Film & Docs

Scoop

Dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh's satire on Fleet Street's World War II journalists

Director
Gavin Millar

Written by
William Boyd, based on the Evelyn Waugh novel

Cast
William Boot : Michael Maloney
Salter : Denholm Elliott
Uncle Theodore : Michael Hordern
Baldwin : Herbert Lom
Julia Stitch : Nicola Pagett
Lord Copper : Donald Pleasance
Katchen : Renee Soutendijk
Eric Olafsen : Sverre Anker Ousdal
Corker : Jack Shepherd
John Boot : Nicholas Le Prevost

Evelyn Waugh's Scoop - a classic spoof of desert war correspondents from World War II - was exposing the black humour of conflict many years before Catch-22. The journalistic types are timeless (as, regrettably, so is war, it would seem) and this production, made in 1987, stars Donald Pleasance, Denholm Elliott and Herbert Lom.

Scoop was inspired by Waugh's misadventures covering Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Abyssinia for the London Daily Mail. Like Waugh, the central character of Scoop is flagrantly unsuited for war duty. He's William Boot, a dilettante nature columnist for the Daily Beast (the column, called "Lush Places", features lyrical celebrations of the great crested grebe and the "questing vole").

Through an identity mix-up, Boot gets packed off to cover a looming revolution in the obscure East African republic of Ishmaelia. Waugh surrounded Boot with the Fleet Street types he most loathed, and they're all here: Lord Copper, the Beast's war-happy publisher, a staunch believer in "strong, mutually antagonistic governments everywhere"; Salter, the craven foreign editor terrified of his boss; and Corker, tabloid hack and master of fiction - especially when writing his expenses.

Michael Maloney perfectly captures the character's endearing bewilderment and his good-natured incompetence, but it's Pleasance's newspaper-baron-gone-bad that steals the show. "We shall expect victory about the middle of July", he says, with an eye more on his circulation than on national security. Laugh-out-loud satire it may be, but comments like that in these times have an uncomfortably true ring to them.