House of Cards - Episode 1

House of Cards opens with Francis Urquhart looking straight into the lens and telling the audience that nothing lasts forever, not even the longest and most glittering reign. Margaret Thatcher has resigned. The first episode was shown on 18 November 1990, the same week she announced it, and the timing could hardly have been better.

Urquhart is the Conservative Chief Whip, and Ian Richardson plays him as courteous, amused and quietly ruthless. He runs through the men who want to replace Thatcher, with a verdict on each. Lord Bilsborough is too old, Michael Samuels too clever, Patrick Woolton a bully-boy, and Henry Collingridge a well-meaning fool with no bottom to him.

Collingridge, played by David Lyon, wins the leadership and then the General Election, though with a greatly reduced majority. Urquhart expects his reward, a senior cabinet post. Instead the new Prime Minister tells him that he is far too valuable to the party as Chief Whip. It is a snub, and it decides Urquhart that Collingridge must go and that he would do the job better himself.

He still needs a push, and it comes from his wife. In Andrew Davies's adaptation Elizabeth Urquhart, played by Diane Fletcher, is a far larger figure than in Michael Dobbs's novel, and she urges her husband on like a Lady Macbeth. Davies changed other things too. He gave Urquhart those asides to the audience, which the novel does not have, and he turned Urquhart's brief acquaintance with the young reporter Mattie Storin into an affair.

Mattie, played by Susannah Harker, arrives at his house that night to ask why Collingridge made no changes to his cabinet. Paul Seed shoots the study scene with Urquhart on his feet and Mattie seated, so that she has to look up at him, and the arrangement tells the viewer who holds power. Urquhart feeds her misinformation and sees at once that she can be used.

From there he starts to manipulate everyone who might be useful. Roger O'Neill, a charming but unstable cocaine addict played by Miles Anderson, becomes a pawn, and so does the Prime Minister's drunken brother Charles, played by James Villiers.

Colin Jeavons appears as Tim Stamper, Urquhart's number two, with little to do yet but a hint that his loyalty may not last. A scene with a disgraced MP called Stoat shows how the two of them handle trouble: Urquhart tells the man to use a more discreet brothel next time, and Stamper says that he would shoot a dog like that.

Embarrassing leaks, all engineered by Urquhart, start to wear Collingridge down, and Urquhart keeps up the pretence of being his most loyal supporter. By the end of the hour he has settled on his next move. One more scandal should finish the Prime Minister, ideally a financial one that involves his brother.

The episode was the start of the series that made Richardson's name as Urquhart. The reviewer at Archive TV Musings found it had hardly dated, and noted that the theme of power-hungry, amoral politicians was as relevant in 2015 as it had been in 1990.