| Worth seeing: | for the battle of wits between the Palace private secretaries as the story of the infamous interview is retold from the point of view of the interviewer |
| Featuring: | Michael Sheen, Ruth Wilson, Alex Jennings, Clare Calbraith, Eanna Hardwicke, Honor Swinton Byrne, Joanna Scanlan, John Hopkins, Lydia Leonard, Matthew Stagg, Nicholas Burns, Sam Troughton, Sofia Oxenham |
| Key crew: | Julian Jarrold, Josh Hyams, Emily Maitlis, Jeremy Brock |
| Channel: | Amazon Prime |
| Length: | 60 minutes |
| Episodes: | 3 |
| Broadcast date: | 19th September 2024 |
| Country: | UK |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
For some years now, Prince Andrew (Michael Sheen) has been embroiled in the scandal of his former friend Jeffrey Epstein (John Hopkins), the American billionaire financier who killed himself in prison after being accused of sex-trafficking underaged girls.
One of the highest profile of his accusers, the American woman, Virginia Roberts, has claimed that Epstein sent her to the UK to have sex with Prince Andrew – leaving an infamous photo of the pair together to haunt the Prince.
Andrew maintains his innocence but no-one seems to want to listen – so his private secretary Amanda Thirsk (Joanna Scanlon) sets up an interview with the BBC’s high profile Newsnight programme to give him a chance to put his side of the story.
When the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Edward Young (Alex Jennings) finds out about the plan, he’s convinced it’s a bad idea but doesn’t have the authority to stop it.
But when Andrew’s answers fail to satisfy the public, Sir Edward is left with no choice but to clean up the mess for the Royal Family.
Oh – and Emily Maitlis gets an award.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
The team behind A Very English Scandal and A Very British Scandal return for a third instalment of parochial scandal – this time, a Royal one.
It’s the second TV dramatisation of this pivotal interview – the adaptation of Emily Maitlis’s own book about how amazing she is and how clever she was to ask such probing questions as whether the Prince regretted his behaviour and his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The point is that history will not remember Maitlis’s questions, but Andrew’s answers; not regretting a friendship, because it led to good contacts – not having a message for Epstein’s victims, because he had to have thick skin – and famously his inability to sweat and his visit to Pizza Express in Woking.
Of course, it was a coup for Newsnight to get an hour long interview with Prince Andrew at a time he was potentially embroiled in a scandal – but the consequences – his withdrawal from public life – was down to his lack of preparation – or his inability to understand how he was viewed by the public – rather than by anything Emily Maitlis did or said.
Centring the story of this historic interview on its two chief protagonists at least makes a bit more sense than Netflix’s Scoop, which was based on the memoirs of the producer who helped to set up the interview – a mere footnote in Amazon’s three-parter – and indeed in history.
Maitlis’s story is told over three hour-long episodes; the first is about the run-up to the interview, in which Emily charms Andrew into doing the interview; the second centres on the interview itself, in which Emily asks some clever questions that no-one else would have thought of; the third concentrates on the aftermath of the interview – how Emily worried about her own safety, how she received a standing ovation when she returned to her office and how she won a TV award for being such a great journalist. Oh – and Prince Andrew was shut away in a cupboard by his own family.
As with the previous telling of the story, we don’t really learn much about such an episode of recent Royal history that we remember most of it anyway – we find out that Emily Maitlis’s son is called Milo – an earth-shattering revelation in itself. Perhaps the most interesting exchanges come from the confrontations between the private secretaries of Prince Andrew and the Queen, with Joanna Scanlon and Alex Jennings being perhaps the most revealing characters or screen. But it’s these conversations – and ones between Prince Andrew and his ex-wife and house-mate Sarah Ferguson – that are likely to be no more than figments of the imagination of the writers, as Maitlis’s memoir clearly can’t be relied upon for things that happened when she wasn’t there herself.
Ruth Wilson feels like she’s doing an impression of Emily Maitlis – a perfectly good impression, but it feels like an act – and Michael Sheen elicits a degree of sympathy that you perhaps wouldn’t expect from Prince Andrew – without particularly looking or sounding like him.
And pitching this as part of a series of scandals slightly misses the mark; it was certainly scandalous that Prince Andrew remained friends with Epstein even after his conviction – but that’s not what this is about; it certainly would have been scandalous had he admitted having had sex with Virginia Roberts, but he didn’t.
The one thing that comes out of both adaptations of this story – the one thing that people will remember as they study this episode of Royal history – is that it was Prince Andrew who torpedoed his own career through his lack of empathy and sense of entitlement. Emily Maitlis did not expose a scandal – or make history – and neither did her junior guest booker, Sam McAlister. They perhaps gave the Prince a little nudge – they handed him the rope – but he put it around his neck and jumped.
The interview made history. The two attempts to bring it back to the screen don’t. Despite strong performances and earnest journalist endeavours, they each feel like individuals crowing about how significant they are. The bits around the fringes of history you just don’t need. Ultimately, if you want real drama, watch the original interview again.