Scoop is a dramatized account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The one he imagined would allow him to put Jeffrey Epstein behind him, but instead put Pizza Express (Woking) on the map, made us want to claw our own faces off with the horror of it, and led to the Queen stripping him of all his royal and military titles. (I think you know you are in trouble with Mummy when this happens.)
Although Scoop is billed as a “film,” this isn’t especially cinematic. It’s more like a bonus episode of The Crown but it is phenomenally cast (Rufus Sewell is a revelation) and you do get to claw your own face off all over again. If, that is, you have any face left.
Written by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, and directed by Philip Martin, Scoop is based on the book by Sam McAlister, the Newsnight “booker” who secured the interview, so this is her account. (She serves as an “executive producer,” whatever that is.) She is played by Billie Piper as a single mother who does not seem well-liked in the Newsnight office and doesn’t seem to fit in at the BBC. “Too Daily Mail,” the show’s deputy editor complains. “An echo chamber,” McAlister complains back, when asked to book Nigel Farage yet again.
Meanwhile, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) prowls the office icily and haughtily with her whippet (Moody) always in attendance. Amazon has its own upcoming drama on which the real Maitlis will serve as an “executive producer.” That portrayal may be different. Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), Prince Andrew’s private secretary, first gets in touch with McAlister when she wants the media to puff his “Pitch@Palace” nonsense. It’s a firm “no” from Newsnight but if other matters were on the table? (“An hour of television could change everything,” McAlister will tell her.) McAlister nurtures the relationship. I feel rather sorry for Thirsk, who sincerely (if fatally) believed that, if the public knew Andrew, they’d simply adore him. Sometimes, a part of me feels sorry for Andrew but then another part comes along and promptly closes that part down.
Sewell doesn’t so much imitate Andrew but embody him — who knew Sewell had that in his arsenal? This Andrew protests boorishly when a maid misarranges the teddies on his bed, yet he is never too much of a cartoon monster. Sewell perfectly captures someone who thinks they are amazing because no one has ever told them otherwise. I think that’s what happens in those circles where grown men still say “mummy” — “Mummy is planning my sixtieth birthday party” — while you’re a bit sick in your mouth. He is also wonderfully thick. There are terrific scenes, including the one where he brings Princess Beatrice along to negotiate with the Newsnight team because if the matter at hand is sexual abuse, who wouldn’t want their daughter there?
Scoop is not pacy, or a nail-biter. It’s not like Frost/Nixon, which Peter Morgan, in his pre-Crown heyday, managed to turn into a suspenseful thriller even though we knew the outcome. Both the script and direction are fairly perfunctory, while Anderson sometimes gives off Margaret Thatcher vibes, but the highlights — lowlights? — of the interview are meticulously played word for word. They include the non-sweating, the lack of concern for any of Epstein’s victims, and how he found himself staying in Epstein’s houses — to be fair, accepting hospitality from a convicted sex offender because it’s the “honorable” thing is easily done.
Maitlis was superb in that interview, and her character does defrost slightly by the end, while Andrew, I now note, was always looking over her shoulder to the audience he’s convinced are lapping it up. You will want to claw your face off. But if you don’t have any face left by that point then remember: you still have a jaw to drop to the floor.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazines. Subscribe to the World edition here.
