Scoop is one of the most anticipated new films of the year. Boasting an all-star cast (including Gillian Anderson, Keeley Hawes and Billie Piper), it promises to tell the inside story of Prince Andrew’s infamous Newsnight interview in 2019.
Fronted by the BBC’s Emily Maitlis, the interview gave us meme-able lines from “I can’t sweat” to “Pizza Express Woking”, with the fallout leading to Andrew stepping back from royal life (though he strenuously denies all wrongdoing).
But the film delves deeper than the headline gaffes and looks at the people who made the entire thing happen. Specifically, Sam McAlister, the journalist who was responsible for securing access to the prince, and upon whose memoir, Scoops, the whole film is based.
She’s played by Billie Piper in this dramatisation, but who is the real McAlister?
Who is Sam McAlister?
McAlister was a producer for the BBC Newsnight team. Having studied at the University of Edinburgh, she became a barrister, before going into the media.
She was with the BBC for 10 years, helping to secure interviews with notable figures for the Newsnight team including Bill Clinton, Elon Musk – and, of course, Prince Andrew.
“As the interviews producer, it was my job to book guests for Newsnight,” she later wrote in Tatler.
“You might think that was an easy job, that people would be queuing up to appear on such a prestigious show, but nothing was further from the truth. I had to persuade them to risk all on national television; to face the court of public opinion.”
The Newsnight interview
In 2020, McAlister landed the scoop of all scoops when she helped secure an interview with Prince Andrew about his association with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The process of getting the interview started in 2018, when McAlister received an email from Andrew’s team, inviting them to talk to the prince about the work he did with young entrepreneurs. Though McAlister refused, she made a counteroffer: an interview with the Newsnight team.
“I was so convinced that he wouldn’t do it that I didn’t even tell my boss,” she wrote. “Instead, I showed up at Buckingham Palace in May 2019 to meet his then chief of staff, Amanda Thirsk, and did my best to persuade her that Prince Andrew should answer questions on the hot topics of the time.”
Initially, the answer was a firm no. Several months later (and after much to-ing and fro-ing), there followed a meeting with Andrew himself (with Emily Maitlis and Princess Beatrice in tow). Shortly after, Andrew said yes.
“We had a face-to-face negotiation which we show you a snippet of, but [in the interview] he revealed a number of the things that he revealed in that negotiation,” McAlister told the Standard.
“So I had heard ‘Pizza Express Woking’ and ‘no sweat’ already, but I did not for one second think he would say them when the camera started rolling. I assumed none of that would come out in the public domain, so the shock for me, if you like, was that the things I had already heard were now on camera for the world to see.”
She later wrote in Tatler that the interview was “a masterclass in how to destroy your life.”
Where is she now?
After the Newsnight interview (which took place a few months before the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020), McAlister spent several months struggling with the disease – after which she decided to write Scoops.
She had hoped to stay at the BBC while she did so, but as she later explained, “it was made clear that that wasn’t an option. And so I threw the dice. Found an agent. Gave up my staff job, risked it all.”
According to McAlister, taking voluntary redundancy (as she did in 2021) was the “best decision” she ever made. Soon enough, Netflix came knocking, looking to option the rights to her story.
Now, in addition to working with Netflix on Scoop, she works as a professional speaker, and teaches negotiation. “Instead of long days on the commute and in the airless BBC office,” she wrote, “I’m always on the move: there’s been a TEDx talk, a fellowship at LSE, martinis at The Dorchester.”
