April 6, 2024 - 12:00pm
Woodward. Bernstein. McAlister? Scoop, Netflix’s new account of Prince Andrew’s 2019 Newsnight interview — which went so calamitously that it now has to be prefixed with “car-crash” every time it’s mentioned in print — isn’t really about the son of the late Queen, or the Royal Family more broadly, or Jeffrey Epstein. This is a paean to brave investigative journalism, and the key player isn’t even a journalist.
Sam McAlister, played here by Billie Piper, is the guest booker who secured the interview, and she has managed to parlay the scoop into a memoir and now this self-regarding, somewhat pointless film. Piper has referred to her character as an “unsung hero”, but Scoop trumpets McAlister’s involvement without stopping to ask: was the “scoop” really all hers? We meet the photographer who captured the infamous Central Park shot of Andrew and Epstein strolling together; there are glimpses of scurrying researchers who compile, without complaint, the damaging material on the prince while the on-screen McAlister wails that nobody takes her seriously. Clearly, this was more of a team effort than the film’s framing lets on.
The other brave truth-seeker depicted is Emily Maitlis, whose questioning of the prince was so effective largely because she eschewed the shouty confrontation usually employed by her Newsnight predecessor, Jeremy Paxman, and lured Andrew into thinking the interview had gone rather well. Gillian Anderson captures Maitlis’s icy glamour — and her hairstyle — but the vowels often sound more reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s. “Harry Potter has his wand; Emily Maitlis has her Bic,” McAlister pronounces, by no means the lamest line in a production which also includes “How difficult can it be talking to the Queen’s son about his relationship with a convicted sex offender?”
Rufus Sewell’s incurious, vain Andrew is the standout performance, but the uncanniness of his delivery makes one wonder what the point of Scoop is. The most entertaining segment is the recreation of the interview, and the film seems to be impelling the viewer to whoop at those familiar, still surreal lines: “Pizza Express in Woking”, “straightforward shooting weekend”, “At the time, I couldn’t sweat”. Scoop plays out a bit like a police procedural, with producers poring over photos pinned on boards and a montage of McAlister doing some frenzied Googling; Andrew is really just the bejowelled villain they’re trying to bring down.
The effect of this is that Epstein and his victims recede into the background. We can chuckle at the accuracy of Sewell’s impression but, barring a pre-credits note about the $550 million dollars paid out to survivors of Epstein’s abuse, we forget how high the stakes really are. Instead, the focus is on the plucky outsider, dismissed as “too Daily Mail” by her fusty Beeb colleagues, getting the story of her life and finally showing how brilliant she is. There is even a Love Actually-style romantic subplot for McAlister’s pre-teen son, with Mum playing wingman.
Scoop falls victim to the Achilles heel of any dramatisation of very recent events — an increasingly common and increasingly half-arsed genre — even if Sewell’s rubbery Prince Andrew is more interesting than Kenneth Branagh’s rubbery Boris Johnson in This England. However good the imitations, the real thing is much more compelling. There is also a cinematic preoccupation, sent into overdrive by Saltburn last year, with creating “viral” moments for shock value, the result of which here is a naked Prince Andrew getting out of the bath in a detail which contributes nothing to verisimilitude or plot propulsion.
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SubscribeA large portion of the BEEB’s content now is predictably and depressingly self-referential; the private travails of their presenters, the outtakes, the background features, the ‘analysis’, the story about how they got the story about how they got the story, the fictionalised version of the story and how they got the story served up as entertainment and of course, Marianal Spring telling us about how the story was ‘verified’ for disinformation and how difficult her job is (go back to top and restart).
They are the public service equivalent of a slow-death film franchise after 9 outings and a prequel that disappears up its own a**e in time to less and less effect while costing more and more money.
Indeed. I’m sick to death (as it were) of hearing about the illnesses and struggles of BEEB employees and presenters. I don’t read the stories but the straplines are enough to make anyone vomit. I guess they think they’re being ‘brave’ in ‘sharing’ their stories, but they just come across as you describe: self-referential, and entirely ignorant of the millions of others whose travails they pay lip service to.
It’s on Netflix…
Defund the BBC!
Given that there is only one comment other than mine, it seems the “scoop” isn’t.
She booked an interview. Woodward I think not..
The worst thing is that the more people like Maitlis are hyped up, the more currency their gated estate, hedge funder hubby worldview gains and the more remote the BBC comes from the people who pay for it.
The original interview had me in stitches, but this Netflix production mostly showed a story of the BBC‘s cringingly self congratulating and “righteous” characters of a so-called Scoop (this wasn’t Watergate after all). It ended up making the hilarious interview of pompous Prince Andrew boring.
Not sure I want to see anything associated with Emily-Go-F__k-Yourself.
I don’t like quadruple-barrelled names.
Still missing the truth
Maybe one day there can be dramatizations of BBC coverage of ‘gender affirmation’ and the rochdale grooming scandal