“Three women and a whippet – wouldn’t have seen that in a BBC studio when I started.”
These are the words of Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) 20 minutes into Scoop, Netflix’s latest political drama. Based on the memoir of Sam McAlister, producer on the infamous Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew in 2019, Scoop tells the story of how three women and a whippet secured and conducted one of the most explosive interviews of the 21st century.
From the offset we understand that Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) is different to your traditional, dowdy BBC producer – she wears leopard print stilettos and her ringtone is ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’. As a producer on Newsnight, her job is “booking the people we can’t just call up.”
Her skills are put to the test when she comes across images of Prince Andrew and his friend the prolific sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and sets about securing an interview with the problematic Prince. Why would he agree to do an interview guaranteed to send the media and the world into a frenzy, I hear you ask? He thought he would be promoting ‘Pitch at Palace’, an entrepreneurial endeavour aimed at helping start-up businesses.
The interview scene itself is spectacular. Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) fumbles his way through the questions posed to him by steely superwoman Maitlis. He denies having sex with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre – he was at a Pizza Express in Woking. He denies getting sweaty on the dancefloor – he doesn’t sweat… you know the story. Meanwhile, his private secretary (Keeley Hawes) watches with admiration, severely underestimating the impact his words would have on the Royal Family’s image. At the end of the interview, Prince Andrew cheerfully declares “I thought that all went very well.” Yet, as we all know, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Rufus Sewell (The Holiday, The Diplomat) looks uncanny as Prince Andrew and flawlessly conveys his ‘Randy Andy’ persona. After meeting Maitlis and McAlister to set up the interview, he says “I don’t understand why everyone’s so obsessed with my friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. I knew Jimmy Saville so much better.” It’s not all laughs though, he also displays a sinister side, creepy even, as he (a 59-year-old man) berates a young member of staff for putting his teddies back on his bed in the wrong order.
Critics have labelled Scoop a “media love-in” and it does feel a bit smug at times, particularly at the end when producer Esmé Wren (Romola Garai) gives a triumphant speech: “This is what Newsnight is. We put the time in to get the stories other shows won’t. Stories that need to be told, that people care about, that hold the powerful to account and give victims a voice.”
To me, however, it felt more like a powerful critique of the elitist practices of the media industry. The scrutiny culminates in McAlister’s mum’s line “Sam, you know how this works. People like us, we don’t wait to be asked”, after Sam laments that she has not been asked to help prepare for the interview, despite being the one to set it up.
Scoop isn’t afraid to show that the media industry is unfair and demonstrates that perhaps it is time for the industry to turn its attention inwards and do some self-reflection to address the internal inequalities that are rampant in institutions like the BBC.
4/5
