18 September 2024

A Very Royal Scandal is the latest surreal instalment in the Prince Andrew multiverse

In Scoop vs Scandal, this is the clear winner. But is that the sound of TV eating itself?

Crunch, crunch. Listen carefully, and you can hear it: the sound of TV eating itself. First, Emily Maitlis did for Prince Andrew when she bagged an interview with him for BBC Newsnight in 2019 in which he talked of PizzaExpress and his friend the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Then Netflix made a movie about this, Scoop, an extravaganza (of sorts) that dropped in April. And now, less than six months later, Amazon Prime has produced a three-part drama on the same subject, A Very Royal Scandal. Yes, extreme mastication is the name of the game. If television was a human being, it would currently be wrapped in a fluffy robe at one of those spas where clients are made to chew everything, no matter how soft, at least 50 times before swallowing.

As a scholar of these matters, I can tell you that when it comes to Scoop vs Scandal (no, it’s not exactly Alien vs Predator), the latter is the clear winner. Amazon’s effort is sharper all round. If Michael Sheen just nudges Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew, Ruth Wilson is miles better than Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis (the voice!). The former Newsnight presenter is an executive producer, and this series gives her a home life – long-suffering husband, sons who worry about her online trolls. It parades, perhaps slightly self-indulgently, her conscience; she worries where Epstein’s victims are in all the hullabaloo (answer: nowhere), and, after the interview has screened, is pricked by the look of betrayal on the faces of the princesses Beatrice (Honor Swinton Byrne) and Eugenie (Sofia Oxenham) when she runs past them in the park. In this version of events, moreover, Sam McAlister, the Newsnight fixer on whose book Scoop was based, has more or less disappeared.

But I have caveats. A Very Royal Scandal is written by Jeremy Brock (Casualty, Mrs Brown) and directed by Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited, Appropriate Adult). When it moves away from Maitlis’s point of view to take us inside royal palaces – something it does a lot – the result is inevitably fiction. Jarrold worked on The Crown, and this drama mimics its soapy tone, happy to put convenient words into plummy mouths. After Charles urges Andrew not to do the interview, his response is: “He can talk, Mr Tampon.” On the night it premieres, Andrew is seen blithely playing “Who Am I?” with some shooting-party house-guests (pretending to be Donald Trump, he sticks out his chunky arse and sounds a loud mock fart, and eventually one of the assorted drawing-room thickos gets it).

All this is perfectly enjoyable in its Peter Morgan-inflected way. But it’s also, in context, dubious. I’m not sure the producers can have it both ways. One minute, the heroic Newsnight team are agonising about whether their editing might be dishonest (Andrew’s now infamous claims about his inability to sweat and his visit to a PizzaExpress in Woking were, it seems, filmed separately from the main interview and inserted later). The next, Andrew is furiously washing up at Balmoral, as if it were possible for him to purge his notoriety with Fairy Liquid and some stubborn roasting tins. The obviously made-up stuff may have a certain imaginative veracity, but it does seem rather drastically to undercut the series’ other convictions about the importance of journalism, and what it can achieve, at a time when public trust in the media is extremely low.

I guess the producers were trying to avoid merely giving us another facsimile of the interview (though we get one anyway). But this only brings them to overreach themselves. When we see Andrew packing gifts for delivery to a hospice during the pandemic – something he did do, seemingly in a highly staged bid for some good PR – writer Brock has him baulking at the task. “There’s no way I’m hugging some f***ing OAP in the middle of a pandemic,” he tells Fergie (Claire Rushbrook, on top form) in a strangulated whisper. It’s not that I feel sorry for Andrew: I don’t. But A Very Royal Scandal would have done well to exercise a little restraint. Metaphorically speaking, he’s already as dead as a dodo (or a Sandringham pheasant) by this point. No need to get out a gun when you’ve already rung the bird’s neck.