A Very Royal Scandal, Prime Video review - a fairly sound reimagining, but to what end?

Why do production companies think the world needs yet another reconstituted TV drama involving famous people in infamous situations? Newspapers and non fiction books already do a great job of telling these stories of intrigue and scandal: why is a TV adaptation a viable improvement?

This is especially true when key moments of the action necessarily take place behind the closed doors of Fortress Firm and are effectively unknowable. All the production team can do is hire a decent writer to indulge in gifted speculation while they come up with a budget for securing the cream of the acting crop and expensively authentic locations. Granted, these recreations can put material onto the radar of a wide audience, as in the case of the Post Office scandal. But all that’s left to the makers of A Very Royal Scandal is to create the best facsimile of a wellworn story that their money can buy. 

They have given it their best shot. Jeremy Brock’s script offers enough flashes of wit to lift the mix, especially in the sparky exchanges between Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis (Ruth Wilson) and her husband (Nicholas Burns). Also in the portrayal of the Yorks at home, all boisterous charades and daft games – “Who’s the fatty?” is a gem – as Prince Andrew (Michael Sheen) and daughters play out entrenched family roles along with impecunious ex-wife Sarah Ferguson (Claire Rushbrook), who still lives with them at Royal Lodge.

But Brock has slim pickings to work with when it comes to recreating conversations Andrew probably had. Top topics are the prince’s prowess at shooting and golf, his equally self-inflated entrepreneurial skills and his career in the Royal Navy, including the Falkands war. Particularly the latter, couched as “fighting for Queen and country”, a phrase that is dragged in as a defensive weapon whenever Andrew is in high dudgeon about a slight or perceived injustice. This repetition may be a sign of his limited worldly wisdom, but it becomes an irritant, and when, finally faced with insuperable legal nightmares, he varies it with, “But I’m the sovereign’s second son!”, it comes as a relief.

Sheen’s is a livelier, feistier Andrew than Rufus Sewell’s in Scoop, but he seems to have several fewer subterranean layers. Sewell’s Andrew was an intermittently ugly character, barking at servants, pickled in sef-denial; Sheen’s is slightly softer, more of a foul-mouthed, blustering fool, a portly man whose bed is covered in soft toys, though he’s able to pour on the charm when required. Brock gives him a crucial counterweight in the shape of Honor Swinton Byrne’s Princess Eugenie (pictured below), a calm and reflective young soul who unsurprisingly takes over her father’s legal negotiations when the stakes are raised. Lord knows if the real Eugenie is this mature, but the dynamics of this piece require somebody in it to have a level head.

Wilson apparently studied Maitlis in all aspects, from her messy handbag to her on-screen tactics, and because it’s Wilson under the blonde wig, Maitlis emerges with some of the actress’s vitality and intelligence. She also emerges with an almost baritone voice that sounds like a recording slowed down by one rpm. Even so, Wilson manages to project the loose-cannon side of Maitlis, as well as her driven professionalism. One of the funniest scenes is a silent one in which the running-late Maitlis has to rein herself in behind the slowly plodding Palace official escorting her to the set of her interview. Wilson and Lydia Leonard, playing Newsnight editor Esme Wren, also have some enjoyably snappy exchanges, two women battling for recognition.

Further down the cast list, you can watch notable thesps having a ball. Alex Jennings marshals his crispest nastiness as Sir Edward Young, the Queen’s private secretary, who sinks his talons into the neck of Andrew’s protective but out-of-her-depth press officer, Amanda Thirsk (an excellent turn from Joanna Scanlan), before defenestrating her. Over them all is an unseen “higher power” that issues commands and banishes Andrew to a small corner of the realm, dependent on his hated older brother’s purse. Or, as he would call this omnipotent presence, “Mummy”.

The notorious interview itself is carefully filleted so it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Besides, who hasn’t already seen it or read about it? This is the crux of Brock’s problem in this assignment: how to present old news in a fresh way. His answer is to cut brief flashbacks into the proceedings, representing the memories swirling in Andrew’s head about his visits to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s various homes. There is nothing too explicit but everything to suggest he has perfect recall of those events (pictured below, Wilson with Claire Calbraith and Éanna Hardwicke).

Brock’s Andrew is pretty much what you might have expected: a man raised inside a unique bubble who has not benefitted from his few encounters with the real world, blinkered as he is by his overweening sense of entitlement. The script imagines him doing his own washing as his staff have to be let go. It’s almost sad, but then the refrain running throughout that dogs all the main characters pops up again: “But what about the victims?”

Has this miniseries about the scandal brought anything new to the table, other than confirmation that there are still some really great British actors working in television drama? There are no obvious scoops. And its inevitable vulnerability as a docudrama becomes clear in the obligatory end-credits summarising how everybody in the story is doing now. These state that Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are still living at Royal Lodge – well, true, but only just.

What’s needed here at the very least is an update that points out that King Charles has increasingly been making it clear that he wants Andrew out and off his books. Or maybe Amazon Studios is already working on a new royal docudrama about the feuding siblings of the British royal family, or another such story we may never fully know the truth of?

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