a single (103-minute) drama, the latter will be a three-episode series (with Ruth Wilson as Emily Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew); A Very Royal Scandal may therefore have more time to devote than Scoop does to the briefing Andrew received for the Newsnight interview[1]. Martin cross-cuts between Emily Maitlis rehearsing while she’s out running in a London park and Andrew’s getting coaching from Amanda and Jason – but only briefly. During the recording, Amanda intervenes anxiously at one point but is rebuffed by Andrew and retreats to the sidelines. From this point on, she’s shown smiling there; Amanda, like her deluded boss (and the Queen’s press secretary, who also watches on), appears to think it’s all gone rather well. Straight after Scoop, Sally and I watched – for the first time in its entirety – the actual interview on BBC iPlayer. I felt the dramatisation’s lack of coverage of interview prep all the more keenly after seeing the real thing. Prince Andrew is astoundingly inept: incapable of giving a short answer, he much prefers to dig holes for himself. Did he go off script or did he not even have a script in his head to depart from?
5 April 2024
[1] Afternote: A Very Royal Scandal is indeed clearer on this. It also gives a more detailed account of the recording and editing of the interview, devoting nearly all the second episode (the best of the three) to this. The acting, writing and direction are all strong. For much of the last episode, though, I did wonder if the story of Andrew’s downfall merited quite so much screen time.