Honestly, you wait ages for a drama based on Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis, then two come along at once. This ponderous Amazon three-parter with Michael Sheen as the boorish royal and Ruth Wilson adopting a bizarre drawl as his journalistic nemesis, arrives mere months after Rufus Sewell and Gillian Anderson played the roles in Netflix’s film Scoop.
Both productions are examples of media self-congratulation – yay, it was *us* who brought down a royal! Both suffer from the fact that the most excruciating lowlights of Andrew’s responses are already burned on the nation’s frontal cortex.
He didn’t immediately break off his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein after the latter’s conviction for pedophilia because he was “too honourable”. He couldn’t have had sex with 17-year-old Virginia Roberts (now Guiffre), as she alleged, because he was in the Woking Pizza Hut that day. Her description of him sweating on the dancefloor at Tramp was untrue because he “can’t sweat” after flying helicopters in the Falklands War.
Like Scoop, A Very Royal Scandal dutifully ticks these off in a more or less verbatim central recreation of the grilling. But where Scoop was based on a book by news producer Sam McAlister (and put her centre-stage, in the shape of Billie Piper), AVRS has been made with Maitlis’s co-operation.
So the first episode is dedicated to the juxtaposition of her chaotic home life and… well, her equally chaotic work life, as she battles BBC sexism and stuffiness while the Andrew interview teeters on a knife-edge.
And the third deals with the aftermath of the broadcast, which again, we already know. Andrew was disgraced and sidelined but not displaced. Maitlis quit the BBC to create the News Agents podcast. Guiffre was paid a sum thought to be £12m by the Crown – in other words, by us – but she and Epstein’s other alleged victims have had neither closure nor justice. Andrew also strenuously denies all allegations against him.
Throughout, Jeremy Brock’s script is thuddingly on the nose, painstakingly reminding us of foreground events (Boris and the ERG torpedoing Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the pandemic, the Queen’s Golden Jubilee) and of obvious textual undercurrents. Andrew asks the Newsnight team if any of them were ever sexually abused, a device to shoehorn Maitlis’s real-life stalker into the mix as proof that “certain men… assume certain rights without giving it a second thought. [It’s about] their want, their need, their impulse.”
Andrew is portrayed as a bumptious, vain oaf, obsessed with golf and game shoots, dismissing underlings with a lofty “fuck off!” He’s shown begging money from Epstein but the jury’s out on the sex allegations. Maitlis is constantly either jogging (at one point passing Andrew’s crestfallen daughters in a park), swearing or slugging vodka from the freezer to illustrate her drive and the stress of her job.
I’d crawl over harsh terrain to see Sheen and Wilson in just about anything. After AVRS I felt I had. His chameleonic power seems muted, while her attempt to capture Maitlis’s grave diction makes the broadcaster sound glutinously smug. There are nice turns from Joanna Scanlan as Andrew’s hapless secretary Amanda Thirsk and a bouncy Claire Rushbrook as Fergie. As factotum Sir Edward Young, Alex Jennings is so dry you fear he’ll blow away.
Julian Jarrold directs with a muted grey/blue palette, with close-ups for cramped media offices and expansive interiors and exteriors for the conjectured royal scenes. A wistful piano tune and the ticking of a clock are signatures on the soundtrack. This latest piece of royal “faction” is strictly by the numbers.
