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| Cover to The Ron Grainer Orchestra's soundtrack album |
Surrounded by films, TV series and albums that I “will get to eventually”, my next experience must call out to me.
I do not understand how it took until two weeks ago before seeing, for the first time, “The Prisoner”, the postmodern and psychological science fiction spy drama that was first broadcast by ITV in 1967, but it arrived at the perfect moment.
I was in the right mood for a story about an individual shorn of their identity, dumped in a place where they must conform, their name and clothes assigned to them, kept constantly under surveillance, and forced to undergo psychological mind games to reveal information about the decisions they made.
Of course, for an allegorical story where all the characters are numbered, its setting and plots are surreal, individuality pitted against collective community, and need driving motive – for freedom, for information – its audience sees what it wants to see, and I am glad the premise wasn’t made more specific for that reason. I realised my above description of “The Prisoner” could also fit “The Matrix”, Neo being forced to exist as “Thomas Anderson” until they escaped the reality created for them.
I am fortunate that I watched “The Prisoner” by myself, forming my own view of it without knowledge of the extensive industry of merchandise, including clothing, further novels and comic books, and many books analysing the series – I will get to them all eventually.
What started this journey was ITV’s placing of the first episode, “Arrival”, on their YouTube channel “ITV Retro”, alongside episodes of “Thunderbirds”, “Stingray” and “Sapphire & Steel”. Not having uploaded subsequent episodes fast enough, I moved to ITVX, their own streaming service, where they saw fit to add four breaks for advertisements in each 48–50-minute episode – my solution was to watch at 10pm, when there was less inclination to sell to me.
I liked that I didn’t initially think Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six – we never learn his real name – was a spy. Someone living in a London townhouse and driving a Lotus Seven he built himself doesn’t automatically make Number Six a continuation of McGoohan’s John Drake from “Danger Man”, a show I’ve never seen. He could have been a civil engineer, or the inventor of a bottomless bag of peanuts – recalling the only time McGoohan reprised the role, on “The Simpsons” in 2000 – also with sensitive information wanted by the organisation behind The Village, represented by the constantly changing Number Two.
The opening titles justify their three minutes of total length, portraying McGoohan as a forcefully determined individual – indeed, he is the only person to appear in every episode – driving his Lotus into Westminster, walking down a long corridor to resign his unnamed position, thunderclaps accompanying Ron Grainer’s theme tune. Gassed at home while packing for a holiday, notably by a man in black driving a hearse – the fade to black after McGoohan passes out invites guesses on the reality of everything that follows – and waking up to find both himself and his room transplanted to The Village, we get the barest of explanatory dialogue, indicating where they have ended up, what they are being called, who is talking to them, what they want, and what they won’t say – who is “Number One”.
McGoohan is perfect as Number Six – headstrong, resourceful and confident, with a sense of self that does not rely on anyone else. He knows exactly who he is – not having to explain what that is to anyone should be taken as a given, not as a challenge. I would hope that, if I found myself in a similar situation, I would know when to fight, but I know the situation portrayed in “The Prisoner” is an allegory taking things to extremes, but you should always be on guard for when things take a turn.
In making The Village a pleasant, controlled community that Number Six ideally will never leave, what stops me from wanting to go there for a week was being unable to identify inmates from their guards, everyone a possible informant. With the Edwardian clothing and festive air abounding, does The Village evoke nostalgia for a time when everything was simpler, and everyone knew their place? Whether or not, the look of it did make me search for room rates at the Hotel Portmeirion during while watching the first episode.
My favourite episodes were early in the series’ run, balancing contemporary psychedelia and Cold War paranoia with themes of dream manipulation (“A. B. and C.”), doppelgangers and identity theft (“The Schizoid Man”), indoctrination (“The General”) and conformity (“A Change of Mind”) – being labelled in the latter episode as “unmutual” is as good as “cancelled” today, including the psychological torture, but without the simulated lobotomy.
However, constant surveillance in “The Prisoner” means that any story could be subjected to “deus ex machina”: any character sympathetic to Number Six could really be working for Number Two, or think that Number Six is there to test their loyalty, while any location to which Number Six escapes could be part of The Village. Any scene could cut to Number Two watching the same view on a screen, camera seemingly available at all known points, commenting on the action, and revealing that all we have seen was under their control the whole time, because that is the community that The Village creates.
I don’t know if invention or necessity led to later episodes becoming more outlandish in their approach to storylines: transplanting Number Six’s mind another man’s body, McGoohan filming elsewhere at the time; beginning one episode as a Western, titled “Living in Harmony”, with Number Six as a sheriff who resigns for his own reasons, then imprisoned for his own safety, finally revealed as a roleplay using hallucinogenic drugs; and “The Girl Who Was Death”, featuring Number Six undercover as an English colonel, and later in a Sherlock Holmes costume, was really Number Six telling a story to children in a nursery, Number Two’s hope being that he would drop his guard enough among them to reveal more about himself.
I have since read that McGoohan wanted “The Prisoner” to be a seven-episode mini-series, but production company ITC, run by Lew Grade, who also owned ITV franchise ATV, wanted a twenty-six-episode series he could sell to American networks – what was hoped to be two thirteen-part series became one of seventeen, that took over a year to shoot. “The Prisoner” ultimately aired on CBS on Saturday nights during the summer of 1968, in place of “The Jackie Gleason Show”, directly opposite NBC’s broadcasts of Roger Moore in “The Saint”, another of Grade’s series.
Most fortunately for watching “The Prisoner” today is its having been filmed in colour, again required to sell the show abroad, meaning I can enjoy a high-definition transfer of the original 35mm elements today, light years from the murky 405-line black and white TV standard in the UK of 1967. An odd outcome of this situation is revealing the artifice that would have been covered on first broadcast – back projection, photographed and painted backdrops, studio sets replicating outside scenes – that I chose to interpret as further evidence of the covert operations by Number Two and The Village, a further layer that no-one ever intended. However, iconic as it is, the “Rover” weather balloon monster, looks silly no matter how you look at it.
As famous as McGoohan’s cry from the end of the opening titles, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” is a line from the opening episode: “I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.” To get by in the real world, where the footprint of your identity is on record to make your day run, I realise that I must agree to all the above, but I want them to be correct – if we are all to be “prisoners”, as the show insinuates, then allow me some agency. I can admire Number Six, but I don’t want to be in his tennis shoes.
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