The Netflix film Scoop, which retells the story of how Newsnight landed its infamous, eye-popping 2019 interview with Prince Andrew, has a strong Working Girl vibe, which may be one reason why I enjoyed it (I’m talking about the Oscar-winning 1988 movie, in which Melanie Griffith plays a girl from Staten Island who dreams of climbing the corporate ladder). In part, this is thanks to the blond wig worn by one of Scoop’s stars, Billie Piper, which comes with a powerful whiff of the late 1980s. Mostly, though, it’s because Peter Moffat’s screenplay pitches Piper’s character, Sam McAlister, as a plucky outsider surrounded by somewhat toffee-nosed types who only finally begin to take her seriously when she lands the TV exclusive to end them all. One minute, her lip is trembling with the unfairness of it all. Why do her bosses disdain all her brilliant ideas? The next, she’s at Buckingham Palace telling the queen’s favourite son to his face that his brand is distinctly grubby and could do with a generous spin in the Newsnight washing machine.
Was it really like this? When I meet Piper and the real life McAlister at Netflix HQ in the weeks before Scoop has its premiere, I hope vaguely to get to the bottom of some of the gossip that trails it; there’s talk, for instance, that Emily Maitlis, the journalist who ultimately delivered the prince’s head to the nation on a platter, is put out by her former colleague’s version of events (the Netflix film is loosely based on a chapter of a recent book by McAlister, once a booker on the show; Maitlis, meanwhile, is an executive producer on Amazon’s rival depiction, A Very Royal Scandal, in which McAlister’s role may, we hear, be far smaller). But alas, in their presence, one thing about the Netflix production does at least ring very true: McAlister is indeed an unusual combination of warmth and steel, just as Piper plays her. Ten minutes in her presence and I can see how good she must have been at her job in the decade she spent at Newsnight (a booker, in case you’re wondering, is the person whose job it is to bag the right guests). Basically, everything is up for grabs… until it isn’t.
“I was unusual at the BBC,” insists McAlister, who’s wearing a lot of black leather and carries her kit in a big, gold Chanel bag. “The thing that people say about me when they meet me is: ‘You’re not very BBC.’ And that has a meaning, which you’ve just described. My book was nonfiction, but there are elements of my personality that Billie needed to know in order to play me as a human being. The film uses a kind of shorthand to explain the experiences of someone with a different kind of background to lots of the other people at the BBC.” So did she cry in the loo at Broadcasting House because people – I want names! – were so snotty to her? “Yeah, I went to the toilet to cry sometimes. I think lots of people do that in the workplace, right?”
McAlister’s colleagues were, she thinks, a bit put out by her hours, which were shorter than theirs, though she was on her phone 24/7. Even inside television, she says, there’s a lack of understanding about the work of a booker (as the screen Sam puts it – I paraphrase – the job is about contacting those whose numbers you don’t have, not just ringing up Nigel Farage yet again). But she won’t talk of individuals, and about Maitlis (played in Scoop by a mischievous Gillian Anderson) in particular, she has only good things to say. “[At Newsnight] I had the joy of obscurity; the accidental fearlessness you see in this movie came from that. I didn’t envisage any of this happening to me. But it was different for Emily. Every time she wore an outfit, there’d be 100 tweets criticising her look…” Maitlis was seemingly supportive of McAlister once she’d brokered the deal with Andrew’s side – and Scoop makes a point of showing this, even if it is mildly satirical when it comes to Maitlis’s whippet, Moody, a dog she takes everywhere except Buckingham Palace.
McAlister and Piper are side by side on a corporate sofa in a windowless room near Oxford Circus in London. Tonight, some kind of Netflix press shindig is happening, and Piper’s carefully waved red hair is held in place with bobby pins; the coffee table beside us is covered in rollers, straighteners and all the other accoutrements of the professional stylist (he has just exited, pursued, not by a bear, but a publicity retinue comprising half a dozen people). In a way, these two couldn’t be more different, and not only physically: if McAlister’s TV career was spent in hot pursuit, Piper, famous since childhood (she was a pop star before she was an actor), has been forced to spend at least some of it running away from journalists. But the former maintains that the latter embodies her perfectly on screen, to a degree that’s unnerving. “I think we share an essence,” she says. “We’re both grafters, we’re both very warm, and we both care about our children above everything – if you don’t mind me saying, Billie, we’ve both had periods when we’ve looked after our children alone. But it’s really weird. In some ways, it [Piper’s performance] feels more like me than me now. I have a little bit of snark, and I’m very resilient and passionate about my work, but there’s none of the mundane stuff. It’s like seeing the best version of yourself.” She laughs. “It’s pinch yourself insane, and it’s pinch yourself wonderful.”
What about Piper? Is it difficult playing a real person, one you have met and will likely see again and again? She shakes her head. “I had more freedom than Gillian and Rufus [Sewell, who plays Prince Andrew], who play people who are very public-facing. I could cherry pick more than them, but I could also talk to Sam. In a way, I had the best of both worlds.” For her, it’s the writing of a project like this that bears the heaviest load: “It’s so dependent on the writer. The greatest responsibility is theirs, and you either sign up to that interpretation, or not. Really, I felt so relaxed around Sam. She’s so easy to be around, and that made my job a lot easier.”
McAlister, who took voluntary redundancy from the BBC in 2021, met Piper in Soho after she was cast for a martini (she loves a martini, and in Scoop her on-screen self has a crucial one with Amanda Thirsk, Andrew’s private secretary). They liked each other immediately. “I’m an executive producer on Scoop, and I knew about the casting,” says McAlister. “I was holding my breath to hear what she would say, and she probably heard my screams [when she said yes].” More surprisingly, she also had Rufus Sewell in mind for Andrew, unlike Piper, who admits that at first she wondered whether he was the right man for the job (he spent four hours in hair and makeup every day, and the transformation is, I think, extraordinary). “Rufus has a complexity,” says McAlister. “Regardless of what people think of Prince Andrew, there’s an energy to him that is quite unusual, one I felt Rufus shared.” What kind of energy? “A charisma that fills a room. Andrew is eminently noticeable, for the right and the wrong reasons. And for only the right reasons, Rufus is also eminently noticeable. I felt he wouldn’t just do a pantomime version of the prince; that his energy was commensurate with that of the man I met.”
For her part, Piper was fascinated by the idea of playing McAlister. “I felt like she was this unsung hero,” she says. Is a role like this – sorry to play the shrink – also a way of wresting control? She has played a journalist before: she was the tabloid editor in Great Britain, Richard Bean’s 2014 National Theatre play about phone hacking – and I wonder if it is a neat way of turning the tables, given how often she has been in newspaper columns herself. (Most recently, this has been thanks to comments she made about the difficulties of co-parenting with her ex-husband, the rightwing controversialist and sacked GB News presenter, Laurence Fox.) “It has been my luck in the world to be on the receiving end of [a certain kind of journalism],” she says, softly. “As sad as it sounds, fame is kind of all I know, and I’ve been exposed to all of it. But I don’t know if I’m conscious of it [when I choose a role]. I have had some awful experiences, but I also love a great bit of journalism.”
She laughs. “I don’t know. Maybe it is a great therapeutic breakthrough! Or maybe it’s just that there has been a period in my career when I’ve just been reading girlfriend roles, and that’s so disheartening and depressing. I really chase roles where the character is a woman in her own right, not just an extension of a man. One of the great things about this part is that we see Sam’s son and her mum, but there’s no private life to speak of, really – and a lot of what there was went in the edit, I think…” Isn’t she sure? “No, I haven’t seen it yet. I’m waiting for the premiere.” This isn’t unusual, she says. Often, she won’t dare watch herself in something until years after she made it. “I need distance to lovingly detach or disassociate from it somehow, so I can watch it as a piece of work in which I just happen to have a part. There is some fear and vanity around watching yourself. Though bizarrely, if I’ve written or directed something, I can watch it, perhaps because I’ve got more control over the outcome. When I don’t have creative control, I just can’t do it.”
Both women see Scoop as a feminist project, and not only because – with the exception of the role of Andrew – the biggest parts are all for women (Keeley Hawes plays Thirsk, and Romola Garai is Esme Wren, Newsnight’s then editor). The film exposes for a second time the crimes of the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Andrew’s friendship with him. “It’s important to say that this isn’t a story about [Epstein’s] victims,” says Piper. “But I followed the original story very closely, and I felt upset by it, and connected to it. I’m an ambassador for Refuge [the charity that supports victims of domestic violence], and I feel this is the kind of narrative I want to bring to people’s attention.”
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The chief achievement of the film, however, may be that it makes you wonder all over again about the extent of Prince Andrew’s delusions: it emphasises rather wickedly that he felt the interview, a PR disaster, had gone really well at the time – as did, apparently, Thirsk, whose advice to Andrew before the camera rolls is: “Just be yourself.” I turn to McAlister. Why did he do it? Is she any closer to knowing? “He cocked it up to the degree that he did for a very simple reason, one that’s writ large in lots of powerful people in lots of powerful organisations,” she says. “At the top, you’re surrounded by people telling you that you’re amazing, and this is a very extreme example of that. He was 59. He’d never had a normal job. He’d never had an appraisal. He’d never been knocked back. My feeling was that through an accident of his birth he had a real misperception of his abilities.” So entitlement just kicked in? “Yes.” And what about now? Is he chastened, does she think? (Soon after the interview, the prince was stripped of his military titles and patronages, and retired from royal duties.) “I think he is profoundly sad – sad that he doesn’t have the life he used to, I mean.”
After the interview, she didn’t hear formally from the palace, and she doesn’t expect to now, either. “Amanda [Andrew’s private secretary] was magnanimous. We both knew that if something went wrong, one of us was going to get it; that understanding created a connection and a poignancy between us, and unfortunately it was her [who got it]. But I have nothing but good things to say about her. She was cool, calm, collected, confident.”
This brings us to talk about fame more generally. “It’s the thing I like least about my job,” says Piper. “I have such a weird dance with it. I wish I could do my job, and not have to feel the heat of it. What I’ve always struggled with, especially when I was younger, was the responsibility of it: I felt I had to be a good child because I was an idol for young girls. I couldn’t stand the burden of that, and I get it now that I’ve had kids [she has three children]. It’s not fair or realistic to expect that of a child. Sometimes, it makes me feel physically unwell, and then people say: well, why do you still do it? The answer is that I love what I do, but actually I feel quite shy in many ways. I’ve become very precious about my privacy, obviously, but I continue to struggle with it if I’m honest. It can be incredibly dark.”
She goes on: “This feeds into the Prince Andrew stuff because apart from the fact that people see you and take pictures – and that feels aggressive, like they’re taking a piece of you away with them when you’re just walking to the post office – there’s also this thing about the way other people treat you. It’s disproportionate: either disproportionately horrible, or disproportionately kind. There’s no real middle ground, and sometimes that’s even with your family. They almost stop seeing you as a member of the family, and suddenly maybe all their friends want to talk about is their famous relative. It really affects the social network, the fabric of everything. That’s why the idea of my children becoming famous makes me feel sick – not that they are showing any interest, but I would do everything in my power not to let them go near that until they’re adults.”
Social media, of course, amplifies all this: “I really struggle with it. I post something and then feel completely irresponsible, and I see my kids now disappearing into it.” A key moment in Scoop comes after the interview goes out. Andrew is relaxing in the bath – he’s so pleased with himself! – when his phone begins to throb and bleep, the first sign of the doom that lies ahead. Piper will be nervous when the film goes out; she will avoid the coverage. For McAlister, however, it will be a new and rather thrilling experience. “I’m excited to see what people think,” she says. “But of course I do feel allergic to some kinds of noise.”
What next? Piper doesn’t have her next project lined up yet; she has just finished the first draft of the script of a film she wants to make. McAlister makes a living as a professional speaker now; she is also a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, where she teaches negotiation, a role that draws both on her experience at Newsnight and as a criminal barrister (the job she did before she went into television, which was where, in the cells with criminals, she learned her very useful poker face). But I can’t let her go – I sense the return of a hairstylist, bearing a can of Elnett – without asking what she feels about her old show, and what, as a result of budget cuts, it is about to become (Newsnight’s programme time will be cut, and it will no longer showcase investigative journalism).
“This movie is a homage to BBC journalism,” says McAlister. “The team at Newsnight was sensational: a group of hardworking mavericks who every day tried to bring the powerful to account to close the democratic deficit; to ask questions that matter to the nation. I could not be more profoundly upset by the thought that this has been diminished. It’s the epitome of public service journalism. The powerful will sleep more soundly if programmes like Newsnight are lost. If I were the director general – that’s never going to happen – Newsnight and the Today programme [on Radio 4] would be the most important parts of the organisation.” This is a fluent, passionate speech and once again, I find myself thinking of Working Girl. All the way back to the tube, I hum the film’s theme (by Carly Simon, in case you don’t remember). Every woman I pass is both an underdog and – just possibly – a future queen.
