Ruth Wilson is a superb actress but brace yourselves. Her voice as Emily Maitlis at the beginning of A Very Royal Scandal is odd. When she spells out her surname to a Buckingham Palace flunky — “M.A.I.T.L” — she sounds like Mrs Thatcher crossed with a braying 1980s Sloane. Happily, Wilson relaxes the baritone as the series progresses and I stopped googling Maitlis’s real voice for comparison. The interview scene with Prince Andrew is hypnotic, a high pedigree two-way of Wilson v Michael Sheen.
Ah, yes — The Interview. You may feel you have heard quite enough now about Prince Andrew’s train wreck of a Newsnight interrogation in 2019, given that there has been a documentary, a book, the recent Netflix film Scoop and now this three-part drama on Prime Video, released on Thursday, with Maitlis as an executive producer. Maitlis’s questioning of Andrew was glorious, but her back must be sore now with all the slapping. (Jealous, moi? Perish the thought!).
Initially it goes for slapstick: Maitlis drops one of her killer-heel shoes rom-comishly in her flustered rush to get inside the palace. The first words uttered by Sheen, who seems to be wearing waist padding to play Andrew, are a comedic “f*** off!” to a hapless servant. Andrew’s “f***s” keep coming, along with a “c***” aimed at a royal aide and a moment when he calls his private secretary, Amanda Thirsk (an excellent Joanna Scanlan), “Fatty”. Hello? Pot and kettle. Wilson presents Maitlis as hyper-focused PA I assumed Sheen was going for a cartoon version of the “Duke of Pork”, a blithering half-witted man-baby. Which would obviously not be unfair. But it develops into something more nuanced and thoughtful in a three-act tragicomedy; the arrogant prelude, the disastrous fall and the consequences felt by Andrew’s daughters as well as himself. After her sacking, Thirsk — played as a deluded but faithful puppy doting on the Prince (“It went very well, Sir”) — meets the Newsnight deputy editor Stewart Maclean (Éanna Hardwicke) and asks: “What if you’re all wrong? What if his worst crime is that he is clumsy and misspoke?” This is interesting, textured. It hints that Maitlis, too, suffered negative effects from the interview that made her world-famous — suggesting that afterwards powerful figures wouldn’t come on Newsnight, fearing a mauling. We also discover new things, such as the fact that Andrew apparently asked the Newsnight staff if they had ever suffered abuse. Maitlis did not tell him about her stalker, a genuine nightmare for which the culprit was jailed, but we hear about the toll it took on her family. Sheen and Wilson put in hefty, quality performances (I also loved Alex Jennings as Sir Edward Young). It feels a bit like what The Crown might have produced if it had covered this car-crash event. The dialogue is sometimes top-notch and funny, sometimes expositional and cliched. Sheen has bursts of brilliance as Andrew: “I fought for the country, all he did was talk to the roses and shag his f***ing mistress,” he bellows of Prince Charles. The scenes in which he attempts banter with the BBC technicians setting up the cameras for the interview are inspired — an idiot trying to impress his executioners. • How accurate is A Very Royal Scandal? Our expert sorts fact from fiction Yet other bits are clunky, such as when a fixated Maitlis calls her producer Esme Wren (Lydia Leonard) in the middle of the night before the interview. “It’s crazy o’clock,” says the awoken colleague. “You’ve got a date with his Royal Highness tomorrow.” I don’t claim to speak for all journalists but I’ve never heard them talk to each other as formally as that, especially when they’ve just been woken up. Wilson presents Maitlis as hyper-focused, wanting to secure the interview because she has had complaints for rolling her eyes on Newsnight. We see a lot of Maitlis’s home life too — I’m not sure we need to know where her dog, Moody, prefers to defecate but we hear it anyway. The role of the Newsnight producer Sam McAlister is much reduced in this version, with only a few lines. Is the series self-admiring? Yes, inevitably. But there is much to admire. It is also complex, touching on Maitlis’s guilt at the hurt caused to Beatrice and Eugenie and the fact that the conversation wasn’t about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims but about dismantling the Queen’s second son. It is not perfect, but it is highly entertaining and, in my opinion, a better piece of television than Scoop. Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows, the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer, the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don’t forget to check our critics’ choices to what to watch this week, the best shows of 2024 so far and browse our comprehensive TV guide
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★★★★☆
