Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Like the last slice on a plate at PizzaExpress, the story of Prince Andrew’s infamous 2019 Newsnight appearance is at risk of growing stale. Following Netflix’s Scoop, A Very Royal Scandal is the second drama in five months to chronicle the calamitous BBC interview where Andrew presented a visit to a chain restaurant in Woking as exculpatory evidence in the face of allegations related to his friendship with the American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And given that the excruciating exchange is still seared in most people’s minds, it is hard to see the need for another glossy rendition.This three-part Prime Video mini-series also goes behind the scenes of the monarchy and the BBC: two august British institutions little-known for their transparency. At the palace, Andrew responds to accusations of sexual assault brought against him by Virginia Giuffre — a woman who alleges she was trafficked by Epstein as a minor — first with chauvinistic arrogance, then Hamletian melancholy, and finally childlike petulance. “I’m my own man!” he screeches when “mummy’s” staff advise against his decision to try to clear his name in an hour-long tell-all on a forensic news programme.The floundering interviewee is played by the chameleonic Michael Sheen in an inversion of his role as the interviewer in Frost/Nixon. Ruth Wilson is as formidable but notably less frosty as the Newsnight griller-in-chief Emily Maitlis (an executive producer here) than Gillian Anderson in Scoop. And while some scenes play out almost exactly as before — not least the reenacted interview — a shift in focus from Newsnight guest booker Sam McAlister to Maitlis herself here gives a richer sense of being in the extraordinary position of having the power to challenge a prince.But the main problem with both of these well-made, finely performed productions is that they miss the larger story. The collision of journalistic rigour and a near-farcical act of self-sabotage made the interview a sensation, but the serious, sinister content of that discussion is something that these dramas only superficially grapple with.After all, a royal PR disaster is easier to navigate than the question of how much a senior royal was embroiled in the crimes of a convicted paedophile. A flashback to a conversation between the prince and the predator in the latter’s New York home in 2010 provides moments of speculation, but what is lacking is a head-on confrontation with the known facts of Epstein’s monstrousness and the suffering of his victims.Yet there is a suggestion towards the end that the show is aware of its limitation as Maitlis wrestles with the realisation that she has become more talked about than the women Epstein abused. Ever the penetrating interviewer, she doesn’t spare herself some tough questions about the way the media covers such stories.★★★☆☆On Prime Video from September 19
