Duncan reviews The Organization (1972)

This ITV comedy drama starred Donald Sinden and Peter Egan, the latter seemingly still in the cocky, up-and-coming young man phase of his career we saw him play in Big Breadwinner Hog three years earlier. Bernard Hepton and Anton "Susan died a year ago, Number 6" Rogers are also in it, but despite their characters being considered important enough to make it into the title sequence (and the cover of the DVD set from Good Old Network) they are very much in supporting roles.

The series is set in the Public Relations department of a made-up corporation, the Greatrick 'Organization' of the title, and is about the office politics played, largely, between the regular characters. Sinden plays David Pulman, the Machiavellian head of the department whose scheming ensures he usually (but not always) comes out on top. Egan meanwhile is the 'new boy' Richard Pershore, who therefore serves as our point of view character, at least to begin with, as we meet the other characters for the first time when he is introduced to them in turn.

Have I been WFH for so long (thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, it's been almost a full year now) that I need to get my fix of office politics this way? Nah, I think it's safe to say that this is the sort of series I would have watched anyway - it's not quite in the same league as The Power Game, with a much heavier emphasis on the humourous side, but the quality of the drama is of the same type.

At only seven episodes there is also less time to develop intricate plotlines here, but they are enough to tell a self-contained story as Richard Pershore goes through a character arc over the course of them. While I would happily have watched more, especially of Sinden's character, this leaves the series ending on a satisfying note.

The Plane Makers, Season Three

It may date from 1964 but this is a spoiler warning.

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...

The Plane Makers, Season Two

Don't worry, you haven't missed my looking at season one, it is just that, since almost all of it is lost (think '60s Doctor Who, or The Quatermass Experiment, or the first season of The Avengers) with only the pilot episode surviving, it didn't seem to warrant an article of its own.

Originally intended as a series of one-off dramas with a rotating cast of characters themed around the single setting of them all being "Plane Makers." The pilot, called Don't Worry About Me, was broadcast in 1963, making this as old as Doctor Who. The main characters here are played by Ronald "Evilest Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark" Lacey and Colin "Watson in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" Blakely, but they were both long gone from the series by the time season two began.

One-off episodes do still appear in season two, and some of them are pretty good - the best of the bunch is a borderline outright comedy featuring Rodney "Likely Lads" Bewes and Barbara "Carry On films" Windsor - but they gradually give way to the serial structure I have already seen in the sequel series The Power Game.

And, speaking of which, the first episode of season two introduces us to the 'new' main character John Wilder, as played by Patrick Wymark, his first appearance fortunately not lost to posterity. Here he is the Managing Director of Scott Furlong Limited, the company that titularly makes the titular planes, and the ongoing story arc of the season concerns his struggle to keep his job in the face of opposition from his rivals, including company Chairmanny Sir Gordon Revidge and scheming MP Sir Gerald Merle.

Wilder is the same character we know and love to hate from The Power Game, and there are other familiar faces too - Don Henderson (Jack "Professor Travers" Watling) becomes a regular character partway through the season, and Pamela Wilder (Barbara Murray) makes several appearances in key episodes - as a rule, if Pamela is in it, it'll have one of the best plots of the season. And here we see the genesis of the dynamic between John and Pamela Wilder that was one of the most successful elements of The Power Game - his wife is the one opponent that John Wilder can never get the better of.

Characters that are more tied to the plane-making setting so didn't make the transition to The Power Game include test pilot Captain Forbes (Robert Urquhart, familiar to me from his multiple guest appearances in Danger Man) and Arthur Sugden (played by Reginald Marsh), a W-wording-class character who has risen to management level in the company (like the way Richard Sharpe did in the British army) and who therefore often acts as the audience's point-of-view into the world of big business, with the result that he comes across as the most sympathetic of the regulars - especially when he clashes with his boss John Wilder.

Season two of The Plane Makers has a number of very strong episodes, but it is not quite at the level The Power Game would operate at. It has a feeling of being a bridge between the stand-alone stories of the (missing) first season and the series that would follow - another example of the ensemble feel being carried on to this season is the way that regular characters will sometimes be confined to single scenes within an episode, or else only appearing by telephone (thus saving their actor the trouble of turning up at all that week).

But by the end we are left in no doubt that Wymark and Murray have made the series their own, and I am left struggling to imagine what the first season could have been like without them - guest appearance by William Hartnell (only a few months before he took the role in Doctor Who) notwithstanding!

Duncan reviews The Power Game, Season Three

Contains spoilers, including of the really big twist in episode 9.

Every so often, perhaps once every few years, I discover for myself another great TV show from the past. I think the last one that qualified for this was Shōjo Kakumei Utena. I'm pleased to say that The Power Game is certainly among them.

In the third season it reinvents itself - after two seasons of Sir John Wilder and Caswell Bligh fighting each other for control of Bligh's company, both men left it behind at the end of season 2. We pick up two years later, with them meeting again and both working for the same firm - only this time the "firm" is the British government. Caswell, now Lord Bligh, is the minister for Trade, and Sir John is his Special Envoy - a kind of ambassador, but not a civil servant, and don't the real civil servants hate him for it!

The conflict is therefore twofold, as Bligh still blames Wilder for causing the rift in his family (he cannot see how much of the fault is his own, an ongoing plot thread for this season too) and wants revenge, but there is also their joint attempts to gain control of their department from the civil servants - like Yes Minister but not played for laughs. Indeed there are many comparisons you could make with that superb series, and I would say The Power Game is not found wanting.

It seemed to me that Sir John Wilder was a softened, more sympathetic character in this season than before, which I would put down to two things. First, while before he was rarely, if ever, able to take the moral high ground against his business opponents, now his antagonists are Bligh, who often acts solely out of spite, and the civil servants who are shown to be an old boy's network of self-seeking and tradition bound time servers, who oppose him and the good he is trying to do for British trade only because Wilder is not one of them, or because his methods are unorthodox.

Secondly, we see much less of Wilder's hypocrisy in this season, a trait which always made me like him less whenever it manifested. In the absence of Susan Weldon, Wilder has no new mistress, and seems to be abstaining from infidelity - at least for the first half of the season - and we see him rejecting one outright offer of same. Not that that stops Pamela Wilder from suspecting him, and that drives the plot of at least one of the better (and more farce-like) episodes.

There is an exception to this, and it comes in the one bad episode of the season - arguably the one outright bad episode from all of the three seasons put together. Cat Is You, Bird Is Me sees Wilder have a sort of mid-life crisis, running off with a Foreign Office interpreter who happens to be a 19-year-old hippy chick. This being made in 1969, it is as cringe-making a portrayal of the hippy culture as you would expect for mainstream television, scarcely better than Star Trek's The Way to Eden. This sort of storyline would be done much better in Rumpole of the Bailey, 10 years later, with the character of Guthrie Featherstone QC MP in Wilder's role.

While on the subject of bad things about The Power Game, I should mention the quality of the DVDs - while Network did a great job on the first two seasons, this one seemed not quite up to their usual high standards, with the picture seemingly less cleaned up (of course I don't know what the quality may have been like before they got their hands on it), and with the ad breaks excised from all but the final episode. In some cases this was clumsily done, with the edit points very jarring and noticeable. A shame.

But back to the good stuff which far, far outweighs the bad.

To go with the new setting there are new regular characters. The one deemed important enough to make it into the new title sequence is Wilder's civil service Private Secretary, Lincoln Dowling, played by Michael Jayston.

There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality.

Dowling seems like a potential ally for Wilder to begin with, but before long his ambition turns him into a rival, a junior version of Wilder himself. He feuds with Don Henderson (Jack Watling, somewhat sidelined this season, but not so much that he could slip away to be Professor Travers in The Invasion, which must have been made about this time) and romances Pamela, and while he lacks Wilder's lifetime of business and political experience and connections, he has one card Wilder lacks - we see his recruitment to the Secret Intelligence Service.

With the benefit of hindsight, the episode in which this happens, The Goose Chase, is somewhat odd. Because Michael Jayston would, 10 years later, play Peter Guillam in the BBC's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy series. While in The Power Game, the two SIS agents we see recruiting Dowling are played by Michael Aldridge and Terence Rigby, later Tinker and Soldier respectively. Now I'm not saying Lincoln Dowling = Peter Guillam, but...

Another new regular character is Sir Jason Fowler, played by Richard Hurndall. Hurndall is an actor I'm not hugely familiar with - I mainly know him for his attempt to fill the huge shoes of William Hartnell in The Five Doctors, a matter of months before his death, and Big Gay Longcat won't let me not mention he was in Blakes 7's Assassin. But he's really good here. Fowler is the Permanent Under-Secretary of State to Bligh's minister, the role Sir Humphrey Appleby serves to Jim Hacker in Yes Minister, but Sir Jason's no Sir Humphrey: Bligh, Wilder, even Dowling - a junior civil servant to Fowler in both senses - run rings around him, and as their schemes develop over the course of the season he is shown to be increasingly out of his depth. Fowler is a pitiful character, past his prime and, it turns out, with not long to live from (probably) cancer. Hurndall captures that side of the man beautifully, and makes him one of the most tragic of the series.

For me, the best episode of the season and, probably, the series as a whole, is The Heart Market, containing the most surprising twist of all. Caswell Bligh has a heart attack, and in hospital is told by doctors that he has less than a year to live... unless he has a heart transplant! Knowing something about transplants myself I realised at once that, in the 1960s, that was practically a death sentence either way.

Absent from the new titles and the first seven parts of the season, Kenneth Bligh (Peter Barkworth) returns to the show to guest-star for two episodes and is reconciled with his father before the end, even helping Caswell ensure a potential organ donor's next of kin is willing for the heart to go to Caswell. In his final act of the series, we see that for Bligh Senior everything is about money, when he callously offers the soon-to-be widow £20,000 (so over £300k in today's terms) for her husband's heart. Kenneth is horrified by his father's behaviour, but he still cries for him after his death.

Caswell gets his new heart, but doesn't survive the operation. We cut from him going off to the operating theatre to just after his funeral, a scene that Barkworth completely nails and which cements this episode as the best of them all.

Yes, the show kills off its main antagonist with four episodes still to go. A new character is brought in, Garfield Kane MP (played by Barrie Ingham, great as Sejanus in The Caesars the year before this) to replace Lord Bligh as minister, but the role of Wilder's nemesis goes principally to Dowling after this, for all that they have to work together against Kane from time to time.

It is somewhat ironic that the first two seasons of The Power Game closed with endings that felt as though they could have been the end of the story, had the programme not been recommissioned, while this season ends with the feeling that they were very much setting up the next one. From what I can gather, they would have made more but for Patrick Wymark's early death in 1970.

But there are more stories with John Wilder available - for them I will have to go back to the earlier series The Plane Makers in which he, his wife, and loyal sidekick Don Henderson first appeared.

The Power Game season 3, and the entire series, get ***** ratings from me.

Duncan reviews The Power Game, Season Two

Spoiler warning. But seriously, it's a series from 1966 - are you really worried about that now?

Befitting a show about engineers, this season builds greatly on that which came before it, and follows on from the events of season one as seamlessly as though they were planned together from the start. I have no idea if that was in fact the case, or if the writers were just that good at their job.

The main cast of The Power Game (the ones considered important enough to appear in the title sequence) all carry on from the first season, but there is significant turnover in the semi-regular and guest actors, necessitating a number of new recurring and one-off characters.

Before seeing him in this, Robin Bailey was best known to me as Judge Graves, a recurring nemesis for Rumpole. He takes over the void left by the (off-screen) departure of Ian Holm's Sefton Kemp as Charles Grainger, a senior civil servant. There is more than a little of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Grainger, and he proves to be a far more formidable opponent to Sir John Wilder than Kemp was. At one point he even gives a very Humphrey-esque speech where he claims true power lies with the Civil Service, not with the politicians or the businessmen. And the events at the conclusion of the series would appear to bear this out.

Roger Delgado is sadly only in the one episode, playing an opportunistic businessman from the Middle East called Farid Salem whom Sir John Wilder outwits. The show once again transcends its '60s origins by showing racist attitudes of its time that are confined to the characters - the show itself does not espouse them, as dialogue between Wilder and Salem indicates: Wilder accuses Salem of being crooked by making the common generalisation about thieves in his country having their hands cut off. Salem responds that they have abolished amputation just as the British have abolished capital punishment. "Progress is universal," he concludes, in a very Masterful way.

Then you will give your power to me?

It was seeing this performance of Delgado's that inspired Big Gay Longcat to write his article on actors who should have played Number 2 in The Prisoner.

Coming off less well is Alan McNaughtan. He reminds me of the Bargain Basement Frank Finlay I took him for before I saw him give a great performance in The Sandbaggers, as here he plays a Dutch banker whose accent wanders around Europe like he's Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The middle of the season is chock-a-block with faces familiar to me from other British shows, including Kevin Stoney, George Pravda, John Barron, and even Ray Lonnen (the first two both playing foreigners, the latter two both Englishmen abroad in the made up African country of Magalia).

Finally we get our third Number 2 to appear in the series as Guy Doleman, the very first Number 2 encountered by Number 6 in Arrival, guests as a rival for the attentions of Sir John Wilder's mistress Susan Weldon.

Wilder's relationships are again at the heart of the series, and while it is of course the business ones that are usually the main focus of the various plots, his romantic entanglements take centre stage more frequently in this season than in the first: the collapse of his marriage is more or less the point on which the season's arc pivots, with Pamela leaving him representing a change in his fortunes. After a run of successes, it seems his wife is the one person Wilder cannot out-manipulate - and after that we see a gradual loss of control spreading into his business life as well.

Wilder reconciles with his wife by the end, but his relationship with Miss Weldon falls apart for good after declining over the course of the season. While she may or may not end up marrying Guy Doleman's character - the series is ambiguous about whether he is using her just as Wilder did - we are clearly supposed to feel she is better off away from Wilder. His most unlikable characteristic is his hypocritical jealousy - in season one we saw this when his wife also had an affair, this time it is when Miss Weldon sees other men, including Doleman and Patrick Allen. Presumably she didn't stay with Allen because he kept reminding her of the possibility of imminent nuclear war.

There's little to criticise about this superb drama series, but I can't let pass the new title music which has been... funked up... for the second season. If the season two titles had been my first exposure to the series, I would never have been able to take it seriously.

Here, judge for yourselves. Compare this first season title sequence:



to this second season version:


The funk kicks in after about 12 seconds (with thanks to ZillakYT for uploading them to YT).

At the end of the series Wilder finally loses his position at Bligh's, with Caswell Bligh finally "winning" over Sir John. But with Wilder walking away with £330,000 in 1966 money (multiple millions in today's money) as a final move, and Caswell's family torn apart by his manipulations, it is far from being as simple as that.

It does suggest that there will be big changes for the third season, with the status quo not looking like an option. I'm looking forward to it - this is an outstanding series.

Duncan reviews The Power Game, Season One

The Power Game was a British political drama series that ran on ITV between 1965 and 1969, centering on the struggles between the three top men at a large (fictional) civil engineering company for control of the company and the wider political influence that comes with that power.

With a level of complexity to its intrigue that requires viewers to pay attention, and storylines that run across the whole of the first season's 13 episodes, this is the sort of series that US television wants us to believe that it invented about 15 years ago, but which really was already being produced as a matter of course in the UK going back 50 years.

Spoilers of this 50-year-old series follow.

In fact The Power Game is a sequel to another series, The Plane Makers, which I have not seen - yet - but which I do know contained several of the same characters, first of which is the main character of The Power Game, Sir John Wilder (played by Patrick Wymark), joint managing director of "Blighs" civil engineers, a man with a great deal of high level business experience and some political influence as well.

Wilder is the main character, but he is not a "good guy" - he's greedy, ruthless, and only out for himself. He also proves to be a complete hypocrite in his personal life, jealous of his wife while keeping a mistress of his own. He's a thoroughly unlikable character, and it is a tribute to the acting skills of Patrick Wymark when he manages to get the viewers to side with him.

The second main character is Caswell Bligh, played by Clifford Evans - he may have been Number 2 in the worst episode of The Prisoner, but he wasn't the worst Number 2, and here he gets to show off the skills he was denied by being in Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. Bligh, the founder of "Blighs", is in some ways a more sympathetic character than Wilder - while just as unscrupulous in his business dealings, Bligh is a family man whose ambition is to leave the company he built up to his son and grandson after him (Wilder, by contrast, definitely only wants money and power for himself). There is a darker side there though - it is revealed during the series that Bligh made his fortune during the second world war by skimming profits from contracts that were supposed to be part of the war effort.

The final member of the trio that make up the primary tier of characters is Caswell Bligh's son, Kenneth Bligh. Kenneth (always referred to as Kenneth in the show, not Bligh or Mr Bligh, to avoid confusion with his father) is played by Peter Barkworth, an actor who was in many things but whom I probably most associate with either Leader Clent in Doctor Who's Ice Warriors or else Martin Hewitt in two stories of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. Supposedly Kenneth is in his mid-thirties, and while Barkworth was about that age at the time, I find this hard to swallow because he definitely looks older.

So the basic setup is that Bligh (Senior) wants to pass on control of his company to his son, but feels he is not ready yet, so makes him joint managing director with another man until he is ready. Sir John Wilder wasn't Bligh's first choice but Wilder forces his hand in the first episode, coming out of the semi-retirement he ended The Plane Makers in and with a lot more powers than the Blighs are happy with.

Around these three are a second tier of regular characters. Jack Watling (Professor Travers in Doctor Who) plays Don Henderson, another character returning from The Plane Makers to be Wilder's right hand man. He often serves the role that Bernard Wooley served in Yes Minister, with the other characters explaining their deep plots to him and, by proxy, the viewers at home.

Lady Pamela Wilder (Barbara Murray) is Wilder's wife. Susan Weldon (Rosemary Leach) is Wilder's mistress. One of the most impressive things about the series is how unsexist it is for the time in which it was made - let's not forget that even the progressive Star Trek was incredibly sexist in the 1960s - and would even stand up well against some series being made today. They are two of the cleverest characters in the series, but Lady Wilder does not work and Miss Weldon is merely the assistant secretary to a civil service board - despite having a PhD in Economics - because they are unsexist characters who exist in a sexist time.

These then are the characters who appear in almost every episode. There is a third tier of regular characters who recur across a few. Rachel Herbert as Justine Bligh (Kenneth's wife) is perhaps the most worthy of mention for being the other Number 2 to appear in the show. Sorry if that's a spoiler for Free For All, by the way.

Who is Number 1?

George Sewell (Alec Freeman in UFO, or the Superintendent from The Detectives if you prefer) plays Frank Hagadan, employed by Wilder as an engineer and then sacked by him when he discovers Hagadan is his wife's lover. This makes for one of the best moments of the season, when we see that Pamela Wilder didn't love Hagadan at all, she was just using him to get back at her husband for his own infidelity - a twist conveyed by Barbara Murray with only a single look to camera.

Philip Madoc (who I trust needs no introduction) plays a trade union official and member of the National Export Board - as are Wilder and Bligh. He plays them off against each other when it becomes clear that they should not both be on the board when they work for the same company (Wilder was appointed to it before he took the Blighs job), and the main plot of several episodes hinges on this development with first one, then the other, threatened with losing their place and, with it, a good deal of their political influence. Probably my favourite moment of the season comes when it looks like Bligh has been forced, by one of Wilder's many schemes, to resign from the board, but at the last minute he is saved by an intervention from the Minister that neither of them foresaw while at the same time having been foreshadowed, to us, beautifully.

The last regular I feel is worth mentioning is Ian Holm, here near the beginning of his career that would go on to include such highlights as Ash in Alien, Pod in The Borrowers and, of course, The Lord of the Rings where he played Frodo Baggins. Here he is the closest thing to a real "bad guy" antagonist, the ambitious civil servant Sefton Kemp.

Kemp is the secretary to the National Export Board and, as such, is Miss Weldon's boss. After failing to get rid of her - which he wants to do because she is actually better qualified for his job than he is - he plots with the chairman of the Board to get rid of Wilder as part of a play that will expand the powers of the Board. This forms the finale of The Power Game's first season, a superb climax that sees everyone turned against Sir John Wilder and, by the end of part two (Network leaving the ad breaks in on their DVDs again - I like it when they do that) he's as up against it as he's ever been. Suffice to say that before the end credits roll he turns it around and it is Kemp that ends up getting sacked, and Wilder comes out with more power than ever before.

Well, by going through the characters in this way I have also covered all the features of the series that I felt were worth discussing, so that's it for my review really. In conclusion, while this might seem like a TV series consisting largely of men shouting at each other in rooms... actually, I'm not going to deny it is that. But it manages to make that into totally gripping drama. Even The Sandbaggers, behind its office-bound setting, had the advantage of being about the inherently more exciting subject of espionage, but The Power Game makes more with less.

I would unhesitatingly give the first season of The Power Game a ***** rating.