Here is a laboriously acted and distinctly self-admiring, self-mythologising drama about the media, the royals and the media royals. It is all about Emily Maitlis’s 2019 BBC Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, challenging him about being friends with sex trafficker and abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The prince’s performance was so grotesquely embarrassing that he had to forgo his royal titles and “step back” from public duties, an achievement much emphasised over the closing credits, but about which audiences may now have mixed feelings, given that he is still, after all, known as Prince Andrew and still unrepentantly prominent on royal occasions.
Rufus Sewell in heavy prosthetic makeup plays the pompous HRH, a puffy-faced babyish poltroon whose smug smile is that of someone accustomed to having his every lame or boorish joke greeted with gales of laughter, and every boneheaded observation rewarded with a solemn courtier’s nod. But that normally estimable performer Gillian Anderson goes into a peculiar Maggie Thatcher-lite mode to play Maitlis – all gimlet-eyed forensic alertness and unrelaxed eccentricity as she brings her dog into the office.
