More than three years on and the world still doesn’t know why Prince Andrew did it. Why he agreed, consciously and deliberately, to be interviewed by Emily Maitlis on his friendship with the man Andrew called, in his first answer in the famous broadcast, “Mr Epstein”. Andrew: The Problem Prince on Channel 4 seeks to find some answers to that question, one that perplexes and haunts his family, even as the coronation of a new king is at hand.
Given that it is unlikely that Andrew himself will ever tell us – though we now know he can be quite unpredictable – this is the closest we are going to get to the truth. The first episode of this series chronicles Andrew’s upbringing and how he became the man he is, the second is where the meaty revelations about the Newsnight fiasco can be found. Like the original interview, these first-hand accounts, telling the story of how the interview was won, so to speak, are strangely mesmerising. Primarily through the testimony of Maitlis and her colleague Sam McAlister, who tirelessly worked on getting the booking for BBC Newsnight, plus "friends” of Andrew, lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and Andrew’s own libel lawyer, we gain some insight into the background to that interview, and what was going through the Duke of York’s mind. McAlister and Maitlis’s mega-scoop still leaves one slack-jawed.
