The arrival of A Very Royal Scandal, a new Amazon Prime drama about Prince Andrew’s car-crash Newsnight interview, might leave many viewers feeling a sense of déjà vu. Haven’t we seen this all before?
Well yes, we have. Scoop, another drama about Andrew and Emily Maitlis’s 2019 head-to-head, landed on Netflix just five-and-half months ago. That film was an adaptation of a memoir by Newsnight booker Sam McAlister, and showed her fighting tooth and nail to bag the interview. This new three-part series, however, is Maitlis’s version of events – she serves as executive producer on the series – and she seems to remember things very differently.
Many details in the two retellings are the same, of course. In both, we see Andrew discuss his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, deny having ever met 17-year-old Virginia Guiffre, and come up with bizarre excuses to do with sweating, the Falklands War and Pizza Express. We also see Maitlis jogging in blue leisurewear matching her whippet Moody, and Andrew’s private secretary Amanda Thirsk (who was promptly sacked by the palace after the interview) is similarly portrayed in the two dramatisations as completely dazzled by the royal.
But here, we dive into the key differences in the ways that A Very Royal Scandal and Scoop tell the same story…
The casting
Scoop starred Gillian Anderson as Maitlis, Billie Piper as McAlister and Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew. In A Very Royal Scandal, meanwhile, Ruth Wilson plays Maitlis, Clare Calbraith is McAlister and Michael Sheen is Andrew. So, who did it better? Well, Wilson certainly masters Maitlis’s voice in a way that Anderson struggled to, but the heavy prosthetics on Sewell made him a more convincing Andrew than Sheen’s version.
What’s Emily Maitlis really like?
In A Very Royal Scandal, Maitlis is portrayed as almost constantly flustered and rushed off her feet. We see her dropping her heels on the way into Buckingham Palace, as she arrives late for the interview. She’s shown sitting on the loo when she gets inside, drying her sweaty armpits with toilet roll. She also becomes frustrated, in one scene, saying that her male colleagues at the BBC, such as John Humphrys, would never receive complaints in the way she did after she rolled her eyes during an interview with Labour’s Barry Gardiner about Brexit.
By contrast, in Scoop, Maitlis is portrayed as cool as a cucumber – always impeccably dressed and coiffed, and seemingly unflappable.
Chasing and securing the interview
This is where the biggest difference between the two narratives lies. In A Very Royal Scandal, McAlister appears only in very small snippets, and is given a mere handful of lines across the three episodes. While she is shown bringing up Andrew to her Newsnight colleagues in the first instance (when she mentions his team has been in touch with her about his entrepreneur initiative Pitch at the Palace), that’s pretty much her only input as far as the series is concerned.
Maitlis is instead depicted as the one who points out the link between Andrew and Epstein, and she is the one who badgers the team about no one following up for an interview. A Very Royal Scandal also gives a lot of the credit to Stewart MacLean, the deputy editor of Newsnight played by Éanna Hardwicke, who is shown being Maitlis’s right-hand man in setting up the meeting.
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On the other hand, in Scoop, McAlister was very much the lead character, with Maitlis popping up at critical moments. Many scenes showed the booker doing a lot of late-night Googling of the photos of Andrew and Epstein, and looking into their relationship (in A Very Royal Scandal, it’s Maitlis doing all the digging). Scoop also sees McAlister having meetings with Thirsk and being very persuasive in the pre-interview meet with Andrew where he agreed to go on Newsnight.
Dramatic licence
When it comes to getting inside Andrew’s psyche, Scoop used a bit of dramatic licence, but nowhere near as much as A Very Royal Scandal.
Scoop had an unfortunately unforgettable scene of a naked Andrew watching the Newsnight interview in the bath and stepping out to reveal his bare bottom (well, the bare bottom of Sewell’s prosthetics). But it didn’t have many other scenes imagining what Andrew is like in his private life.
In A Very Royal Scandal, however, Andrew is shown enjoying a hunting weekend with friends on the evening that Newsnight airs. We also see the royal playing charades with family. We see imagined conversations between his daughters. And we see Fergie (Claire Rushbrook) asking him if he’s guilty while he angrily hits golf balls into the dark night sky.
Andrew asking Maitlis if she’s been abused
This is a big moment in A Very Royal Scandal, which is completely omitted from Scoop.
Both dramatisations show Andrew’s pre-meeting with the Newsnight team, where they persuade him to agree to the interview, but it’s only in the new series that we see Andrew asking Maitlis, MacLean and McAlister if any of them have been abused. It is presented as an apparent attempt to see if their judgment of the case would be coloured by any personal experience.
Maitlis, shocked by the question, responds: “Nothing that bears comparison.” Later, we see Maitlis confiding in her husband that the question made her think about her experience of being stalked. In 2022, a stalker who has had a three-decade fixation with Maitlis was jailed for eight years after attempting to breach a restraining order for the 20th time.
The Independent understands that the abuse question was included in the show following interviews with people present at the meeting. Representatives for Maitlis and Andrew have been contacted about whether the question was in fact asked.
‘A Very Royal Scandal’ is out now on Prime Video