The third and final season of The Plane Makers completes the bridge to The Power Game that followed it. This season involves a lot more intrigue at the level of government - there are no more plots about the 'ordinary' employees of Scott Furlong Ltd, nor their unions, instead it focuses in entirely on the top level of management represented by our antihero John Wilder.
New characters join in on the ongoing struggle for control of Scott Furlong between Managing Director John Wilder and his arch-rival, Chairmanny Sir Gordon Revidge. First among these is David Corbett, played by Alan "War & Peace" Dobie - he is Wilder's new deputy after Scott Furlong takes over his company to get at their military aircraft contracts. Corbett wants Wilder's job - he is a brilliant engineer, very clever and a fast learner, but inexperienced at politics compared to Wilder. Wilder can't get rid of him though, because Corbett's engineering knowledge is indispensable to the military contracts, so the two mannys are stuck with one another.
James Cameron-Grant MP is played by Peter Jeffrey, one of those actors who was in many things, but is probably best known as Count Grendel from Androids of Tara. Cameron-Grant is a young MP (in contrast to Sir Gerald Merle MP, Wilder's old rival from the previous season) and he is ambitious, showing far more interest in his advertising company and arranging himself seats on company boards than in being an MP, which for him is only a stepping-stone to let him achieve his real goals. Although such things were doubtless just as common back in the '60s, this makes him seem like a very modern MP.
Cameron-Grant acts as Wilder's (and our) way in to the Houses of Parliament, ostensibly employed for his advertising firm to do Scott Furlong's Public Relations, he is really brought on board for his connections.
Laura Challis W-words for Sir Gordon Revidge while being sort-of engaged to Cameron-Grant. She is quickly shown to be easily the intellectual equal of either of them but, as would later be the case with Susan Weldon in The Power Game, can only hold a subordinate position due to the nature of the times.
Miss Challis is the main female character of the season, with a complicated relationship to both Wilder and her supposed fiancé, and this means that Pamela Wilder is sidelined - perhaps this was because they got in a new actress, Ann Firbank, who is simply not as good as Barbara Murray was, playing Pamela as more of a stereotype of a jealous wife, while Murray's superior acting always hinted at suppressed emotions and hidden depths.
Every main character is out for themselves, allying with others only temporarily and when serving their own best interests. These alliances shift from episode to episode, with the only constant being Don Henderson's unwavering loyalty to Wilder (not a character trait he started out with, but one that was well-established by the beginning of this season), and there are enough permutations to keep things interesting through the variety of different power plays we see over the course of this season.
The introduction of new characters inevitably means less time for some of the old ones. As well as sidelining Pamela, we see less of Captain Forbes (Robert Urquhart) although he remains present up to the end. Arthur Sugden (Reginald Marsh) is not so fortunate, being written out at the end of one of the best episodes, It’s A Free Country - Isn’t It? With Scott Furlong taking on military contracts from the government, the staff have to undergo clearance checks by the security services and Sugden, with his humble background and links to the unions, is the victim of the security manny's blatant prejudice. Only John Wilder stands by him but, even with his network of contacts in high places, nobody is willing to stick their neck out by going up against the implacable forces of the Secret Service (a theme that would be revisited in the last season of The Power Game). Their decision is final, and Wilder is forced to get rid of Sugden under the cover of early retirement. Given how much of a focus Sugden was in the previous season, seeing him go under these circumstances is heartbreaking, and makes this a powerful episode. (It helps that the security manny makes himself easy to hate by acting like a right cunt.)
As well as featuring the inferior version of Pamela Wilder (Ann Firbank is sort of the Brian Croucher to Barbara Murray's Stephen Greif), the other main way in which this series fails to be as good as The Power Game is the repeated offence of having important characters sometimes appearing in episodes only over the telephone - in other words the actors are not present at all - including main character John Wilder himself, who misses five episodes in this way! At least when this happened in season two it had the excuse of that being a massive 28 parts long and with many of them being side stories about one-off characters, as opposed to here when it is only 13 parts and forming a continuous story arc.
Speaking of the story arc, well... Corbett, Sir Gordon and the others make several attempts, but in the end Wilder is brought down not by any of his enemies but by a mistaik he himself made, a wrong decision (only with hindsight) that anyone in his position could have taken. Corbett then makes a mistaik of his own by gloating, and so giving Wilder the time he needs to make the best of his position - knowing he must inevitably resign, he does so on his own terms, saving the government minister in charge of the contracts from embarrassment (and having to resign himself, like failing ministers used to in ye olde times of the 1960s, unlike what happens today), and with a knighthood and a seat on the board of Sir Gordon Revidge's merchant bank as his price for so doing - the latter only to rub it in Sir Gordon's face that he didn't win.
Yet it is from Wilder's seat on this board that he learns about the situation at Bligh's company in the first episode of The Power Game, just as though the writers were already setting up the sequel series as this one comes to an end.
And with that, we have come full circle...
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