Paul Seed’s television direction makes room for distinctive actors. We rate the theatrical confidence of House of Cards, where Ian Richardson is allowed to be funny and dangerous, though the supporting characters receive too little attention.
Fi1m perspective
Ian Richardson looks straight at us in House of Cards (1990), and Paul Seed lets us enjoy being taken into a schemer’s confidence. The director suggested those asides, giving Francis Urquhart a private audience beyond the people he needs to persuade on screen. We laughed at Richardson’s pleasure in the scheming, then felt uneasy at how readily we had gone along with it. Seed allows the performance to be theatrical, but keeps enough threat in the humour to make our amusement uncomfortable.
Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s novel suits that approach: the language makes ambition sound respectable while the plotting gets on with being devious. Across the four-part series, Seed’s appetite for Urquhart’s unpleasantness keeps the melodrama brisk and entertaining. The limitation is how little comparable attention anyone else receives. Richardson has the sharpest writing, and the supporting characters need lives beyond their usefulness to his chief whip. A little more attention to them would have given us something else to care about when Richardson is out of sight.
The breakthrough of House of Cards led to To Play the King (1993), again with Davies and Richardson, but Seed did not stay with political drama. He directed Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay in A Rather English Marriage (1998), then all six episodes of the Auf Wiedersehen, Pet revival (2002), with the children’s adaptation Just William (2010) further along. His movement between comedy, crime and period work makes sense for a director whose particular strength was recognising what distinctive performers could bring to the material.
There is a limit to what that attention to actors can achieve when the writing gives one of them so much more than the others. In House of Cards, Seed cannot disguise the imbalance, but he knows better than to restrain Richardson for the sake of it. The pleasure comes from watching him trust a performance without allowing the comedy to make the character harmless. Start there, provided an evening with a thoroughly untrustworthy man sounds inviting.
Biography
Paul Seed (1947–2026) was a British television director and former actor. Born in Bideford, Devon, he trained at Manchester University and began his career on stage before appearing in numerous television series including Z-Cars, Doctor Who, Coronation Street and Tales of the Unexpected. In the late 1970s he completed the BBC Directors' course and moved into directing.
Seed directed the BBC political thriller mini-series House of Cards (1990) and its sequel To Play the King (1993), both adapted by Andrew Davies. He also directed episodes of A Touch of Frost, the 2002 revival of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, New Tricks, Doc Martin and the 2010 adaptation of Just William. He won two BAFTA awards, for House of Cards and A Rather English Marriage (1998).
Seed was married to actress Elizabeth Cassidy. He died of cancer on 7 March 2026, aged 78.
