A Very Familiar Performance

A Very Royal Scandal — the second dramatisation of Newsnight’s Prince Andrew interview in six months — offers an equally smug perspective.

Previously: All The Newsnight's Women
Netflix's interview drama was almost as puffed up as the Prince at its centre.

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“You know as well as I do that for most people me and Prince Andrew are the story, not Epstein’s victims. Emily Maitlis dismantles a member of the Royal Family blah blah blah…”

Towards the end of A Very Royal Scandal’s third episode, it tries to have it both ways; Emily Maitlis (played here by Ruth Wilson) delivers a speech to Newsnight producer Esme Wren that comes perilously close to blaming the show’s audience for choosing to press the play button. Like Scoop, Netflix’s dramatisation of the same events, which beat it out of the traps, A Very Royal Scandal self-consciously nods towards Epstein’s victims while keeping them trapped on TV screens and in newspaper photos.

Scoop was based on former Newsnight guest booker Sam McAllister’s book. She was central to its version of the story, with much of the drama resting on whether she could secure the crucial interview and McAllister played by Billie Piper. A Very Royal Scandal has Maitlis on board as an executive producer with writer Jeremy Brock drawing on her memoir Airhead: The Imperfect Art of Making News. McAllister (played by Clare Calbraith) gets roughly four lines across the three episodes. The most senior royals — the Queen, Prince Phillip, and Prince Charles — remain resolutely off-screen like the monarchical equivalent of Niles’ wife in Frasier.

I concluded my review of Scoop by writing: “Perhaps Amazon’s adaptation, A Very Royal Scandal… will be less self-satisfied, but I suspect it’ll simply shift the emphasis of the smugness.” I make no claims to prophetic gifts but that is what’s come to pass. A Very Royal Scandal is another victory lap for the Newsnight team that brought in the Prince Andrew interview. But they didn’t take the photographs of Prince Andrew and Epstein together that kept the pressure on him for so many years nor did they secure the interview with Virginia Giuffre that led the royal and his team to concoct such unbelievable alibis (that was another BBC show, Panorama).

Where Scoop reduced the process of securing the Prince Andrew interview to a series of phone calls saying, “What about now?”, A Very Royal Scandal relies far too much on the mechanic of Maitlis googling information about the story to fill the viewer in on key details. It makes the interviewer seem unbelievably ill-informed about such a big and long-running story and doesn’t give the viewer any kind of real insight into how journalism is done.

Ruth Wilson’s Matilis impression is probably marginally better than Gillian Anderson’s competent portrayal in Scoop but the voice she puts on sounds like she’s straining at all times. Meanwhile, Michael Sheen’s Prince Andrew is, unfortunately, more sympathetic than Rufus Sewell’s cartoonish version — there’s no equivalent of the scene where he emerges saggy-arsed from the bath — despite his frequent “fuck offs” to various flunkies. A Very Royal Scandal gives more time to the home lives of both Maitlis and Andrew. The focus on the latter’s daughters and their suffering is galling despite the script taking time to cover its arse by pointing out that they are princesses, unlike the real victims.

A Very Royal Scandal inevitably suffers from the same fundamental failing as Scoop. Newsnight’s triumph was more about persuasion, production, and presenting rather than journalism. Maitlis asked strong questions once she was in the room with Andrew but the process of getting him there came down to persuading him and his staff that the BBC is where big public figures have their say. A very stupid man put himself in a position where he could not win because he was surrounded by people paid to pander to his whims.

It’s possible for a story where we already know the ending to be compelling and for the piecemeal efforts of investigative journalism to be thrilling (see All The President’s Men and Spotlight). A Very Royal Scandal can’t manage that because it relies on such a small amount of jeopardy — will the interview be pulled? — while failing to deal with crucial elements of the bigger story. It doesn’t help that it swings from scenes where the Newsnight team agonise about whether their editing might be dishonest to flights of fantasy like Andrew angrily doing the washing up at Balmoral, like a gender-flipped Lady Macbeth sponsored by Fairy Liquid.

In in the final episode, Maitlis says: “For what we did to really matter, it has to go to trial, to court. A proper trial, not just a one-hour interview as entertainment.” It’s another attempt by the writer to short-circuit the most obvious criticisms of the drama but it ends up damning it. A Very Royal Scandal is the second attempt to stretch out that interview not just to an hour but three hours. The Crown paid to make Prince Andrew’s legal troubles go away and Epstein’s victims remain without justice. In the end, the interview was just about Maitlis and the Prince. It was a spectacle and A Very Royal Scandal offers nothing that the original hour didn’t reveal.

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