Sam McAlister Talks About The Infamous Prince Andrew BBC Interview

Sam McAlister, the BBC producer who secured the 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, described the experience as profoundly surreal and devastating for him. Despite the careful, months-long negotiations she orchestrated to obtain the sit-down—framing it as a "circumspect moment" where Andrew could express regret without admitting guilt—his actual on-air responses were catastrophically tone-deaf. McAlister witnessed first-hand as Andrew delivered a series of bizarre alibis—like asserting he couldn't have had sex with Virginia Giuffre because he couldn’t sweat or claiming he was at a kids' party at Pizza Express in Woking. Reflecting afterward, she famously called his performance “a masterclass in how to destroy your life,” noting the mismatch between his perception of success and the interview’s disastrous fallout.


From her vantage point about 15 feet behind Andrew during the interview, McAlister maintained a poker-face to conceal her shock, struggling internally with the sheer absurdity of his responses. She recognized that while Andrew thought the interview had gone well—reportedly even giving the BBC team a tour of Buckingham Palace afterward—it was already derailing catastrophically. In a moment of tension, McAlister admitted she had a fleeting thought to halt the interview entirely—joking that she might have feigned a fainting fit or created another excuse to stop it if he had been her client. Her memoir Scoops and the Netflix film Scoop dramatize how her persistence and candor set up one of the biggest journalistic operations of the decade, even as the fallout effectively ended Andrew’s royal public life.


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https://inews.co.uk/opinion/how-i-found-prince-andrews-sweet-spot-and-secured-the-infamous-newsnight-interview-1750247


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