My notes on Scoop (2024)
Remember the episode of The Larry Sanders Show where someone has the bright idea of making the backroom staff of the programme into regular characters and Jeanne Garofalo gets to caricature her character as ‘Paula the Sour Booker’? Here’s a true life film based on a memoir by Sam McAlister, who gets to be played by Billie Piper, in which a talent booker – and you have to know quite a bit of inside television guff (or have watched Larry Sanders) even to know what a talent booker does – is presented as an against-the-odds hero. Sam wears leopard-pattern shoes and is a struggling single mum, looked down on (mostly from seated positions) by the staff of the BBC’s Newsnight as ‘too Daily Mail’ but getting a shot at gossip immortality when she persuades Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) to sit down for an as-it-happens-car-crash interview with Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), who gives him enough rope in the wake of the suicide of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to hang the entire household cavalry. I doubt this would be a Netflix film – with a competing movie in the works – were it not for the success of Peter Morgan’s The Queen and The Crown in making the recent history of the Royal Family gossip-fodder talking point drama. Morgan also wrote Frost/Nixon, the only previous entry in the landing-that-big-TV-interview sub-genre.
As usual, there’s a question of what’s real and what’s fictionalised; in this case I’m frankly not interested enough to bother finding out. The script by Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil makes this the story of a big male beast – Andrew – at the centre of a web of powerful women, who include his unseen mother, Newsnight boss Esme Wren (Romola Garai) and Andrew’s private secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes). Perhaps because this is a very recent story and the lawyers must still be watching, this doesn’t take the obvious dramatic tack of contrasting the way the scoop is a triumph for Sam and a disaster for Amanda – we see Sam getting a sense of how big the story has been and her colleagues now being respectful, but not even a caption covers what happened to Amanda (she got fired and was eventually awarded a big settlement – yes, I did look it up).
Despite his perv reputation – which everyone, including his social media-aware daughter, knows about* – Andrew has always been one of the least interesting Royals … and Sewell does something with that, playing a sixtyish man-baby fussing over the arrangement of his collection of cuddly toys (terrifying a maid) and emerging chubbily from the bath to watch himself blowing up his own life on television, but never tries for any special pleading. Anderson and Sewell recreate the interview, with running comments – Sam sees Emily has changed her usual grilling approach to keep Andrew talking rather than walking off in a huff – in a display of pointlessly good acting. More telling are the appalled reactions to Andrew’s complete lack of self-awareness in ending a meeting with ‘I don’t know why all the fuss is about Jeffrey Epstein … I knew Jimmy Savile a lot better’. Subjective note: I read a review which interpreted a scene of Sam on a bus watching girls chatter over their phones as her being reminded of how young the victims in the case are (though they feature very little in the drama) whereas I first thought the point was that she was looking at an audience who wouldn’t normally be reachable by Newsnight but would pick up on this meme-friendly, tweetable sensation.
*Princess Beatrice is played by Charity Wakefield, in a reprise of her turn as Marilyn Munster in that unsold Mockinbird Lane pilot.
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