Netflix’s Scoop—the brand new Philip Martin-directed thriller that tells the true story behind Prince Andrew’s history-making Newsnight interview—is jam-packed with jaw-dropping moments, from the paparazzi Jae Donnelly’s dash by Central Park to seize a entrance page-worthy shot of the Duke of York deep in dialog with Jeffrey Epstein, to actually each single factor mentioned within the royal career-ending tête-à-tête itself. A lot of them are simply verifiable however, as we’re instructed within the movie’s opening credit, among the actual occasions introduced have, after all, been fictionalized to a level for dramatic functions.
Consequently, I left the movie with plenty of burning questions: within the quick aftermath of the interview, did the Prince and his aides actually assume that it’d gone effectively? (Apparently, sure—a lot in order that the royal then supplied to provide the Newsnight staff a tour of the palace and requested them in the event that they needed to remain behind to hitch his staff’s weekly film evening.) And did the Queen truly log out on her son’s participation? (Each interviewer Emily Maitlis and the editor of Newsnight, Esme Wren, mentioned she had, although palace insiders later instructed The Telegraph that the Queen was “conscious” of the interview, however didn’t particularly “approve” it.)
Nonetheless, probably the most urgent query I had was about one thing else completely: was Prince Andrew, I puzzled, actually that obsessive about teddy bears? In an early scene in Scoop, we see the annoyed Duke of York berating one in all his maids (performed, funnily sufficient, by Kate Winslet’s daughter, Mia Threapleton) for not organizing the cuddly toys on his mattress appropriately. It’s an odd second and, on preliminary viewing, felt like a weird invention designed to play up Prince Andrew’s, er, eccentricities. Besides, it’s not—it’s based mostly on the reality.
In 2022, Charlotte Briggs, a former Buckingham Palace maid instructed The Solar that she had been accountable for laying out the Prince’s 72 tender toys so as of measurement each morning within the mid-’90s (when the Duke would’ve been in his mid-30s). “As quickly as I bought the job, I used to be instructed in regards to the teddies and it was drilled into me how he needed them,” she mentioned. “I even had a day’s coaching. It was so peculiar. In any case, he was a grown man who had served within the Falklands. Every needed to be rigorously positioned. They had been old school teddy bears—the Steiff ones—and practically all of them had sailor fits on and hats. It took me half an hour to rearrange them. Then at bedtime, I needed to take all of the teddies off and organize them across the room. They every had a set place. We needed to stack the smaller ones in an unused hearth, once more in measurement order, to make them look fairly. His two favourite bears sat on two thrones both aspect of the mattress. The others would sit on the foot of the mattress on the ground.” If this was finished incorrectly, she recalled, the Prince would lose his mood.
