In Scoop, Prince Andrew isn't the story

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.

The film features namechecks for Nigel Farage, Brexit and Donald Trump, that triptych of modern evils, just so we know that the BBC newsroom is a place where extremely important news is being covered. “This is the only story,” one producer pompously claims of the Andrew scoop. In training its focus on McAlister, though, this film is telling the wrong one.