To Play the King - Episode 3

By the third episode the opposition between the King and the Prime Minister has hardened into open confrontation. TVDB's synopsis quotes Urquhart: he is, in fact, extremely angry with His Majesty, and he intends to do him harm. The line sums up the stage the serial has reached. Urquhart no longer pretends to be reasonable, and the audience is invited to wonder how far he will go.

His specific charge is that the King is trying to organise a bloodless coup against the Government. That is Urquhart's reading of the monarch's behaviour, not necessarily the King's intention. Wikipedia's summary of the whole serial has the King and his staff covertly rallying Opposition leaders against the Prime Minister, and a public service announcement implicitly denouncing Urquhart's policies, which would give the accusation some substance.

Urquhart's answer, as the serial summary has it, is to threaten the King with Princess Charlotte's memoirs, saying he will be forced to publish them if the King goes on publicly opposing him. The King refuses to be blackmailed. Urquhart then forces Sir Bruce Bullerby, editor of the Daily Clarion, to print the memoirs by threatening to release pictures of Bullerby's own relationship with the Princess.

Bernice Stegers and David Ryall, who play Charlotte and Bullerby, are both billed in this episode, as is John Bird as Bryan Brynford-Jones, so the thread belongs somewhere in these middle episodes. No source says which scene falls in which episode.

Ian Richardson and Michael Kitchen share the centre of the story, with Kitty Aldridge as Sarah Harding, Colin Jeavons as Tim Stamper, Diane Fletcher as Elizabeth Urquhart, Nicholas Farrell as David Mycroft and Rowena King as Chloe Carmichael. All of them appear in every episode of the serial.

Andrew Davies wrote the script, Paul Seed directed, and Jim Parker's march plays over the opening and closing titles. Davies later discussed the controversy that the serial caused, when some viewers thought the portrayal of the King insulted the monarchy, in a short featurette on the Blu-ray set.

The episode is dated 5 December 1993, a Sunday, in TVDB. The serial ran on Sunday evenings at 9.05pm, and the Wikipedia first-night date of 21 November fits the same weekly pattern.

IMDb voters give it 8.1 out of 10, higher than the first two episodes and below the finale.

No reviewer wrote about this episode separately, and the sources do not describe how it ends. The account therefore stops at what the TVDB synopsis and the serial summary support.