In The Final Cut (Pearl, 9.30pm) Ian Richardson returns as dastardly British Prime Minister Francis Urquhart. Supporters will remember him from House Of Cards and To Play The King. He is now 65 years old and Conservative Party vultures are circling. Urquhart, true to form, is not about to go without a fight.
He has his eye on Margaret Thatcher's record in office. He also wants to be remembered as Britain's greatest Prime Minister since Winston Churchill. But there rumblings in the corridors of power. Is Urquhart up to the job? Is it time for a pretender to come forward? One candidate is Foreign Secretary Tom Makepeace (Paul Freeman), who has a scheming back-bencher (Isla Blair) for a mistress.
The Final Cut is the usual admirable blending of fact and fiction from author Michael Dobbs, whose screenplay has been succinctly but dramatically adapted for television by Andrew Davies. Davies is one of Britain's most prolific writers of television drama, with Middlemarch and Pride And Prejudice, as well as the first two Urquhart series, already under his impressive belt.
The closing chapter of Urquhart's career is set against the backdrop of a possible peace agreement between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus. Urquhart sees the deal as one way he can go out with a bang, as it were. But there are skeletons in his closet: Cyprus was the scene of an unpleasant incident in his youth. Will he succeed in outwitting his enemies, and the past? Or will Urquhart be left defeated and disgraced? There are more compelling dramatics from the BBC in Bitter Harvest (World, 2am), an exotic thriller which shows that the Dominican Republic is no place to meddle in politics. Bitter Harvest, with a powerful performance from Josette Simon at its core, is followed by The Hummingbird Tree, a loss-of-innocence story shot in Trinidad.
In Rhapsody In August (World, 9.30pm) Richard Gere holds up his end as the only familiar westerner in an otherwise Japanese cast. Gere plays a Japanese-American and makes a better job of it than we had any right to expect. Otherwise the film is thoughtful but (by his standards) minor Akira Kurosawa, telling of a Japanese grandmother and her experiences during and after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Dead At 21 (Pearl, 12.55am) is a new American drama series about a 20-year-old who discovers he is the product of a bio-engineering experiment and is set to self-destruct at the age of 21. His only hope is to find his creator, a task complicated by the fact that he has also been framed for murder.
