Séamas O'Reilly: The restaging of a single interview must be catnip for audiences

This week, A Very Royal Scandal dropped on Amazon Prime, the second big-budget filmic treatment of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview to have been released in just five months
Séamas O'Reilly: The restaging of a single interview must be catnip for audiences

A Very Royal Scandal was released this week

Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, the son of a rabbi who moved his family to America when Harry was just three. Raised in dire poverty, he was a circus act by the time he was nine, and a globally famous stunt performer by the time he was 25. Within five years he was travelling Europe challenging local police forces to “restrain him in shackles and lock him in their jails”, successfully breaking out of Dutch prisons, German police stations and Siberian prison transport trucks — sometimes fully naked, having been searched beforehand for any trace of contraband.

In London, 4,000 people watched The Great Houdini undo a pair of handcuffs which a master locksmith from Birmingham had taken five years to construct. In New York, he burst out of a straitjacket while suspended from a crane. He jumped, while manacled, from over 40 bridges in exotic locales as Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and Hull, freeing himself before he drowned. This he did, and such was his success that even now, a century after his death, almost everyone reading this will know his name.

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