If you’re stuck for something to watch this weekend, you may want to consider Scoop, Netflix’s attempt to dramatize the infamous 2019 Newsnight interview between Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew. This isn’t because the film is good—we’ll get to that shortly—but because, God, who wouldn’t want to relive the infamous 2019 Newsnight interview between Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew?
You remember the exchange, surely, for it represented perhaps the last moment of pure fun that humanity experienced before the pandemic hit. Dogged by rumors of a close association with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and accused of sexual assault by an under-age girl, Prince Andrew attempted to set the record straight with the interview. However, it went so badly that four days after it aired, Prince Andrew effectively found himself being fired from the royal family by his own mother.
Prince Andrew’s performance was catastrophically inept, the sort of mangled collision you only get to witness when a lifetime of unearned privilege crashes into a wall of unblinking logic. Essentially, we got to witness an adult man (who, let’s not forget, reportedly threw tantrums whenever maids would display his 72 teddy bears in the wrong order) backhandedly failing to bluff and charm his way out of several credible accusations of wrongdoing.
The interview was a greatest-hits compilation of bad P.R. Reports of Prince Andrew sweatily dancing at Tramp were incorrect, he said, because an “adrenaline overdose” during the Falklands War left him medically unable to sweat. He offered no sympathy for any of Epstein’s victims, instead remarking, “If you’re a man, it is a positive act to have sex with somebody.” Indeed, he professed that his only flaw throughout his dealings with Epstein was his habit of being “too honorable.”
Prince Andrew seemed to be the only person on earth who didn’t react to the interview with outright horror. In fact, the power of his own oblivious arrogance was so strong that, after the cameras stopped rolling, he reportedly remarked to Maitlis that he thought it had gone “rather well.”
The interview was the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by mugging. However, the problem with Scoop is that it desperately wants to be more than that. In its mind, it is Frost/Nixon: a complicated battle of ego and intellect, with fallout that would have enormous global implications. But that isn’t what Scoop is. At heart, it is basically a long episode of The Crown, about some women repeatedly punching a cow in the face for fun.
Prince Andrew effectively found himself being fired from the royal family by his own mother.
Scoop has been adapted from a chapter of Scoops: The BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews from Steven Seagal to Prince Andrew, the 2022 book by former Newsnight producer Sam McAlister. If you like reading about the role of current-affairs producers—the unseen forces whose job it is to piece together the sort of hard-hitting interviews that anchor television news—then it makes for an excellent read. The book details McAlister’s behind-the-scenes negotiations that led to interviews with Julian Assange, Sean Spicer, James Comey, and Steven Seagal, who walked out of his interview after being asked too many questions about his sexual-abuse allegations. It’s a very good book.
But, translated to the screen, the nuances of Scoops are sledgehammered into the very worst genre of film: journalists urgently telling other journalists how important journalism is. There’s too much of this rabid self-importance and not enough of what people actually want to see, which is Rufus Sewell basically playing Prince Andrew as a pudgier version of David Brent from the British version of The Office.
Then again, this sense of self-importance does seem to have infected everyone who was even peripherally involved in the interview. These last few weeks have seen an influx of articles and first-person pieces by almost everyone who played a part in producing Scoop. And the overwhelming majority of them seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that they were actually involved in making All the President’s Men rather than a film about a superfluous member of an outdated system of rule in a small and increasingly unimportant country reinforcing the widely held notion that he is a bit of a berk.
The actors obviously did more than their due diligence when it came to researching their roles. Sewell consulted an F.B.I. body-language expert to truly get inside Prince Andrew’s mind. Gillian Anderson, meanwhile, called the task of playing Maitlis “even more daunting than playing Mrs. Thatcher.”
Likewise, McAlister (who perhaps got carried away, calling the interview “the scoop of the century”) has spent the duration of Scoop’s promotional cycle doing her best to psychoanalyze Prince Andrew, as if the last five years haven’t led her any closer to understanding why someone would sleepwalk into blowing up their life so comprehensively. The closest she came was during an interview with The Guardian, when she brutally pinpointed Prince Andrew’s cosseted life as the root cause. “He was 59,” she said. “He’d never had a normal job. He’d never had an appraisal. He’d never been knocked back. My feeling was that through an accident of his birth, he had a real misperception of his abilities.”
The nuances of Scoops are sledgehammered into the very worst genre of film: journalists urgently telling other journalists how important journalism is.
But perhaps the best piece to be published about Scoop was written by a gregarious photographer, Mark Harrison (played in Scoop by Gavin Spokes, from Slow Horses), whom Newsnight hired at the last minute to take the stills. Harrison’s account in The Times of London is alternately hilariously grandiose (Newsnight producer Stewart Maclean constantly barks arbitrary deadlines at him), genuinely tense (he spends much of the interview with his hand over his mouth), and gleefully petty (one of his strongest memories is that the BBC spelled his last name wrong in the credits, and he complains that Spokes holds his camera incorrectly in the movie). “Oh my God, what have I done?” he writes of his time in the palace. “What have I witnessed? I feel shellshocked.”
Another criticism of Scoop is that the Newsnight interview was too recent an event to properly dramatize, that it lacks the necessary historical context for the story to be told correctly. But five years is a long time. Since the interview took place, the Queen has died, and Prince Andrew’s status has been downgraded so frequently that he could almost be considered a squatter in the Crown Estate. McAlister and Maitlis have both left the BBC, with the latter now co-hosting the News Agents podcast, which allows her to get angrily insulted by Marjorie Taylor Greene. And, for the time being, McAlister is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics.
Even Newsnight is no longer the powerhouse it was, and imminent budget cuts are likely to further reduce its scope and focus on investigative journalism. So perhaps Scoop isn’t that ludicrous after all, especially if you take it as what it is (ridiculous, campy fun) rather than what it wants to be (important).
And if you don’t get around to watching Scoop, don’t be too downhearted, because Amazon is releasing A Very Royal Scandal, a three-part drama about the exact same thing, in the coming months. Maitlis is producing that one, and Michael Sheen plays Prince Andrew. Just think, thanks to Newsnight, there will soon be three different Prince Andrews in the world. Honestly, one is too many.
Scoop is streaming now on Netflix
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)