Netflix get the SCOOP

The real-life royal interview on Newsnight is turned into a dramatisation…

It’s the show that has been making newspaper columns across the UK. Inspired by real events, SCOOP is the inside account of the tenacious journalism that landed an earthshattering interview – Prince Andrew’s infamous BBC Newsnight appearance. From the tension of producer Sam McAlister’s high-stakes negotiations with Buckingham Palace, all the way to Emily Maitlis’ jaw-dropping, forensic showdown with the Prince, SCOOP takes us inside the story, with the women who would stop at nothing to get it. To get an interview this big, you have to be bold.

Prince Andrew, played by Rufus Sewell, was urged to appear on the Beeb following allegations he had involved himself in dubious sexual activities. So with his reputation hanging in the balance, ‘Randy Andy’ as he was called in the 1980s by the tabloid press, he has a make-or-break chance to win over the UK public with this TV appearance – and as we all know he royally cocked it up. He would go on to avoid court appearances by proving his ‘innocence’ by paying out 10 million quid to his accuser.

From the tension of producer Sam McAlister’s – played by Billie Piper – high-stakes negotiations with Buckingham Palace, all the way to Emily Maitlis played by Gillian Anderson and her jaw-dropping, forensic showdown with the Prince, SCOOP takes viewers inside the story, with the women who would stop at nothing to get it.

In November 2019 Newsnight, the long-running BBC Two current affairs show, broadcast an exclusive interview with HRH Prince Andrew. Nearly two million people watched journalist Emily Maitlis question the Prince on his relationships with the disgraced, late financier Jeffrey Epstein and with Virginia Roberts, who was underage (in the states) at the time.

The interview did not go well. The Prince’s answers veered between bizarre and daft, lacking empathy or remorse. The inquisition lasted an hour but its afterlife was much longer, with countless memes about not sweating and ordinary shooting weekends appearing on the Internet within minutes. For Newsnight, it was gold dust. Prince Andrew was forced to step back from public duties as a result. But as the dust settled, two questions remained: how on earth had Newsnight secured the interview? And why on earth had the Prince agreed to do it?

The real Andrew on the real Newsnight in 2019

Hilary Salmon and Radford Neville, executive producers at The Lighthouse Film and Television, started to wonder about the story behind the story.

“We have a relationship with a factual company called Voltage TV and in 2021 we were having a Christmas brainstorm with them over a mince pie or two. This idea came up – wouldn’t it be cool to tell the story about how the BBC got the Prince Andrew interview. Because although a lot of people had seen the interview, they didn’t know what he was thinking, why he did it or how Newsnight persuaded him.”

Sanjay Singhal, Chief Executive at Voltage TV, had a contact in TV journalism who knew that Sam McAlister, the interview booker on Newsnight who had secured the Prince Andrew coup, was writing a book. Lighthouse optioned the rights before it had even been published. It wasn’t just the story that they liked, it was its narrator too.

“Sam is a force of nature,” says Salmon. “She’s larger than life – and neither of those two descriptions are clichés in Sam’s case. She’s not the sort of person that you would expect to find in a BBC office, let alone on BBC Newsnight, this serious engine of news. And she’s also that kind of fish out of water figure, who nevertheless is the truth teller – she was the one who said, ‘We need this interview, it’s going to be good. It’s going to be big. It might feel like celebrity journalism to you but actually, it’s
important and it will be massive. And she was right.”

In the hands of scriptwriter Peter Moffat (Your Honor), who had worked with Salmon before on Criminal Justice and The Night Of, Sam McAlister became the lead character in SCOOP. She would be the viewer’s way into the story.

“I was blown away when I read Peter Moffat’s script,” says director Philip Martin, “It had such energy, such pace, such a lovely tonal complexity to it. Sometimes it moves really fast, sometimes it slows down and you get to spend time with the characters.”

SCOOP: Billie Piper plays Sam McAlister / Netflix

When Billie Piper read the script she saw a story that placed four women front and centre: she would play Sam McAlister alongside Keeley Hawes as Amanda Thirsk, Prince Andrew’s private secretary; Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis and Romola Garai as Esme Wren, Newsnight’s perennially calm editor.

“It’s about who those women are,” says Piper, “how their interview made its way to screen, how it was signed off, all the process of getting it up and running and this idea of bouncing between two huge British institutions, the BBC and the Palace. But mostly, it’s about people, I think. It’s about the unsung journalists behind the scoop itself.”

Director Philip Martin adds: “Newsnight is the pinnacle, the gold standard of BBC News journalism. It’s a nightly news show and it’s where the toughest journalism takes place: it’s the most detailed investigations, the hardest interviews. It’s been going for about 40 years and if you work in news at the BBC, it’s where you want to end up.”

The Netflix drama takes place at a time when Newsnight itself is under pressure: as with much serious broadcast news and analysis, audiences are declining and its funding and staffing are under scrutiny. Sam McAlister, a single mum, is tasked with delivering the kind of big-ticket interviews that will bolster ratings and justify the show’s continued existence. As SCOOP shows, getting a member of the Royal Family to commit to a detailed interview with no red lines was a drawn-out, at times fraught back and forth.

SCOOP: Gillian Anderson plays Emily Maitlis / Netflix

“I think the greatest misconception about the interview is, ‘It just happened,’” says Sam McAlister.

“Some people will probably be thinking, ‘Well, I’ve already seen the interview, why do I want to watch Scoop?’ But I always get asked a different question once people know I was involved: ‘How did this happen?’ That really is the question that this film answers: it’s the other 95% before the thing that everybody is familiar with. Here we get to put that other 95% in a dramatic context.”

The context is of a group of hugely capable, professional women combining to get the job done. “These women exist in real life,” says Gillian Anderson, who plays star interviewer Emily Maitlis, “and they are women in a field that has been traditionally male-dominated. Having a story about their experience and having journalists like Emily Maitlis (who is clearly at the very, very top of her game) represented in film is important – it’s important to mark that historically. What I love about this film is that all of the women sit prominently in the story; you see them all working together to bring this interview to light.”

An additional hurdle for writer, cast and crew was getting the tone right: a million memes prove (and still prove) that there was comedy inherent in some of Prince Andrew’s answers, in everything from his alibi with Virginia Roberts (a family visit to Pizza Express) to his apparent inability to sweat. Yet at the same time he was talking about his involvement with a convicted paedophile. It both was and really wasn’t funny.

“There was no getting away from the fact that what he did, and the answers he gave were absurd,” says Producer Hilary Salmon, “as well as jaw-droppingly outrageous and impossible not to laugh at really. Once you’ve got that kind of reaction to the climax of the film, the rest of the film has to keep with that tone in a way.”

SCOOP: Rufus Sewell plays Prince Andrew / Netflix

The Lighthouse co-founder Radford Neville notes:

“Sending the story up actually makes the story feel less important, like it doesn’t really matter and we can all have a good old laugh and go home. We wanted to create a balance between the humour inherent in the story and the gravity of the things we were talking about — Epstein’s crimes obviously, and the absurdity of Andrew’s decision-making. I think that’s something that Rufus [Sewell] judges really well in his performance because although he is funny, he does not play it for laughs.”

If SCOOP shows how the Prince Andrew interview happened, it also offers answers to the second great question that the Newsnight special left hanging: why did he do it? No one is better placed to answer that than Sam McAlister.

“I think it’s three things. First of all, no one thinks they’re going to do a bad interview. Secondly, there is an ego element to interviews. Many powerful people think that not only are they not going to do a bad interview, but they’re probably going to do an excellent one. In his very difficult position, my impression is that he felt he would be able to eradicate the perception of him that had built up over the Epstein scandal by doing this interview.”

The third reason, McAlister says in conclusion, is the most important one. It’s also where she comes in to the story.

“We have a set of skills that people like to call ‘soft.’ I consider them the hardest skills of all, having worked in this world for a long time. And those are empathy and understanding of basic human emotions. This was a man who was now persona non grata. He was the Forgotten Prince, a problem Prince who had gone from a hero to a zero. Princess Beatrice was going to get married: he wanted to walk her down the aisle.

“He was about to turn 60: he wanted to enjoy his birthday. He wanted to go back to the wonderful way of life that he had had. I understood that on a human level that was what was going to really motivate him to try and turn his Royal life around.”

And so he said yes. What followed was the scoop of the decade. SCOOP is streaming from today on Netflix.