The Final Cut - Episode 1

The Final Cut begins with an ending. Prime Minister Francis Urquhart shoots his gun dog, because she is now too old to do her job. The scene sets the theme of the whole serial, which is about a career coming to an end, and it is followed by the state funeral of Margaret Thatcher, imagined while she was still alive.

At the funeral Urquhart praises Thatcher in public as his mentor. In private he resents her, because her record as the longest-serving Prime Minister is one that he is about to pass. The opening scenes of the funeral caused a good deal of adverse comment in the newspapers, who thought it wrong to show the funeral of a living person, and Michael Dobbs, whose novel the serial was based on, demanded that his name be taken off the credits.

Urquhart wants to leave his mark on the world, and his wife Elizabeth wants to make provision for their future. She introduces him to Nures, a Turkish Cypriot businessman, who tells him about an oil seam under the disputed sea boundary between Greek and Turkish Cyprus. If the British judge chairing the international arbitration panel could be influenced, Nures says, a handsome consultancy fee would be paid. The fee could set up an Urquhart Trust, a private pension plan.

Meanwhile Urquhart is claiming the credit for the Cyprus peace plan, which annoys his Foreign Secretary, Tom Makepeace, played by Paul Freeman. The ultra right-wing Home Secretary, John Rayner, played by Glyn Grain, is also eager for power.

Then Urquhart's limousine is forced off the road on a motorway near London by a car carrying three drunken men. They threaten his party with baseball bats and are shot dead by his security staff as they approach. Urquhart is not seriously hurt, but he has a head wound, and when Elizabeth arrives at the hospital he is delirious.

He confuses the motorway with an earlier incident in Cyprus in 1956, when as a nineteen-year-old lieutenant he killed two young guerrillas while trying to get information from them. The past that he thought was dead and buried begins to haunt him.

While he is in hospital Makepeace chairs a cabinet meeting. Urquhart regards him as a possible challenger but not a serious one, thinking him a sentimental dreamer rather than a fighter.

Mike Vardy directs, with Andrew Davies as writer and Ken Riddington as producer. The episodes were cut from an hour to fifty minutes. Isla Blair, Nickolas Grace, Julian Fellowes and David Ryall also appear in the cast.

IMDb voters give this opening episode 7.6 out of 10, the lowest of the twelve.