Deborah Ross

You’ll want to claw your face off: Scoop reviewed

This perfunctory dramatisation of the Prince Andrew interview shows that you should never trust a middle-aged man who says 'mummy'

Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew and Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis in Scoop. Image: Peter Mountain / Netflix  
issue 06 April 2024

Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The one he imagined would allow him to put Jeffrey Epstein behind him, but instead put Pizza Express (Woking) on the map, made us want to claw our own faces off with the horror of it, and led to the Queen stripping him of all his royal and military titles. (I think you know you are in trouble with Mummy when this happens.)

Although billed as a ‘film’, this isn’t especially cinematic. It’s more like a bonus episode of The Crown but it is phenomenally cast (Rufus Sewell is a revelation) and you do get to claw your own face off all over again. If, that is, you have any face left.

Written by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil, and directed by Philip Martin, it’s based on the book by Sam McAlister, the Newsnight ‘booker’ who secured the interview, so this is her account.

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