2024 has been, somewhat surprisingly, the year of competing dramas about Prince Andrew’s notorious Newsnight interview. As I anticipated last year, each has its own distinctive approach, which makes them both worth watching as complementary but decidedly different companion pieces.
The Netflix version, Scoop, was adapted from producer Sam McAlister’s book and told the story over a single 100-minute film. In its telling, McAlister (Billie Piper) was largely responsible for arranging the BBC interview that resulted in the Duke of York being compelled to leave public life, after his conversation with Emily Maitlis made him appear both dishonest and absurd.
The clown prince himself is portrayed by two of Britain’s leading actors: Rufus Sewell in Scoop, Michael Sheen in A Very Royal Scandal. Even their physical appearance is different. Sewell buries himself underneath prosthetics and a fat suit to depict the Duke of York, while Sheen conveys Andrew’s appearance with his usual chameleonic flair, using little more than a wig and some unflattering waistline padding.
Yet there are other significant differences, too. In Scoop, Andrew is portrayed as buffoonish, a teddy bear obsessive who is too arrogant – or stupid – to see the reputational danger that he puts himself in by agreeing to participate in the interview. He’s fundamentally a supporting character, appearing on screen a great deal less than McAlister or Maitlis, and is depicted as a blundering fool; even his much-vaunted Pitch @ Palace initiative is portrayed as little more than a piece of vanity, with Andrew taking the opportunity to crack bad jokes, to the distaste of his private secretary Amanda Thirsk.
The conception of the duke in A Very Royal Scandal – as befits the title – is a richer and more complex one. For a start, Sheen is first-billed, and probably gets equal screen time with Ruth Wilson’s Maitlis, as the show delves into his complex familial relationships with his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, and his siblings – as well, of course, as the Queen.
The late monarch does not appear on screen in either version of the story, but the correlation between both accounts is that she gives her assent to Andrew participating in the Newsnight interview. The major difference in the Amazon version is that the wider Royal family are shown to be horrified by it. There is a scene in which an offscreen Prince Charles calls his younger brother and asks him not to participate in the interview, suggesting, in the duke’s furious recollection, that he is a “mummy’s boy”, who is “damaging the Firm’s reputation”.
In both shows, the duke is depicted as being offhand and rude to staff, although only A Very Royal Scandal shows him spitting “f--- off” at any footman or maid who dares to cross his path. Scoop depicts him as prurient and inappropriate, while the Amazon series suggests that he is a strange mixture of contradictory impulses: a genuinely loving father, a bitter and resentful “spare” who loathes his siblings, a bullying, unpleasant boss who fires advisers who dare to contradict him – such as his PR man Jason Stein – and a childish, immature boor.
Emily Maitlis is credited as executive producer of A Very Royal Scandal, and has spoken in interviews about the amount of time that she spent with Ruth Wilson, the actress portraying her on screen. Although Maitlis and Wilson look little like one another, the costume and wardrobe departments have done a magnificent job of making Wilson a dead ringer for the journalist, and, as portrayed on screen, she is a fascinating character: a hardened professional to her fingertips, but also riddled with self-doubt and a fear that she is going to muff the opportunity of a lifetime by not grilling Andrew rigorously enough in the interview.
She is also given backstory in the form of a (real-life) stalker who has haunted her for years, and it is suggested that she carries a personal vendetta against alleged abusers who have been allowed to get away with their behaviour unchecked because of their (usually male) power and influence.
The Gillian Anderson incarnation of Maitlis on screen in Scoop is different, in large part because the journalist was not involved with the show’s production. She is depicted as cold, haughty and borderline eccentric, down to taking her omnipresent whippet into the BBC with her, and frequently clashing with McAlister over how they should approach the subject.
There is some suggestion that the working-class single mother McAlister is on the verge of being fired for speaking out of turn to her superiors – Anderson’s Maitlis remarks, with more than a hint of her Margaret Thatcher, “Poor Sam” as she watches her leave the BBC studios one evening – and the central narrative is that McAlister persuades her to do the interview, rather than, as in A Very Royal Scandal, the idea being driven by a crusading Maitlis.
The figure looming over both dramas is, of course, the billionaire paedophile and sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, whose dubious friendship with Andrew – and supposed introduction of the duke to Giuffre – sparked the whole affair off. In Scoop, Epstein is only depicted briefly, during his notorious walk in Central Park with Andrew in 2010; the scene that opens the show, shot and edited like a thriller, depicts Connor Swindells’ intrepid photographer Jae Donnelly racing to get the famous picture of the two men together, thereby proving that Andrew and Epstein’s friendship had continued long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sexual offences.
Although the incident is shown in A Very Royal Scandal, Donnelly does not appear. Instead, Epstein himself features as a character, in a chilling, fictionalised scene in which Andrew approaches him cap-in-hand to ask for money to pay off Fergie’s debts. Epstein obliges and offers him the cash as a gift – “It’s done” – but in return, he “suggests” that Andrew remain as his guest in his New York mansion for several days, with a view to meeting many of Epstein’s influential friends and supporters. The content of that scene is from the imagination of writer Jeremy Brock, but the implication is that Andrew was both too stupid and too venal to extricate himself from Epstein’s malign web of influence, and that this ended up being the central plank of his downfall.
There are comparatively few scenes in both Scoop and A Very Royal Scandal that focus on the same moments. One of the key ones, however, comes relatively early on in both dramas, and it is the sit-down to discuss the potential interview between the team from the BBC – Maitlis, McAlister and Newsnight editor Stewart MacLean – and the royal household, as represented by the Duke of York, Thirsk and a surprise special guest in the form of Princess Beatrice, on hand for a mixture of moral support and professional advice.
In Scoop, the focus is clearly on McAlister, who is shown to be charismatic and go-getting, defining the terms of the interview and generally being the most important person in the room. However, in A Very Royal Scandal, matters are very different. McAlister barely features (as she doesn’t throughout the drama – her entire contribution to the interview is suggesting that the Pitch @ Palace initiative represents a way through to the duke) and is portrayed, in passing, as something of a simpering nobody.
Meanwhile, Thirsk – who in Keeley Hawes’s portrayal in Scoop is a sympathetic, highly intelligent woman, who bonds with McAlister over their both being ambitious single mothers – is suggested in A Very Royal Scandal to be a well-meaning dolt who is keen to push the interview forward, against the wishes of the wider Royal family, in order to show her beloved employer in the best possible light. The ever-superb Joanna Scanlan does wonders with the part, but it’s still unflattering. Who knows if either portrayal of Thirsk is anywhere near accurate or whether events unfolded in this manner, though you can easily imagine Thirsk preferring Hawes’ characterisation.
There are slight differences of tone and approach between the two shows when it comes to depicting the centrepiece interview, which sum up their approaches in miniature. In Scoop, it acts as the climax, showing the way in which the initially detached Maitlis warms up and skilfully skewers the arrogant, foolish Andrew in a bravura display of journalistic prowess.
Yet in A Very Royal Scandal, it comes halfway through the show, meaning that as much screentime is devoted to showing its fallout; for instance, we see Thirsk being coldly and summarily dismissed by the Queen’s private secretary, and de facto head of the Royal Household, Sir Edward Young, for failing to stop the interview and thereby bringing the monarchy into serious disrepute. In reality, all we know is that Thirsk reached a legal settlement to end her employment with the royal household in January 2020, two months after the Newsnight interview.
Sewell’s Andrew strikes a sillier, more buffoonish note at the beginning of the encounter, remarking – lecherously? In surprise? Both? – at Maitlis wearing trousers and generally coming across as a deeply limited man out of his depth and unprepared for the tough line of questioning he is faced with. In Sheen’s portrayal, however, the duke is a more belligerent, adversarial character, who has earlier suggested that he sees the encounter as a fight of the kind that he last faced in the Falklands, and that he is determined to win it, which makes his failure to cope with the questioning all the more pathetic.
The crucial difference – one that owes its verisimilitude to the presence of Maitlis as executive producer, who has confirmed that the story is true – is that A Very Royal Scandal shows Thirsk belatedly realising that Andrew has failed to give his so-called “alibi”, asking for part of the interview to be reshot, in order for him to be allowed the chance to answer questions about where he was on the night that he was supposedly with Giuffre. The surprised crew agree, and his answers – the Pizza Express in Woking, his Falklands-induced inability to sweat – duly went down in infamy, turning an already terrible situation into a catastrophic, irretrievable one as far as his reputation went.
Scoop is streaming on Netflix; all three episodes of A Very Royal Scandal are available on Amazon Prime Video
