Scoop review: Netflix's film about the infamous BBC Prince Andrew interview misses the point

The 2019 royal interrogation has become a scripted drama with stars including Gillian Anderson – but there's too much emphasis on the personal story of the news producer behind it, and not enough on the bigger issues.

It was one of the most astounding interviews in television history. In 2019, an episode of the BBC's Newsnight programme devoted 50 minutes to Emily Maitlis's forensic questioning of Prince Andrew, the main topic being his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a sex offender who had died in custody three months earlier. The prince maintained that he was innocent of any crimes himself, but the entitled tone and language of his denials turned viewers against him, anyway.

He claimed that on a night when he was alleged to have been with one of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre, he was actually in a Pizza Express restaurant in Woking. He argued that Giuffre's recollection of his sweatiness must have been mistaken because "I don't sweat". He insisted that he hadn't organised a birthday party for Epstein's girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, but merely a "straightforward shooting weekend". And he made a non-apology for staying in Epstein's New York house after Epstein had been convicted of sex offences against a minor: "I admit fully my judgement was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable," he said, referring to his decision to continue contact with him, despite everything.

The success of The Crown has proven just how much the public loves to see actors recreating the British royal family's troubles, so it was probably inevitable that someone would turn the behind-the-scenes story of this landmark interview into a scripted drama. The only surprise is that there are two of them to choose from. Amazon Studios is making a three-part series starring Ruth Wilson as Maitlis and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew, but first we have Scoop, a Netflix film directed by Philip Martin (who made several episodes of The Crown), with Gillian Anderson as Maitlis and Rufus Sewell as the Duke of York. A tip of the crown to the hair and make-up artists who helped both actors to resemble their real-life counterparts so closely.

Not that either Maitlis or the prince is the central character. Scoop is adapted from a memoir by Sam McAlister, who had the job of booking guests for Newsnight, and she is at the heart of the film, played by Billie Piper: the director loves shots of her strutting towards the BBC's London headquarters, Broadcasting House, in high-heeled boots, a long black coat and designer sunglasses. Once she's inside Broadcasting House, though, Sam has to put up with the grumblings of snobbish colleagues who don't think that a kebab-eating single mother belongs on the team. Her boss, Esme Wren (Romola Garai), doesn't participate in this grumbling, but the film's overarching theme is how frustrating it is for Sam to be left out and looked down upon by people who consider themselves to be classier than she is.

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Piper is extraordinarily expressive, and does a terrific job of selling Sam's anger and determination. And the screenplay, by Peter Moffat, establishes how skilfully Sam builds a relationship with the Prince's doting private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes). All the same, when Scoop gets to the bland scenes of Sam at home, counselling her son on how to talk to a girl he has a crush on, you can't help but ask whether it should have put so much emphasis on her. The programme was, after all, an enquiry into the Queen's favourite son's links to sex traffickers Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Weren't there more important issues to explore than a journalist's hurt feelings? And didn't the other Newsnight staffers have a bigger part to play? In Scoop, it's not at all clear what Wren brings to the process, and Maitlis is little more than a cypher with an ever-present pet whippet in place of a personality.

Some of the best scenes show the Newsnight team gathering in an unfurnished, abandoned room (I'm not sure where it's supposed to be) with photos stuck on the walls, where they prepare for the interview like bank robbers rehearsing a heist or detectives building a case against a serial killer. But this key sequence is over all too quickly. In her own account of that period, Maitlis wrote that the programme-makers "spent weeks investigating every aspect of the story, and between us as a team we meticulously planned the interview so that the questions could stand the test of time".

In Scoop, those weeks are reduced to a montage during which the interchangeable male producers tell Maitlis to be aggressive in her questioning, whereas the wise Sam advises her to sit back and let the prince speak. Given that Maitlis wasn't involved in Scoop, but she is involved in the Amazon series, it will be interesting to see if her version of events gives McAlister quite so much credit.

The climax of the film, of course, is the tense, surreal, and blackly funny sequence that reproduces some of the key exchanges from the car-crash interview. It's here, more than in the other scenes, that Anderson transforms into Maitlis. It's here, too, that Sewell steals the show by imitating Andrew almost exactly, yet slightly exaggerating the hesitations and the snorting laughs that give him a puffed up quality. On the other hand, the reason that this sequence is so gripping is that it's a carbon copy of the real thing, and so it does raise the question of why the film was made at all. Why watch a hit song being performed by a talented tribute act when you could be watching the band that recorded the song in the first place? At the screening of Scoop I attended, the only lines that got big laughs were those lifted directly from the interview.

There are some other worthwhile scenes, though – and they're the ones that venture beyond what we've seen on news reports already. In one of these scenes, Andrew scolds a maid because she hasn't arranged the teddy bears on his bed in Buckingham Palace properly. In another, he brags that "Mummy" has big things in mind for his 60th birthday celebrations – although the filmmakers are too cautious or too respectful to show the late Queen. Whether these scenes are based on eyewitness accounts, or whether Moffat was given licence to invent them, they starkly propose how sheltered being a British royal might be, and thus suggest why Andrew might have been foolish enough to agree to the interview that shredded his reputation.

This is what Scoop lacks elsewhere: a bit of boldness, irreverence, imagination and depth. It's a brisk, well-acted and solidly built newsroom drama, but there is plenty of scope for the Amazon series to be better.

★★★☆☆

Scoop is released internationally on Netflix on 5 April

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