Except for the interviewee being an obliging idiot, this could as easily have turned into an own goal by a BBC desperately trumpeting its values to an indifferent nation that has been wooed away by the streamers. When the top dog is indulged by having her own top dog, a whippet, sitting at her feet everywhere she goes in BBC HQ and the supposed news bosses believe a scoop is snatching someone else’s scoop you’re on a very sticky wicket indeed.
And it’s worth bearing in mind that this show only came about because the person who set up the interview Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) had a severe case of schadenfreude and believing she hadn’t been sufficiently well rewarded wrote a book about the episode and nabs a writing credit here.
There’s not really a sympathetic character in the whole feature, unless you count the 450 journalists being shown the door because the Government won’t let the BBC raise the licence fee to cover its running costs and the BBC refuses to lower the fees it pays its top presenters (who only stay out of the goodness of their hearts because of course they would get richer pickings on commercial channels) to achieve the same end.
The only person who comes close is the sad-eyed Royal PR guru Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), heart roasted by looking after spoiled man-child Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell in an ill-fitting face mask) – inclined to throw a tantrum should some housekeeper fail to arrange his battalion of teddy bears in the correct order – and clearly desperate to believe the prince could not possibly be at fault. However, the idea that you would let such a dope loose on Newsnight, facing one of the world’s toughest interviewers in whippet-lover Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), shows remarkably poor judgement, especially when the prince just can’t see what all the fuss was about when he was doing the right thing by standing by his old pal, a convicted paedophile.
Anyone expecting proper investigative journalism or a thrilling narrative up to standards of All the Presidents Men (1976) or Spotlight (2015) – where the journalists actually do the hard work of the digging rather than just regurgitating a story that’s already out there, albeit with a bit more gloss, and the luxury of a one-hour time slot – would be looking in the wrong place.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had discovered just a little bit more about Bernstein and Woodward’s personal lives, whether they owned dogs or had girlfriends or maybe a sick mother, just to fluff out the story a bit, but luckily Alan J. Pakula had more to worry about than what clothes his Woodward and Bernstein had to wear when confronting their subjects.
The BBC high-ups, when not toddling off to sit in boxes at the opera, come across as up their own backsides. Sam is shown to be an outsider, who, unfortunately, dresses like she’s going clubbing, which gets everyone’s back up, but, red card here, seems surprisingly ignorant of the juicier details of the story she’s investigating.
Netflix has been on a roll with The Crown so presumably thought any story with a royal connection would be equally a ratings winner, not realizing that you still need interesting characters to snaffle the viewers and no number of angst-ridden people is going to cut it.
I can’t vouch for the truth of the impersonations of real characters, but while Gillian Anderson seems to catch the essence of Emily Maitlis, Rufus Sewell’s intonations are very much the actor’s own while the face mask seems to wobble from time to time. Billie Piper got the thumbs-up from Sam. I doubt if Amanda Thirsk would care for her worst PR moment to be dramatized but Keeley Hawes at least lends her gravitas.
Suicide by television is the best way to describe the prince, locked into a self-serving version of himself as charming war hero best suited to modelling Army uniforms glittering with medals. However, it struck me at the time and I was reminded of this omission here, that none of the investigative journalists have sought to investigate the small matter of the Pizza Express alibi. I would have thought it would be relatively easy to establish if Andrew was there on the night in question. Directed by Philip Martin.
This only goes to prove that not only can you lead a horse to water but without much encouragement you can get it to drown itself.
The original interview is better value than this. But we should perhaps thank Netflix for allowing its rival a moment in the sun.
The Magnificent 60s 