Ladle
FOUR STARS
Verdict: A high-quality cast and a naughty script
Less than five years after Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis questioned Prince Andrew about his friendship with pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the specific claim that a 17-year-old girl was forced to have sex with him in three occasions, accusations that he has repeated repeatedly. Denied, Netflix dramatized the infamous interview and the events that preceded it. It is not surprising.
After all, after that special edition of Newsnight on 16 November 2019, one royal commentator tweeted that he expected the interview to be “a train wreck”. But for Andrew it was much more seismically disastrous than that, he added. It was “a plane that crashed into an oil tanker, causing a tsunami and triggering a nuclear explosion.”
Well, I can think of dramas about plane crashes, tsunamis, nuclear explosions and, indeed, the misadventures of oil tankers, so, even metaphorically, all those things combined with the Royal Family would surely end up, sooner or later, in a movie .
Less than five years after Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis grilled Prince Andrew, Netflix dramatized the infamous interview. No surprise there.
No less surprising is that Scoop boasts a top-quality cast with the daring Sam McAlister, the Newsnight interviewer whose tenacity landed the award-winning catch, played splendidly by Billie Piper.
No less surprising is that Scoop has a high-quality cast. A double-chinned Rufus Sewell plays Andrew, and if you squint really hard, you can almost believe it’s him. Maitlis is portrayed by Gillian Anderson as stick-thin, fragile and imperious, which seems about right, marching around the BBC offices with her pet, intimidating everyone.
Keeley Hawes is the private secretary of Andrew’s mother, Amanda Thirsk. Romola Garai plays Newsnight’s fierce editor Esme Wren. And the daring Sam McAlister, the show’s interviewer whose tenacity got the award-winning capture, is played splendidly by Billie Piper.
The film begins in New York in 2010, when photographer Jae Donnelly (Connor Swindells) takes the now famous photo of Andrew and Epstein strolling through Central Park, in serious conversation. Then he takes us forward to 2019. The BBC is mired in the mire, facing massive job losses, and McAlister fully expects the cut.
Plus, she’s not a natural fit for Newsnight. The BBC’s daily current affairs program is made up of middle-class liberals driven by notions of their own importance but, more especially, that of their “flagship” programme, which they see as embedded in the very fabric of the nation.
McAlister is a kebab-eating, bus-riding, working-class single mother who relies on her own mother (Amanda Redman) to care for her teenage son when she’s at work. She’s not part of the club.
“I’m not a snob, but she’s very WhatsNew2Day,” executive producer Stewart Maclean (Richard Goulding) snobbishly observes of McAlister. And that’s how she is. She is a Mail reader, totally in tune with the Mail’s values, with a sensationalist nose for news that her colleagues only belatedly come to appreciate.
She begins to court Buckingham Palace, forging a strong working relationship with Thirsk, who has Andrew’s support. When Epstein is arrested and later found dead in his prison cell, more details of his heinous crimes begin to emerge. An interview becomes more urgent for both parties. Andrew seeks and obtains the approval of ‘Mum’ (the Queen), to whom he is clearly in thrall.
Peter Moffat’s script is more mischievous with its depiction of an emotionally arrested prince, obsessed with his teddy bears and laughing at the media’s interest in his dealings with Epstein, when he “knew Jimmy Savile much better.”
A double-chinned Rufus Sewell plays Andrew, and if you squint really hard, you can almost believe it’s him.
Emily Maitlis is played by Gillian Anderson as stick-thin, fragile and imperious, which seems about right.
Scoop is never more electrifying than when it finally gets to the only part of the story we already know intimately: the interview itself.
Like Netflix’s The Crown, director Philip Martin’s film deftly mixes historical truths with dramatic license. But fiction cannot compete with reality. Scoop is never more electrifying than when he finally gets to the only part of the story we already know intimately, the interview itself, with all its extraordinary minutiae about Pizza Express in Woking and Andrew’s supposed inability to break a sweat. He is recreated very carefully and convincingly.
After the recording, Andrew is crazy. He and his advisors believe that everything has gone very well. But when Newsnight airs two days later, he emerges from his bathroom to receive a deluge of phone messages confirming just the opposite.
Martin shoots him from behind, limp and bare-bottomed, as he silently confronts the implications of a real-life implosion. The images couldn’t be less subtle, but they’re even more powerful: here he is, in the lap of privilege, completely exposed and completely alone.
Scoop is available on Netflix starting Friday, April 5