A Very Royal Scandal Review – Michael Sheen is excellent as Prince Andrew in THIS interview | TV & Radio

IIf you haven’t seen Scoop, Netflix’s take on Prince Andrew’s disastrous (for him) Newsnight interview about his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, you might find more to enjoy in A Very Royal Scandal. It’s the second time the story has been given a preamble of “true events, fictionalised for dramatic purposes” in the same year. As with Scoop, it’s a buffet of top-notch acting talent. Here, Ruth Wilson is Emily Maitlis, taking the deep voice very seriously, while Michael Sheen is Prince Andrew, and Joanna Scanlan his beloved and doomed private secretary, Amanda Thirsk. The performances are predictable, but lack the weight you might expect from such a heavyweight cast, and from a series that follows the excellent A Very English Scandal and A Very British Scandal.

Over the course of three regular episodes, the series follows Maitlis and her Newsnight team as they pursue the interview with the Prince and the allegations against him, before recreating the interview and exploring the fallout. Scoop has focused on producer Sam McAlister, played by Billie Piper, and turned her dogged pursuit of the interview into a kind of thriller. It almost completely sidelines her. Instead, the series sticks with Maitlis and the Prince, fleshing out their private lives and offering a deeper portrait of each other’s characters as they move towards their shared destiny. It’s done elegantly, even if it’s a leisurely pace rather than a sprint to the finish line.

That means Maitlis is at home with her husband and sons, drinking vodka after work, chatting to her greyhound and Googling Epstein’s links to Andrew. We join her as the BBC comes under pressure from the right-wing press and the government for its apparent partisanship. Maitlis is being chastised for rolling her eyes at Brexit, and while Paxman and Humphries would be applauded for that sort of thing, she says, she still feels she has to prove herself. Andrew’s interview would be perfect. “I’m not losing to ITV,” she thunders.

The television industry feels smug about itself, especially when confronted with the absurdity of royal life, presented here as a surreal catalogue of hunting, golfing, fancy dinners and charades. This series delves much deeper into Prince Andrew’s world than Scoop did, and you can see that it’s fascinated by his psyche and the question of not only why he gave the interview but why he seemed to think, immediately afterwards, that everything had gone rather well.

We meet Fergie (Claire Rushbrook), a loyal and amoral woman who describes herself and Andrew as “the happiest divorcees in the world,” and who has sent her ex-husband to his old friend Epstein with “a fucking bowl of begging” to settle his many debts. Andrew, played by Sheen, is an almost tragic buffoon, a man-child who thinks he is the embodiment of charm but who berates his staff with endless “fuck you” and furious tirades. If the drama tries to humanize him, it does so through his daughters, Beatrice (Honor Swinton Byrne) and Eugenie (Sofia Oxenham), who by the end seem to, if not accept, at least understand the mess their father has created.

The comparison with The Crown is inevitable, not least because the film spends so much time in royal households and runs into the same problem of dramatising a very recent story, still fresh in the minds of most viewers. It’s hard not to fall into caricature. Still, Sheen is excellent as the delusional prince – “I’m the second son of the f***ing sovereign” – but perhaps the underrated star of the story is Alex Jennings, who plays the late Queen’s private secretary, Sir Edward Young, a master of the old ways. He warns Thirsk about the Newsnight interview, explaining that the royals have to protect themselves from themselves. They live a “frictionless existence”, he says. They will never know what it’s like to miss a train, because the train will always be waiting for them if they’re late.

The fallout from the Newsnight interview was not intended to wait for the Prince. It ends with a close-up of that A 2001 photograph of Andrew with Virginia Guiffre, then 17, in Ghislaine Maxwell’s London home, recreated with the actors for A Very Royal Scandal and Scoop, but also powerfully left in its original form in the final moments here. It reminds us that this is not simply a case of a stupid man making a stupid mistake. When Maitlis responded to Andrew’s description of Epstein’s behaviour as “unseemly”, she did so with the astonished retort that Epstein was “a sex offender”. Like Maitlis, A Very Royal Scandal behaves with bearing and class, but as a drama it is too fluid for its own good.