A Very Royal Scandal Recap: They Got Nixon This Way

A Very Royal Scandal
Episode 2
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Ah, here it is, the main event. The second episode of A Very Royal Scandal dedicates itself to the days, hours, and minutes before, during, and after Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview, laying out exactly how it ever came to be and how it was allowed to go so terribly. It’s an often frenetic piece of TV, though its suspense is undercut by its reality. Obviously, the interview went ahead in real life, so when the prospect of its cancellation arises early in the episode, we know it won’t stick. More broadly, we know how the events of the episode played out for the most part in real life because it’s a matter of recent record. The result is that it all feels a little lack of stakes. This is another reason why it feels a bit of a fool’s errand to adapt a story that is so fresh in the public memory. Sure, there are nuggets of curtain-lifting intrigue in how the episode colors in the moments surrounding Andrew’s fateful exposé. And Sheen’s performance continues to be enjoyable, not least when Andrew whines like a petulant school child that he deserves better treatment than this — he was in the Falklands, don’t you know!?

But the majority of this episode evoked a similar feeling in me that I had when watching Scoop: I’m not sure what the point is of meticulously re-creating an interview that is widely available to watch online, aside from it being a somewhat indulgent exercise in re-creation. And sure, the series has a transformative quality that makes it an entertaining watch. Wilson and Sheen are pretty exacting in their attention to their characters’ mannerisms and the intonations of their voices. The thing that strikes you most about Sheen’s work is how credibly he plays Andrew’s little stutters and solecisms — it can’t be easy to convincingly play a bad, stammering speaker. But the big scene is, ultimately, just another dramatization of an interview that has been watched 4.4 million times on the BBC’s official YouTube channel and is still available to watch now. The episode does well not to dwell on it.

More interesting is the episode’s depiction of those aforementioned surrounding events. We begin the morning of — Andrew and Maitlis, many miles apart, are both in their gardens, coaxing their beloved dogs into doing their morning number twos. As we previously noted in the first episode, the series likes to mirror its principles. Here, paired shots of Andrew in his expansive royal estate and Maitlis in her quaint townhouse demonstrate the scale of difference in their everyday lives. On the one hand, this has a humanizing effect on Andrew, putting him in parallel with one of his subjects. Then again, it’s a fairly unsubtle reminder of the privilege — and power — he occupies, even compared to a person whose own public sway is significant. 

It’s a delicate balancing act that Royal Scandal does surprisingly well, resisting the palpable urge to make a monster out of Andrew without coming out explicitly in his favor. It’s the familial stuff that makes this work: Even if we don’t sympathize with Andrew for the shoddy, arrogant handling of his encounter with Maitlis, it’s hard not to feel bad for his daughters, so similarly steeped in privilege, as they watch their father eviscerated on terrestrial TV. We’re also offered a window or two into Andrew’s relationship with the royal family — or “the firm,” as he clinically calls it. Early on in the episode, his brother Charles, the man who will become king in a few short years, calls Andrew to tell him to cancel the interview, which briefly puts a spanner in the works. Andrew’s response is more petulance; more younger brother than the adult, aging son of the sovereign. “Yes, of course Mummy’s aware,” he meekly contends. Minutes later, he storms past the aides, screaming to himself in a Learian rage: “CALL ME A FUCKING MUMMY’S BOY!”

So, for a moment, the interview is off per Charles’s demand. (“He can talk, Mr. Tampon,” Andrew scoffs, referring to another infamous royal scandal that has been dramatized more times than there are individual crown jewels.) For the first time, then, in front of Beatrice and his ex-wife, he allows his disdain for the firm — aside from his mother — to come through: “I love my mother. I love you. I love Eugenie,” he says. “Listen to your loved ones,” says the Duchess of York. This turns out to be yet another terrible suggestion in the putrid pile of advice, well-meaning so it is, that will dig Andrew even further into the shit. With that, the decision is made: fuck the (future) king! The interview is going ahead, Tampon-head be damned. 

With a flurry of preparation — much of which we saw in the prologue of the first episode — everyone is thrown back into action, with Maitlis having to leave her poor dog locked in the back garden to make it to the palace on time. Andrew’s aide, Amanda Thirsk, appreciably assumes that the duke will be primarily concerned about material preparation for the interview; it seems obvious that he needs to do his homework, which is why she has prepared a pile of possible questions for him. Studying himself in the mirror as he fixes his tie, it’s apparent that he is more concerned with his image. Is it the vanity of a man who once thought of himself as so sexy that women screamed his name at port when he returned home from the Falklands, or is he just worried about getting Dicked? “They got Nixon this way, you know,” he says. “All of those close-ups.” Then there’s the question of whether he’ll remember the details if Maitlis asks: “At the end of the day, how on earth is a bloke supposed to remember all of the women he’s bedded?” This is in reference to a woman who has accused him of rape after allegedly being trafficked for sex by a notorious sex offender who Andrew has called a friend. Yet, the women in Andrew’s life continue to support him: his daughters, Thirsk, and his ex-wife. Before Andrew heads to the interview, he watches Maitlis rush into Buckingham Palace, bedraggled so she is. He smirks. An easy win, he must be thinking. It’s all coming up Andrew. In the meantime, Thirsk helps him to put on his oxford shoes.

The interview takes place; you could hear a pin drop. It is monitored by a guy called Donald, a representative for the queen’s chief aides, who treats the endeavor like a superspy on an espionage mission. Afterward, it’s immediately apparent to everyone aside from Andrew that it has not gone well for him, and yet he is positively chuffed. Maitlis worries that she didn’t push him on Virginia Giuffre, but in the end, she hardly needed to. There’s just one more thing before they conclude, Andrew and Thirsk tell Maitlis and the BBC team. The little matter of those alibis they had discussed: the birthday party at Pizza Express, and the fact that he can’t sweat. “I must insist that we include these details,” Thirsk says, every word drenched in delicious dramatic irony. “They’re material to His Royal Highness’s defense.” Afterward, Andrew asks Maitlis how she thinks it went. “I thought it was … very frank,” she says. 

Later, Andrew triumphantly putts balls in his study, imagining himself as a star golfer. But he is suddenly struck by … what is that, guilt? A choppy, distorted flashback casts his mind to a nightclub, where he dances with Epstein and Giuffre; as to whether this is a memory or a haunted vision of what might have been is left deliberately ambiguous. To clear his head and escape the interview, he embarks on a shooting weekend, where he and friendly aristocrats shoot birds, indulge in booze and food, and play parlor games. Not a care in the world. In the meantime, Maitlis and the BBC team work against the clock to cut the interview to be ready for broadcast — they’ve just a few days.

Before the interview can air, another act of hubris, this time on the part of Thirsk, who is visited by the queen’s private secretary, played by a brilliantly menacing Alex Jennings. The interview was “a bit of a dog’s dinner,” he has been told; he’s here to make one final play to have the conversation struck from broadcast, but he can’t overstep, lest he incur the wrath of his boss, who unconditionally supports her son’s decision to defend himself on television. But if Thirsk is concerned, perhaps there’s something they can do about it. Thirsk contends that the interview went well, but is she really so naïve? Perhaps it is her ego guiding her: To admit that the interview went wrong after she played such a significant part in orchestrating it would be to acknowledge her own failure. And so it goes ahead. But not before the interview transcript is distributed to journalists in the morning; the attendant flurry of tweets tells Thirsk that she has made a fatal misjudgment. After the interview airs, Andrew is pulled from his party: The queen is calling him. Tentatively, he picks up the phone. “Mummy?”