Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew in Scoop. Photo / Netflix
Netflix has made a drama out of the crisis that sealed the Duke of York’s fate. From Emily Maitlis’ whippet to the depiction of Andrew — what does it gloss over?
After the cameras stopped rolling on his catastrophic Newsnight interview in November 2019, Prince Andrew turned to Emily Maitlis and said: “Well, that went well, didn’t it?” It was an extraordinary misjudgment: the grilling about his friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein would force the Duke of York to step back from public life, win the BBC a shelfload of awards and launch a thousand memes: about Andrew’s Pizza-Express-in-Woking alibi, inability to sweat and description of “a straightforward shooting weekend”.
It was deemed such a car crash that it has been mined for two rival projects, the first of which, Scoop, is based on three chapters of a book by Sam McAlister, the producer who helped to secure the interview for Newsnight, and landed on Netflix on Friday. Billie Piper plays McAlister and Gillian Anderson is Maitlis. Amazon’s A Very Royal Scandal, starring Ruth Wilson as Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew, is expected this year.
So how accurate is Scoop? The film features a disclaimer stating that “some parts have been fictionalised”. A number of the real-life protagonists emphasise that the film-makers have used “creative licence” and “heavily dramatised” events, most obviously rejigging the timeline (BBC job cuts were announced after the interview, not before) and turning phone calls and emails into in-person conversations. As McAlister has noted, the writers faced a challenge: they had to turn sending scores of emails into a compelling film.
Some of the most interesting decisions, however, are around characterisation — including that of the duke. Rufus Sewell, transformed through prosthetics from comely to jowly, plays Andrew as a buffoon with a Bridesheadesque teddy bear obsession (true) who reminisces about “Mummy” combing his hair before he went off to boarding school. Sewell says that he modelled his version of Andrew on Ricky Gervais’s David Brent from The Office, a character devoid of self-awareness.
Some viewers will feel this lets the duke off lightly. “Where Netflix slightly pulled its punches, [it was because] they did not want this to become a row with the royal family,” a Palace insider says. “They didn’t want to get into the dynamics of the ‘spare’, and so they made Andrew look like a petulant idiot. There will be people who think they’re glossing over the issue here: that this is a guy who, at the very best, made an appalling error of judgment and at worst turned a blind eye or was complicit in crimes.” Epstein’s victims, while mentioned, are not given a voice in the film.
In the royal camp, Andrew’s former spin doctor Jason Stein comes out of Scoop well — he is a Cassandra who can see that the interview will be a disaster, but is ignored. Stein joined the Palace in September 2019 to try to rebuild Andrew’s reputation, and left before the Newsnight interview was filmed in November. His alternative PR strategy, as shown in the film, was to have tête-à-têtes with royal correspondents and newspaper editors, an approach deemed too slow by the impatient Andrew. Scoop doesn’t show this, but Stein felt that the duke would need to give an interview to mark his 60th birthday in which he would apologise for his association with Epstein to try to detoxify his image. This would have been more tightly controlled: probably conducted by a newspaper, with rules about what could not be asked.
Considering the brutal criticism she received in the press for encouraging Andrew to do the interview, Scoop is relatively sympathetic to his aide Amanda Thirsk. Played by Keeley Hawes, Thirsk, who joined the royal household in 2004 after a career in banking, is portrayed as naive about her boss’s flaws, thinking that he would be able to redeem himself if the world saw him as she did.
“Amanda was let down by her perception of Andrew not being true,” the Palace source says. “The film makes it look like Sam bounced her and that she had no choice, whereas in reality Amanda made enormous mistakes. One of them was that she didn’t use the institutional BBC for this, which has a way and a history of interacting with the Palace — an unwritten contract between the two. The Newsnight crew were like a renegade arm of the BBC who ended up in Buckingham Palace interviewing the renegade prince.” That he was being set up for failure now seems obvious. In the preparation for the interview in the film, Maitlis asks, “What if he is good?” when the reality is that Newsnight wouldn’t have allowed Andrew to “be good”.
This royal source added that while Thirsk “threw away the house advantage” that the monarchy has when dealing with the media, the wider Palace let this interview happen. “I think she made some spectacular mistakes, but she was also allowed to make those mistakes by the royal household, who just didn’t care about Andrew. The film doesn’t really get into that because Netflix doesn’t want to annoy the royal family. In real life, no one stopped Thirsk. There are safety measures to stop such disasters, but the air bags didn’t inflate.” This is only briefly alluded to twice in the drama, with the presence of Queen Elizabeth’s communications secretary, Donal McCabe, before the interview, then later when the director-general of the BBC at the time, Tony Hall, notes that the Palace has not called to try to stop the broadcast.
Scoop shows Andrew going to seek “Mummy’s” approval for the interview, which was conducted in a state room in Buckingham Palace. This remains disputed, with Maitlis and McAlister believing he consulted her and royal sources insisting that she was told only after the interview had been arranged.
Andrew’s fiasco was, of course, Newsnight’s triumph. The show had been struggling with dwindling audiences and locked in infernal Brexit debates; afterwards, one of the show’s most senior staff said that the interview had bought it a stay of execution. The timing of this drama seems “mad” to Newsnight staffers now, as the programme faces big cuts and is to have its run time reduced to 30 minutes with less focus on investigations.
Where the film seems to stick most closely to the facts is round the interview negotiations. It did all begin with a press release about Pitch@Palace, Andrew’s initiative to encourage entrepreneurship. Princess Beatrice came to a meeting, although another source remembers her as more “standoffish” than in the show where she, like Thirsk, is excited to meet Maitlis. McAlister did tell Andrew that he was still perceived by the public as “Randy Andy” and “Air Miles Andy”.
After the interview Andrew was pleased with himself and offered Maitlis a palace tour. However, while in Scoop Maitlis jokes about being smuggled into the palace à la Martin Bashir coming to see Princess Diana, the reality was more mundane, with Newsnight sources saying they walked in through the front door.
This film is McAlister’s version of events; Maitlis will tell hers in the three-part series A Very Royal Scandal, which she has executive-produced. In the Newsnight offices, staff assume that Maitlis, who left the BBC in 2022, is irked by the Netflix version, although she is diplomatic to her friends, telling them that she is happy for McAlister. In turn, there have been many rumours that McAlister feels her part in negotiating the interview has been diminished by colleagues, including in a July 2020 interview that Maitlis and the Newsnight editor at the time, Esme Wren, gave to Radio Times that didn’t mention her. McAlister says that the animosity between her and Maitlis on screen isn’t real — it’s just drama.
Some at the BBC feel the portrayal of Maitlis is unfair. Gillian Anderson has deployed the same languid superiority that she used when playing Margaret Thatcher in The Crown, making Maitlis seem haughty, cold and eccentric, bordering on weird. “Maitlis is rigorous, brilliant and has high standards, but she was popular at Newsnight — and she’s friendly, generous and really not grand,” a friend says.
Her dog Moody is in the office all the time in Scoop, like an emotional support animal (Anderson said at the premiere that the hound was a diva so she was often filmed holding a lead with no dog attached). Maitlis wrote on Twitter/X that she had been “upstaged by my own whippet — again” as she shared the Scoop trailer. In reality, Newsnight insiders say that she never brought Moody in when presenting as it would be such a long shift, only very occasionally taking him in when she had a couple of hours of interview prep or briefings to do.
The film has divided opinion in the BBC. There are those who applaud that one of the corporation’s army of underpaid and often underappreciated production staff is enjoying a moment in the sun and a more vociferous group who complain that McAlister has taken too much of the glory.
“BBC presenters hog the credit all the time and they’re well paid; I don’t understand why people are so resentful of someone who used to be pretty poorly paid profiting from their work,” a producer on another BBC news programme says. “Sam’s just spotted an opportunity and run — in her leopard print boots — with it.” McAlister has told the story of how a BBC executive spent more on taxis than she earned in a year working part-time, and said at the Scoop premiere that “usually people in my role behind the scenes … don’t really get heard about”.
A former Newsnight staffer, however, said that McAlister had taken too much credit for what was a team job. “There were a few people who were absolutely fundamental in getting that interview to happen — [the deputy editor at the time] Stewart Maclean being the key one,” they said. “Without him, it would never have happened — he got it across the line with Amanda, and stayed in touch with her long after.” Others whose roles have been diluted, they added, include the Newsnight staffers Alicia Quiero, Stuart Denman and Jake Morris, who “are being erased from the picture, [but] they were utterly fundamental.” Another Newsnight source added that the absence of many colleagues from McAlister’s book launch and the Scoop premiere was telling: “It wasn’t a one-woman triumph … Telly is a team effort with hours of phonecalls.”
The pursuit of truth is a journalistic aim, but the story of how that interview came about in November 2019 perhaps illustrates the wisdom of the royal household’s line about its own internal dramas: recollections do indeed vary.
Scoop is on Netflix now.
Written by: Rosamund Urwin
© The Times of London
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