A Very Royal Scandal — a very controversial series?

Now that The Crown has finished (for the time being, at least), production companies are scrabbling about for replacements. Perhaps inevitably, the biggest royal story of the past few years — Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis on the BBC’s Newsnight program — has now been made into two separate shows this year. The Netflix offering, Scoop, focused on Sam McAlister — and was, far from coincidentally, based on McAlister’s memoir. Now Amazon Prime has entered the fray with a three-part series that follows in the wake of the peerless A Very English Scandal and the lesser A Very British Scandal. Whatever next? A Very Scandalous Scandal

This show, written by Jeremy Brock and directed by Julian Jarrold (the pair previously worked together on the screen adaptation of that other study of class and privilege, Brideshead Revisited), has two interwoven plot lines that sustain it through its generous three-hour length. The first storyline revolves around Maitlis, as played with blonde hairdo and initially distracting husky baritone by the ever-chameleonic Ruth Wilson, who has her own history of abuse to contend with, in the form of an obsessive stalker, and who therefore prosecutes the Duke of York with the committed zeal of someone who truly believes in her work. The account of the machinations at the BBC is all mildly interesting, but Scoop added a layer of jeopardy in its suggestion that McAlister was only just clinging onto her job. Here, everyone is passionate, committed et cetera, and Maitlis’s eccentricities (owning a whippet; drinking vodka neat out of the freezer) are presented as nothing more than the side effects of being a passionate, committed journalist.

The more interesting storyline revolves around the grand old duke himself, played with appropriate sleaziness by Michael Sheen. In Scoop, Rufus Sewell’s buffoonish, crass Andrew was very much a supporting character, a teddy bear-collecting obsessive who can always be relied upon to say or do the wrong thing. However, in A Very Royal Scandal, he’s actively bad, a charmless ignoramus who barks “Fuck off!” at any bowing and scraping flunkey who has the misfortune to cross his path, and who approaches his Newsnight interview with belligerent self-assurance, as if he was about to fight for his country in the Falklands again.

At times, the show feels like a spin-off from The Crown, especially when that show’s alumnus Alex Jennings appears, here in typically excellent form as Sir Edward Young, the Queen’s private secretary and head of the Royal Household. Not only does Jennings get the best lines — “We find ourselves here, in a clusterfuck worthy of the Kardashians,” he hisses after the interview — but his Machiavellian presence, brutally firing Andrew’s devoted private secretary Amanda Thirsk after the interview goes predictably awry, gives the show a lift and a boost every time he appears, adding intrigue and interest to a story that is now as well-known as the Bible.

There’s nothing wrong with A Very Royal Scandal as such — it’s impeccably cast and well-mounted, and even if the dialogue unavoidably has to lapse into unconvincing exposition from time to time, it’s delivered with assurance by a talented ensemble. But if you’ve seen Scoop, you may feel that this is inessential and unrevelatory, yet another exercise in poring over the soiled underwear of a minor public figure. The show makes great play of Maitlis vicariously fighting for Jeffrey Epstein’s victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre and all the other abused and trafficked women who suffered in the wake of powerful men picking them up and using them as their playthings, and this is commendable. Yet it’s hard to discern a wider point other than these powerful men being very, very bad indeed: an inarguable observation, but whether you need to watch all three hours of the drama to be reminded of it is up to you.