"You may think that. I couldn't possibly comment..."
Long before Kevin Spacey was a household name, let alone disgraced, Ian Richardson became a household name through his extraordinarily sinister, fourth wall breaking, insidious performance as Francis Urquhart. I haven't seen this since that late Autumn of 1990 when Thatcher fell, the only prime minister I could remember. This TV adaptation of Michael Dobbs' potboiler of a novel cheekily alludes to her downfall in its opening shot, an early example of the visual wit that made this series a cut above the original novel.
Other differences are that the party in power is explicitly stated to be the Tories, an of course the asides to camera which give the whole thing both its structure and its intimacy. Urquhart is not just our antihero, he is our intimate guide to the dark arts of politics. If Mattie is seduced by his charms then so are we all, even an old Liberal like me.
It's an uncomfortable reminder of my age, though, that I remember lots of things that happened in 1990, but they did things differently then. Here we see casual sexism and homophobia in the corridors of power, MP's actually speaking in the Commons without notes, an all-male cabinet and smoking everywhere.
But the episode insists entirely of skulduggery and plotting, and all from our Chief Whip’s point of view as he manipulates the wet drip of a PM (although I not that Henry Collingridge, a “wet” Tory, is depicted as wet personally too), his cocaine using fixer, the Cabinet and, through Mattie, the press. The relationship with Mattie is interesting: in a sense he’s grooming her, all for his own benefit. We end with a manufactured scandal about to break and the PM set to fall...
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