Here is a laboriously acted and distinctly self-admiring, self-mythologising drama about the media, the royals and the media royals. It is all about Emily Maitlis’s 2019 BBC Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, challenging him about being friends with sex trafficker and abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The prince’s performance was so grotesquely embarrassing that he had to forgo his royal titles and “step back” from public duties, an achievement much emphasised over the closing credits, but about which audiences may now have mixed feelings, given that he is still, after all, known as Prince Andrew and still unrepentantly prominent on royal occasions.
Rufus Sewell in heavy prosthetic makeup plays the pompous HRH, a puffy-faced babyish poltroon whose smug smile is that of someone accustomed to having his every lame or boorish joke greeted with gales of laughter, and every boneheaded observation rewarded with a solemn courtier’s nod. But that normally estimable performer Gillian Anderson goes into a peculiar Maggie Thatcher-lite mode to play Maitlis – all gimlet-eyed forensic alertness and unrelaxed eccentricity as she brings her dog into the office.
In the supporting roles, Billie Piper plays tough producer Sam McAlister who landed the interview, trusting her fierce journalistic instincts in the face of her colleagues’ prissy squeamishness and highmindedness, and Keeley Hawes plays Andrew’s long-serving, discreet and loyal private secretary Amanda Thirsk who is sufficiently amiable and unstuffy with Sam to have a private drink with her in a hotel bar with no other flunkies present, and entertain Sam’s notion of a candid TV interview. Something in the movie’s body language seems to suggest an important kind of female solidarity here, and yet, whatever she thought in private, Thirsk isn’t shown caring or commenting about Epstein’s victims, and she appears to believe in Andrew’s innocence. There is a male media adviser who is shown as very uptight and disapproving about this whole interview idea – and he, on the basic level of PR, is of course proved right. And yet his exclusion from the discussion process sheds no light on what Palace officials believed about Andrew’s behaviour.
The big moment happens – interestingly – off camera, when Andrew asks “mummy” if he should do the interview, and returns with the news that Her Majesty “trusts his judgment” – the Queen evidently joining Amanda Thirsk among the indulgent women in Andrew’s life who made that calamitous mistake. The resulting interview itself is apparently considered important enough to have a second feature-drama treatment about it in development called A Very Royal Scandal. Even Frost/Nixon only got one film and the Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales only merited a single episode on The Crown.
And despite the title … well, was it a scoop, exactly? It was certainly a terrific coup and an unmissable bit of limo-crash television. But a “scoop”? All the factual elements had been established by other people, significantly by photographer Jae Donnelly (played in a prologue sequence by Connor Swindells) who took the famous picture of Andrew in New York’s Central Park with Epstein. The interview itself, though vividly and valuably showing us the mindset of a member of the ruling class, and showing us how outrageously stupid and entitled Andrew is (which we knew already), didn’t get Andrew to concede anything explicitly.
There is one spark: when Prince Andrew is shown humiliating a female underling for mishandling his collection of soft toys. It’s a flash of black-comic horror and Sewell has something to get his teeth into as an actor. Otherwise, the drama is smothered by its own overwhelming sense of importance.
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