Final Programme, The (1973)

Dr Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch) is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, billionaire, adventurer and time traveller who wears black nail varnish, drives a 1930s-vintage Buick, flies a Phantom jet and a Sikorsky helicopter and is a compulsive eater of chocolate digestive biscuits.

His sexual inclinations are confused by a touch of incest with his Sleeping Beauty sister, Miss Dazzle (Julie Ege), who is on her deathbed.

The events are set sometime near the end of the world and take place in Lapland, Turkey and in a flat next door to a scrapheap in Trafalgar Square, whose fountains are piled high with junked cars.

The ruthless Miss Brunner (newcomer Jenny Runacre) – who physically consumes her lovers (of both sexes) – is a computer programmer who wants to trace a roll of microfilm belonging to Jerry’s late father.

The film is an integral part of the programme in which she and a potty group of scientists are engaged.

The ‘programme’ of the title is a design for a perfect, genetically modified, self-replicating human being – an immortal hermaphrodite who can survive the coming apocalypse and prevent the human race from dying out. A bisexual Messiah, born of – and for – the age of Science.

After a chase across a war-torn Europe on the verge of anarchy (the Russians are fighting in Europe, the Vatican has been destroyed, and Amsterdam has just been reduced to 28 square miles of white ash by the Americans), Brunner and Cornelius obtain the programme details on microfilm from Jerry’s loathsome drug-crazed brother Frank (Derrick O’Connor) and retire to an abandoned underground Nazi fortress in the Arctic to run the programme, with Jerry and Miss Brunner as the subjects.

The sight of the misshapen messiah will certainly send shudders down the spine of those who have stuck with the stylised imagery and apocalyptic incidents that comprise this baffling adaptation of one of Michael Moorcock’s “Jerry Cornelius” stories.

But many more will have long since despaired of finding any tangible meaning in this fatally flawed fantasy that ends with a cruel joke at the expense of 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968).

Dr Baxter (Patrick Magee), Dr Smiles (Graham Crowden) and Dr Powys (George Coulouris) make fearsome adversaries, but Jerry’s bid to save both his sister, Miss Dazzle (Julie Ege) and the planet are confounded by director Robert Fuest’s preoccupation with look over logic.

Also released under the title, The Last Days of Man on Earth. Mick Jagger turned down the part of Jerry Cornelius as he thought the script was “too weird”.

Jon Finch’s trendy wardrobe in the film was designed by fashionable designer and tailor Tommy Nutter.

Jerry Cornelius
Jon Finch
Miss Brunner
Jenny Runacre
Professor Hira
Hugh Griffith
Dr Baxter
Patrick Magee
Major Wrongway Lindbergh
Sterling Hayden
Miss Dazzle
Julie Ege
John
Harry Andrews
Dr Smiles
Graham Crowden
Dr Powys
George Coulouris
Dr Lucas
Basil Henson
Frank
Derrick O’Connor
Dimitri
Gilles Millinaire
Shades
Ronald Lacey
Jenny
Sandy Ratcliff
Catherine
Sarah Douglas
Fortune Teller
Delores Delmar
Waitress
Sandra Dickinson

Director
Robert Fuest

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