Telling the wrong story: the battle of the Prince Andrews

A Very Royal Scandal vs Scoop

A brief summary of the Prince Andrew situation

Prince Andrew, brother of the current King and (purportedly favourite) son of the late Queen, associated with, stayed with, and was photographed with sex trafficker and abuser Jeffrey Epstein. A photograph emerged of him with Virginia Giuffre, who alleged that she had been trafficked to Andrew (amongst other powerful men) and that he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was under the age of 18. She brought a civil case against him in the US in August 2021, by which time the public had been aware of these accusations (denied by Andrew) for quite some time. The case was settled out of court in February 2022. The settlement amount was never made public, but it was speculated to be in the region of £12 million.

Meanwhile, in 2019, Andrew was interviewed by journalist Emily Maitlis on BBC Newsnight. If any of the British public weren’t aware of the accusations against him before this interview, they certainly would be afterwards. The interview was watched by huge numbers of people, clips circulated wildly online and the interview was widely mocked and dissected throughout traditional and social media.

The interview included such gems as ‘no [it wasn’t a party], it was a shooting weekend…just a straightforward shooting weekend,’ ‘I'd taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party,’ and, the breakout hit, ‘I have a peculiar medical condition which is that I don't sweat or I didn't sweat at the time.’

In sum, he made a royal arse of the interview and, in doing so, made a royal arse of himself—a fact which was perhaps immediately evident to everyone but him who, apparently, thought it went well. A couple of days later, Andrew announced that he would be stepping back from his public duties.

Emily Maitlis recently summed up the impact of the interview by saying, ‘he lost his royal duties, he lost the ability to wear uniform, he lost the respect of the nation, and it became, I think, much more difficult for him in his place in the Royal Family.’

In January 2022, it was confirmed that his roles were to be redistributed amongst other members of the royal family and that he would lose his military titles and royal patronages. He would retain the title His Royal Highness/HRH, but stop using it in any official capacity, meaning he would unfortunately not become ‘the royal formerly known as Prince.’

So catastrophic was this interview that it became the subject of two separate dramatisations this year: Scoop (Netflix, a film) and A Very Royal Scandal (Amazon, a mini-series comprised of three one-hour instalments).

Scoop (Netflix), released 5 April 2024

I wrote the following on 5 April straight after watching the film.

Netflix’s Scoop is a dramatisation of that Newsnight interview in which Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) made a complete arse of himself in conversation with Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) whilst discussing his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the sexual assault allegations against Prince Andrew himself. The focus is on the behind-the-scenes of how Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) managed to arrange the interview with Andrew’s private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes). It used McAlister’s book ‘Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the Most Shocking Interviews’ as its primary source.

In brief, it is a serviceable drama with uniformly good performances, but lacks any stakes whatsoever.

Rufus Sewell embodies the doughy-faced, teddy bear-collecting, mummy’s-favourite-son side of Prince Andrew. He looks unrecognisable and adopts the requisite pompous royal voice, as well as a particularly self-satisfied smile after unknowingly giving the BBC an interview that turned out to be sufficiently ludicrously damning as to alter the course of his status as a royal. There’s little fault to find in Gillian Anderson’s Maitlis, Hawes’s Thirsk or Piper’s McAlister, the latter of whom provides the emotional heart of the film, to the extent that one exists, as the narrative is moulded into a bit of an underdog-meets-girl-power story.

However, it doesn’t really give us anything new. Ironically, there is no real scoop to be found in Scoop. It’s very much a recreation of what we have already seen, including an (excellent) extended recreation of the interview itself. The problem is that the film lacks jeopardy. There is no tension in watching McAlister try to secure the interview, because we already know she succeeded. And there are no stakes in how the interview will play out either, because we’ve already seen it. The only new thing we are offered is an inside look into how the interview got arranged, while not addressing the ultimate question of why on earth would he agree to this interview?

left: image from the real Newsnight broadcast; right: from Scoop’s recreation

But is ‘how an interview got got by the BBC’ the most interesting angle to take on the situation? More interesting would have been the inner workings of how the Palace came to decide he would do it. We get brief mention of Andrew going to ‘mummy’ (the Queen) to talk to her about it, then we hear that she ‘trusts his judgement’ (there are conflicting reports of the veracity of this). We see none of the internal discussions, none of the Queen, none of any discussions with Beatrice, Eugenie or Fergie. There is some doubt expressed by a member of his staff, but we never dig down into the details. Hawes’s Thirsk is the one with whom the interview is arranged, the liaison between the BBC and Andrew. Given that she thought the interview was a reasonable move for him, we can assume that she thought there was reason to believe either that he was innocent or at least that he wouldn’t make himself or the Royal Family look foolish (see: Pizza Express Woking and sweat-gate). We see nothing of the reactions to the interview from the Palace or what led to him losing his titles and being relieved of his public duties. We see the newspapers, social media, the public and the Newsnight team all reacting to the broadcast, but the last we see of either the Palace or Andrew is the very moment of his discovery that the interview didn’t go as well as he thought it did.

Even that would still not be touching on the real crux of the matter. The Prince Andrew story is not really a story about the Queen’s son making an arse of himself on TV. It’s a story about a member of the British royal family being accused of sexual offences against a teenage girl and the same man continually associating with Jeffrey Epstein, even after he was convicted of sexual offences. It’s a story about abuse and status and power and all that comes with it. But if you’re not going to give us that (that, admittedly, would be an entirely different film), and instead you are going for the machinations of how that one interview came to pass, it would be a more interesting story to explore the Palace’s perspective. There’s no real story in the BBC’s perspective, which we could have largely surmised ourselves: a royal is the subject of a major news story, of course they want to interview him, of course they want to ask him difficult questions, of course it’s great when it goes terribly. Let’s dig into the other side: the what, why and how it all came to pass and ended in such a colossal embarrassment for the royal family.

End of contribution from 5 April.

Tangents

A couple of months later, I watched The Eichmann Show (2015), a dramatisation of the behind-the-scenes of the broadcast of Adolf Eichmann’s trial—where he was accused (and convicted) of executing the 'final solution' and organising the murder of six million Jews—in Jerusalem in 1961. The film includes archive footage from the trial and from the camps. The trial was broadcast daily on TV as a documentary series, and the film follows the director, producer and cameramen as they work to broadcast the trial, making the first ever TV documentary series. Much like with Scoop, the performances are competent and the story is interesting, but it quickly becomes very difficult to care about the film crew’s interpersonal disagreements and technical obstacles when these scenes are interspersed with real footage from the trial, including survivor testimonies, and the Holocaust. The debates about where to point the camera and whether to zoom are, comparatively, of very little consequence. The problem here and in Scoop is not that a look at how TV is made can’t be interesting; it’s that they show us a much more impactful and emotionally compelling story, then choose to focus the narrative on relative mundanity, the outcome of which we already know.

On the complete opposite end of the emotional spectrum, I’d like to take a tangent for romcoms. I read a Substack essay not so long ago (not linking because I’m not being particularly complimentary) where the gist of the writer’s argument was that she would like to see more romance films focus solely on the ‘cosy’ parts of life after the couple get together (washing dishes, deciding on dinners, having insignificant squabbles, etc.) without any of the drama. To which I ask, would you? Nice (arguably) in theory, but I doubt it would make particularly compelling storytelling. Decisions on what to depict are made intentionally—said intention being to contribute to the story being told, build characters or further the plot.

I have a similar gripe with a lot of ‘Hollywood creates unrealistic expectations’ complaints. Such complaints are often metropolitan-abode-related, and I never agree with them. Carrie from Sex and the City’s apartment looks like that because it tells you something about her, not because they were adhering strictly to what she could afford on a weekly column writer’s salary in New York. Same with friends: Monica’s apartment (which was rent controlled from when her grandmother lived there, maybe with family help, with roommate contribution, and we are told she has a well-paying job, but I digress) is conducive to storytelling: Friends would be less pleasant to watch if everything that happened in that apartment was cramped into a tiny, ‘realistic’ space. And Bridget Jones: we want our light, easy-watching films set in attractive places that look nice and tell us about the character. In this instance, it tells us that she’s not struggling—we are not supposed to think her life is bad! She has her own flat (quite possibly paid for by her obviously wealthy parents), she has a great group of friends, and she has an interesting career that she finds easy success in through her charm and likeability. She doesn’t have particularly difficult life circumstances to overcome; she just still wants things (namely and variously: a relationship, a better job, and to lose weight—as did many who watched/read Bridget Jones at the time—the book was a successful satire and the films are fun. I will go down with the good ship Jones).

A Very Royal Scandal (Amazon), released 19 September 2024

A Very Royal Scandal’s three episode series takes a different angle from that of Scoop. Sam McAlister is sidelined, and focus instead is divided between Emily Maitlis (Ruth Wilson) and Prince Andrew (Michael Sheen).

For me, in every regard that Scoop succeeded, AVRS did not. And in every regard that I was left wanting in Scoop, AVRS did try to plug that gap.

Maitlis served as executive producer (having had no involvement in Scoop) and was followed and studied by Wilson, who also worked with an accent and movement coach to hone her Maitlis impression. The result of which is rather jarring, and not for any kind of shockingly effective resemblance, despite the obvious effort. Wilson is very much doing a voice; with every line, it remains very clear that she is doing a voice. Sheen, on the other hand, does not appear to have exercised the same commitment to his impression of Andrew, but delivers an entertaining performance.

A Very Royal Scandal’s recreation of the interview

The script leans heavily on expositional dialogue, but does provide plenty of insight into the contexts, home lives and inner lives of the characters of Maitlis and Andrew. I say ‘the characters of’ as I imagine there is a lot of speculation, particularly with regard to Andrew’s side. We see much more of the reasoning behind why Andrew agrees to the interview and why he thinks it went well. We see more of the discussion amongst the royals’ employees as they debate whether it should go ahead. We see the fallout of the interview for Andrew and what led to him losing his titles and duties, and settling the court case. Whether all of this is completely factually accurate doesn’t actually matter in the context of telling the story and creating a compelling narrative. Of course there is discussion to be had around the ethics of dramatising, imagining and speculating about real people and real events, but that is an entirely separate conversation.

I wrote above about wanting the story from the royals’ perspective, but AVRS provides a hint of a story that I think would have been even more compelling. Perhaps this iteration’s Amanda Thirsk being played by The Thick of It’s Joanna Scanlan is to blame, but I did think there might have been an interesting drama to be found in the perspective of the royals’ staff, especially the respective private secretaries of the Queen and Andrew, and their discussions, disputes and debates, as they appear to be the engine room of the royal decision-making process.

While we’re at it, why not bring back The Crown for a one-off special, showing the Queen’s perspective on the whole thing—did she really ‘trust his judgement’? Might as well give us Fergie’s perspective as well. And surely Eugenie and Beatrice deserve their own versions (one each, of course). In fact, maybe every British citizen should have their own ‘Prince Andrew scandal’ dramatisation. I’ll give you a pitch for mine right now: I watched the interview on my phone, thought ‘fucking hell’ inside my head, and read probably upwards of 200 tweets about it. I am available to write the screenplay.