THE PRISONER: Episode by Episode

THE PRISONER: EPISODE BY EPISODE

This extended blog is intended as a companion to my book Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner, which was originally published in 1997. It is also written in anticipation of the new TV remake of the series, and in tribute to The Prisoner’s primary creator Patrick McGoohan, who died recently. While the book contains detailed commentaries on each of the seventeen episodes, my purpose here is to present a more impressionistic view of the series and to concentrate more on its visual and cinematic qualities.

In the years since Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner was published The Prisoner has certainly not disappeared from view. In recent years American action-adventure series television has reached new heights of sophistication with series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes and Lost, which have helped to create a new sense of televisual aesthetics and have very often proved to be far more challenging and imaginative than anything Hollywood has been able to offer. Many of the creators of these series – which fully utilise cinematic techniques – have paid specific tributes to McGoohan’s creation within these series. The Prisoner, which was shot at a time when colour TV was still a relative novelty, was the first series to make full use of the possibilities of taking a more ‘cinematic’ kind of TV. The story goes that McGoohan (with typical bitingly ironic wit) actually banned the use of the word ‘television’ during the production of the series. The standards of production quality, especially in terms of set design, camerawork and the creative use of incidental music which The Prisoner set were rarely equalled during the 1970s and 80s. And in perhaps the most naturally collaborative artistic medium of all, The Prisoner stands as one of early TV’s most clearly authorial texts. Patrick McGoohan’s extraordinary performance still resonates as a powerful representation of the archetypal character of the rebel hero, the seeker after truth… The character of The Prisoner represents the nameless force we each feel inside ourselves whenever we feel the forces of oppression, of mindless conformity and of suppression of freedom to think pressing in on us. He is a modern Everyman. The Prisoner‘s use of philosophy, politics, surrealism and social satire is remarkable, especially for a TV series of its time, but what really drives it is McGoohan’s extraordinary energy as performer, writer, director and conceptualist. In one scene in the opening episode Arrival The Prisoner birthday – 6 March 1928 – is revealed. It is also McGoohan’s real birthday. The Prisoner is an intensely personal story, in which only The Prisoner himself appears every week. He is onscreen almost all of the time. The other characters – like the ever-changing Number 2s – seem to float before his eyes with an increasingly intense, dream-like logic. It is often difficult to tell whether what is happening is real or whether it’s all going on in The Prisoner’s head.

Wherever he goes, The Prisoner is under surveillance. His masters in the Village watch him, we watch them watching him… Even the statues have watching eyes. …My life is my own!… he roars. But nobody appears to be listening. McGoohan’s dedication to his central socio-political prophecy – that technology will, in the future, be used for many forms of subtle social control, which will be delivered to us in the sickeningly bland tones of politicians who will keep reassuring us that it’s all for our own good – is all-encompassing. In episode after episode, he shows us how this control will be exercised. The Prisoner is carried forward towards its utterly bizarre and tantalisingly open ended conclusion, by McGoohan’s incredibly driven, monomaniacal conviction. And in this age of mass surveillance, when intrusive voyeurism has become enshrined and fetishised as a national pastime through a seemingly interminable series of excruciating ‘Reality TV’ shows, while outside millions upon millions of camera eyes are watching and cataloguing our every move, the prophetic force of McGoohan’s vision becomes more potent with each passing year. While some of its visual iconography and use of dramatic conventions (especially its fight scenes) dates The Prisoner as very much a product of the 1960s, the central message it conveys becomes more and more relevant with each passing year. Hopefully the new series will do some justice to this vision. But McGoohan’s Prisoner can only continue to grow in stature as the years go by.

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one: arrival

Arrival is, at least for the first two of its three sections, an astonishing piece of visual art. Such is its visual power that its distinctive imagery alone tells all the essentials of the story. The locations – consisting of familiarly iconic parts of London and the eccentrically cosmopolitan setting of the Portmeirion Hotel in North Wales – are especially distinctive, and work in sharp contrast against each other, taking us from an extremely familiar setting into one which is mysterious and strange. The studio sets, in particular The Prisoner’s house, Number 2’s residence inside The Green Dome and the Village’s main surveillance centre are meticulously designed modernist interiors which reflect the rulers of The Village’s use of the most up to date technology. These provide another contrast with the old-world architecture of Portmeirion, indicating that beneath the facades The Village represents a technologically controlled and totalitarian future. Every aspect of the episode’s mise-en-scene has been utilised to reinforce this contrast. The (superficially) comforting environment of The Prisoner’s house features muted, soft greens and yellows while inside The Green Dome everything is dark blue, purple and metallic grey. The black blazers, casual slacks and colourful striped tee shirts worn by the inhabitants of The Village suggest a kind of ‘holiday camp’ atmosphere but the clothes themselves are all so perfectly and immaculately clean, and the actions of the Villagers – as they take part in contrived ‘fun’ – are awkward, nervous and completely desexualised. There is plenty of contrasting colour here, the visuals tell us, but precious little passion. The styles of the Portmeirion buildings, which are drawn from many different parts of the world and which seem to be arranged in an almost random way, add to the sense of dislocation which both The Prisoner and the viewer increasingly come to feel.

Central to the design strategy of the series, as revealed in Arrival, is the imaginative positioning of rounded shapes, which appear in sharp contrast to the rectangular frame of the TV screen. Number 2’s ‘office’ is circular, with built in monitor screens all around. Number 2 himself rises up from below, with measured amusement, in a strange chair shaped like half an egg. In the middle of the room is a large round control console. In the surveillance room the operatives swing round on a kind of wheel with their heads bent down over their equipment. And most memorably of all there is what later becomes known as ‘Rover’, the mysterious and terrifying white balloon which appears to be both Village guard and instrument of punishment. Even the ubiquitous typescript which all Village signs and notices are written in is heavily rounded.

The opening sequence, which appears here in fully extended form, tells the story of The Prisoner’s incarceration in a completely visual way. The sequence is poetically cinematic, beginning with the cracking of thunder and long a shot of an anonymous deserted airfield. It is as if he comes out of some elemental place. We then see our hero’s stylish Lotus 7 crashing towards us. The dynamic music is, here as elsewhere, crucial to the effect, rising to a series of climaxes as we see him driving through London, entering a secret underground location, smashing his fist down on hiss boss’s desk and then storming back down the corridor. The music is slightly orchestrated, but a driving rock beat features throughout, like a racing heartbeat, slowing down to a slower rhythm as he returns to his London home, rising in tempo as he struggles with the effect of the knockout drug that his been posted through his letterbox by a tall, spindly man dressed as an undertaker, then petering out he collapses, the buildings racing around in front of his eyes. When he wakes the music is calm but slightly eerie as he opens up the blinds to reveal his entrance to his ‘new world’. His apartment in The Village has been set up as a replica of his London flat, as if to further disorient him and to display the apparently effortless omnipotence of his captors.

Most high budget TV series use music in a similar way to mainstream Hollywood movies which follow the pattern of classical Hollywood narrative. We accept the presence of non-diegetic background music for dramatic effects as one of those conventions which we don’t really think about. This convention was satirised memorably in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, where an orchestra suddenly appears in a Western setting. But most incidental music in film or TV is meant to be ‘invisible’, and its effect on creating mood and emotion is often underestimated. In The Prisoner music is used in a very deliberate way, sometimes for satirical effects (as with the ‘cheerful’ but bland brass band music used in Village parades and celebrations) and at others in various conventional ways during fight scenes and action sequences. But the series also contains a number of distinctive ‘themes’ which are first established in Arrival. The first section of the opening episode has rather minimal dialogue, as The Prisoner explores the Village and we are introduced to its distinctive if bizarre mixture of architectural styles. One of the main themes, a slightly jaunty but suggestively eerie brassy piece, accompanies our hero’s first ride in a Village taxi. As he approaches Number 2’s residence in The Green Dome another key theme, based on the tune of the nursery rhyme Pop Goes The Weasel, appears for the first time. The apparent banality of the theme is set against the strangeness of the visual setting, creating a discomforting, defamiliarising effect. It also symbolises The Prisoner’s impatience and frustration with the patronisingly ‘childish’ tone of much of the Village’s communication with its citizens.

The appearance of the mute, midget butler, who we see for the first time here, is another unsettlingly strange visual component which will be a constant factor throughout the series. The butler greets The Prisoner and escorts him to the entrance to Number 2’s ‘office’. Here the music changes abruptly into an eerie, ‘futuristic’ theme appropriate to the remarkably distinctive design of the large circular room, with its surrounding hi-tech screens which initially are filled with the floating blob-like shapes which are a distinctive feature of the series. We also get our first glimpse of the penny farthing bicycle, a symbol of redundant and outmoded technology which is in distinct contrast to its highly technological surroundings. As The Prisoner makes his first key statement of resistance: …I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, stamped, briefed , debriefed or numbered… my life is my own… we see his face in stark close-up, the weird floating shapes circling behind him. This is perhaps the most iconic image in the whole series, with McGoohan’s face set in firm, angry defiance. Our hero’s direct language contrasts with the exaggerated all-knowing politeness of his host. Later The Prisoner is asked to answer a ‘questionnaire’ at the Village ‘Labour Exchange’, another circular-shaped ‘futuristic’ interior, conducted by a mild mannered bureaucrat spinning a wheel on an oddly constructed wooden child’s toy which our hero smashes in frustration before exiting. The iconography of the Village is dominated by circles and wheels. And as with the Penny Farthing bicycle, there are Big Wheels and Little Wheels….

Costume is another key visual element of the series. After The Prisoner has been taken by Number 2 for a helicopter tour of the Village, we see him strolling through the grounds to the sound of a brass band, who are all dressed in multicoloured capes and slacks. Other Village inhabitants wear striped blazers, straw boaters and carry colourful umbrellas. The effect, combined with the jaunty music, is that of exaggerated, forced ‘sporty’ jollity. In perhaps the episode’s most surreal and sinister moment, we suddenly see how completely manipulated all the Villagers are. Number 2 appears on a balcony and cries ‘Wait! Be still!’ whereupon almost all the participants in the scene suddenly freeze. The white balloon emerges from a fountain in the middle of the scene, pursues and then smothers the one young man who attempts to escape. After ‘Rover’ bounces away, the scene jolts out of freeze-frame and everything returns to ‘normal’. The deliberate use of the cinematic effect here lends a dreamlike quality to the scene. And we get a distinct impression that the entire scenario has been stage managed for The Prisoner’s benefit. The stage has been set for the continuing psychological tussles between The Prisoner and the various Number 2s which will dominate the series.

One scene in particular illustrates The Prisoner’s utter frustration with his ‘comfortable confinement’. As he examines the contents of his room, the horribly syrupy background music rises in volume until, driven to rage, he picks up the radio set that the music is apparently emanating from and smashes it into tiny pieces. The music, however, merely continues. As with the earlier use of freeze frame in the scene with Rover, here we see another deliberate disjunction between set up between our conventional expectations of cinematic technique and what appears to be happening. We are unsure at first as to whether the music (perhaps ‘muzak’ would be a better description) is actually diegetic – i.e. it is meant to be the actual music being piped into the room by the Village authorities – or non diegetic (the ‘soundtrack’ added for effect). And even when The Prisoner smashes the radio we are still not sure. By the blurring of the boundaries between what is ‘real’ (within the ‘world’ of the series) and what is not, The Prisoner ‘s allegorical significance is already being hinted at.

Most of the rest of the episode becomes more melodramatic, divided between the Village’s attempts to get information out of The Prisoner and his efforts to escape. A pretty girl, assigned to him as his maid, breaks down in front of him and begs him to give her some information to stop her being punished. He can clearly see he is being manipulated and refuses to fall for it, giving her short shrift. After his futile attempt to escape via the beach are defeated by the arrival of Rover, a whole mini-drama unfolds when Cobb, a former secret service colleague  appears in the Village hospital and appears to sympathise with him. The authorities then fake Cobb’s suicide in order to manipulate The Prisoner into a plot by which he has to gain the sympathy of a young woman who had apparently been in love with Cobb in order to gain access to the Village helicopter. However, both the woman and Cobb are actually working for the Village and The Prisoner’s  escape attempt in the helicopter is cynically curtailed by the replacement Number 2. The point of the exercise seems to have been merely to show The Prisoner just how futile any effort to escape would be. Here, as in several places in the episode, the ‘spy plot’ of the episode is emphasised. It appears that The Village is some kind of international prison where ex-spies will be taken to have any valuable information extracted from them. The viewers may even assume that McGoohan’s character is actually John Drake from Danger Man, especially as in many ways McGoohan appears to be still acting the part of this character. At this point the influence of script editor George Markstein, who envisaged the series as basically a sophisticated version of a spy drama, was still strong. In some ways the more surreal aspects of the episode, which are largely executive producer McGoohan’s own creation, sit uneasily with this. The ‘spy plot’ is in fact utterly bereft of defining detail. We do not learn why The Prisoner has resigned, which organisation he has really resigned from or what his motives were. These elements become the enigmas that keep us watching through the succeeding episodes. But as the series progresses, the quest for this apparently basic information becomes not only that of the viewer but that of his captors. Gradually the ‘spy’ elements recede, Markstein himself resigns and McGoohan’s vision comes to dominate the series.

Such was the originality of The Prisoner that it soon built up impressive viewing figures as spectators were drawn in more and more by desire to know the answers to the series’ unanswered questions. As the series developed, the nature of these questions began to subtly shift. This use of continually evolving enigmas is an especially distinctive trait of long running television series, which must continually provide reasons for their audience to keep watching. The elements of the secret agent genre which dominate the last third of the episode were comfortably familiar ground for an audience attuned to both the fantasy of James Bond, and the relative realism of Harry Palmer from The Ipcress File or the John Le Carre novels. The apparently seamless transition of McGoohan’s character from his Danger Man persona only adds to this effect. As Cobb leaves Number 2 says to him …Give my regards to the old country… Already the viewer suspects that The Village is the creation of some kind of secret multinational organization, perhaps like Spectre in the Bond films. Or maybe it is run by the Commies, or quite possibly, by Our Lot. Arrival sets up all these generic expectations in the audience. Yet in its setting, and the strange dream-like logic with which events occur, it already hints at the ‘mind trips’ it will soon be taking its audience on. British TV audiences were already accustomed this kind of ‘proto-psychedelia’ in more ‘lightweight’ ‘spy spoof’ shows like The Avengers. But in Arrival there are already hints that we are in far darker territory. In the Village ‘hospital’ waiting room, signs written in the heavy, childlike ‘Village script’ declaim slogans such as … a still tongue makes a happy life… The ‘patients’ engaged in what Number 2 blithely calls ‘therapy’ appear to be the subjects of Nazi-like experimentation.

Arrival is a tour de force in televisual terms, an utterly compelling, beguiling and outlandish episode which crams an amazing amount of information into its fifty minutes. It clearly establishes the highly distinctive visual world of The Prisoner and begins to outline its philosophical position. At the same time it retains many of the conventions of action-adventure TV, such as highly choreographed chase scenes and fight scenes. But even these are conveyed with a kind of visual inventiveness in terms of both set design (mise en scene), editing and camera work that had rarely, up that point, been seen in any form of television show. The episode sets out the dramatic and visual boundaries of the series, creating stunningly original and literally unforgettable visual and verbal juxtapositions with the use of costume, scenery and highly distinctive props such as ‘Rover’ and the Penny Farthing bicycle. Its visual qualities show its creators’ delight in what was for TV the new medium of colour, while its script creates delicious layers of enigma, in which we as viewers are already relishing the process of immersing ourselves.

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two: the chimes of big ben

The Chimes of Big Ben, the second episode of The Prisoner, is much less visually dazzling or verbally puzzling than the opening Arrival. The dialogue lacks the mysterious evasiveness and ambiguous menace of the opening episode. And while some effective use is made of the distinctively surreal Village iconography which had been established in the previous episode, here the main focus is on the story (concocted by experienced TV and film screenwriter Vincent Tilsley) which centres on an elaborate web of deception the Village rulers create in an attempt to extract vital ‘information’ from The Prisoner. The mechanics of the storyline, which lead up to him being apparently allowed to escape to his old Intelligence Service office in London, are somewhat contrived and melodramatic. The action sequence involving a sea chase by Rover is really rather unconvincing, as are the uncharacteristic hints of ‘romance’ between The Prisoner and Nadia, the Estonian woman he supposedly escapes with. And, not surprisingly, it looks (as indeed it was) much cheaper, very much more like a ‘TV show’ after the cinematic extravagances of Arrival.

Despite these limitations, Chimes introduces several key elements to the series. The question of why Number 6 resigned is given prominence, and the authorities’ continual attempts to get him to reveal this information is now established as one of the most important motifs of the series. The episode also marks the first appearance of Leo McKern as Number 2 (a role he will return to in the final two episodes) and throughout Chimes there is much jocular verbal sparring between him and The Prisoner. During one of their meetings The Prisoner points out to Number 2 that he is also a Prisoner, an accusation which Number 2 accepts with equanimity, and there seems clear evidence here (despite the fact that the episode appears to locate The Village in Lithuania) that the Village belongs neither to East nor West but is run by a third agency, a group which wishes to create a world wide totalitarian society …The whole world as the Village… as Number 2 puts it. Thus, although the episode appears to conform to many of the conventions of the Cold War spy-action genre (with Nadia’s relationship with Number 6 being rather reminiscent of that of Tatiana Romanova and James Bond in From Russia With Love) there are already hints of the broader and more allegorical Orwellian and Kafkaesque themes which will become more prominent as the series progresses.

The episode also introduces a certain tone of comic satire, particularly in its depiction of The Village’s ‘art and craft exhibition’ in which every artefact on show except for Number 6’s own creation is a picture or a sculpture of Number 2, clearly showing that the entire show is: rather than any form of ‘individual expression’: merely an expression of mindless conformity. Number 6’s own contribution is apparently an abstract sculpture which, as he explains to a group of pretentious Village ‘art critics’, represents ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’. In fact his sculpture is the actual boat he and Nadia will escape in.

The key contribution of Chimes to the series, however, is the way it sets up an often ironically conspiratorial tone which becomes a kind of duplicitous game which the audience is increasingly invited to participate it. This will build up over succeeding weeks’ episodes in a particularly intimate, televisual way; but one which will keep the audience guessing right up to the final episode. The Prisoner poses questions about the manipulative relationship between a TV series’ writers and their audience, continually challenging viewers to question what they are being presented with. When Nadia first arrives in The Village, The Prisoner himself seems to deliberately pretend to be one of the Village ‘authorities’, adopting a ‘superior’, knowing tone of voice and participating in the ‘Be Seeing You’ salute to passers by. Having previously been emotionally manipulated by the Village authorities, he naturally suspects that she is a ‘plant’ sent to entrap him.  Yet she appears to think that he is trying to trap her. It is only when he witnesses her being apparently tortured in the Village ‘hospital’ that he becomes convinced that she too is a ‘genuine’ Prisoner. In order to plan their escape together, the two fake a romantic relationship for the benefit of the watching Number 2. Nadia, as we will find out at the end of the episode, really is a Village agent but she continues to tease and flirt with The Prisoner throughout their ‘escape’, making the audience believe that (like Tatiana in From Russia With Love) she is now ‘coming over to our side’.  Just as he is fooled, so are we. It is only right at the end of the story that her role in the deception is revealed and we see that she has merely been skilfully (and cold heartedly) playing a part. Tilsley’s intricate plotting entices us carefully into this web of deception. When Number 6 pushes open the doors of what he thought was his London office and emerges back into the Village, his final ‘Be Seeing You’ is grimly rather than jokingly ironic. Thoroughly defeated, he has been taught a lesson in just how far the authorities will go to manipulate him. And the viewer has been expressly denied any moment of vicarious triumph. The denouement shows us that we, too have been subjected to the kind of ‘mind fucking’ that Number 6 has been put through.

The ending of the episode also raises a number of questions for the viewer. The assertion that the Village is located ‘in Lithuania near the Polish border’ now seems dubious at best. And as for the shots we’ve been shown of aeroplanes, lorries and containers being lifted onto ships, we can only conclude that these images are ‘subjective’ shots showing us what Number 6 expected to be happening. Thus we may start to question just how much of what we are seeing is real and how much of it is in fact a projection of our eponymous hero. We are left with a nagging feeling that we were almost sucked in by the manipulation ourselves, despite the fact that surely we must realise that in a series entitled The Prisoner, it’s really far to early for the central character to escape. So despite the way in which it uses conventional elements of the ‘secret agent’ genre, The Chimes Of Big Ben ends up raising far more questions than it answers, and begins to make us question whether this is really any kind of ‘spy story’ at all.

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three: a, b and c

The third episode of The Prisoner is presented as something of a test as to how far the Village authorities will go to ‘break’ our hero. After the attempts to win over his confidence by ever more elaborate forms of deception in Arrival and The Chimes Of Big Ben, the Village now begins to use various forms of drugs to induce revelatory mental states in The Prisoner. The widespread use of recreational mind-changing drugs was, of course, a major feature of the social ‘revolution’ of the 1960s, and The Prisoner itself was filmed at the height of the first ‘psychedelic era’. There is no doubt that this contemporary style had a considerable effect on the design aesthetic (especially the vivid use of colour) in the series. But the kinds of drugs being experimented with by the Village authorities are hardly ‘recreational’; they are the kind that is useful for social control. Although the series does not make it explicit, it may be that the entire placid, ‘broken’ population of The Village is being carefully ‘medicated’- what we might now label a kind of ‘Prozac Nation’. Issues regarding mental health and how it tends to be dealt with by doling out chemicals rather than with sympathetic therapy are clearly close to McGoohan’s heart and the treatment of these themes in The Prisoner is another feature of the series which has remained relevant (and arguably has become even more relevant) today.

A, B and C is another relatively low-budget episode. Its basic premise – that The Prisoner is given drugs every night and wired to a machine that translates his dreams into TV images – is somewhat contrived, with no scientific basis whatsoever. It’s the kind of idea that could easily have appeared in much ‘sillier’ spy fantasy series such as The Avengers (also made by the ITC production company). The use of locations is very limited, and much of the background of The Prisoner’s life as a secret agent that is revealed in the dream sequences is very conventionally presented. But from a ‘televisual’ point of view the episode sets up an interesting dynamic. By giving us these glimpses into the conventional fictional spy world, it’s as if we as viewers are revisiting cut up episodes of Danger Man. We appear, then, to be watching ‘television’ in The Prisoner’s mind. And perhaps the 1967 audience are still wondering why McGoohan himself ‘resigned’ from his previous (and much less ‘weird’) TV series. The Village authorities also become voyeurs in this process. Eventually The Prisoner discovers what they are doing to him and turns the tables on them, using their own methods against them. It is his first unequivocal triumph over those in power.

The most memorable aspect of the episode is the treatment of Number 2’s relationship with Number 1. Colin Gordon plays a nervous, neurotic, milk-drinking Number 2, who is clearly constantly in fear of what will happen to him if he fails in his mission to break The Prisoner. This is very effectively portrayed by the repeated showing of the chunky red cordless telephone (clearly the hotline to ‘the boss’) which rings at a number of key moments in the episode. The shots of the phone tend to be framed by showing the phone itself looming large in the foreground. Gordon gives a brilliantly twitchy, paranoid performance. His Number 2 is very different to the ‘amiable fellow’ played by Leo McKern in the previous episode. He continues to insist that The Prisoner be given higher and higher doses of the ‘truth inducing’ drugs, despite the medical risks involved. When the ‘hotline’ rings for the final time, we can only imagine his fate. It is made very clear here that the Village authorities are Prisoners themselves. A, B and C is the first episode in which the threat of, and the presence of, Number 1, is made absolutely explicit.

The Prisoner is able to ‘rewire’ the experiment by breaking in to the laboratory where he is being experimented on at night and setting up a situation whereby he can get his revenge. He also fakes taking his ‘medication’ (delivered by a homely-looking elderly maid in his night time cocoa) so that he is conscious during the process. He pretends to be leading the authorities towards the revelation of ‘D’, a mysterious fourth spy contact. When unmasked, ‘D’ turns out to be Number 2 himself, much to Number 2’s chagrin. Then, in the episode’s most striking twist, The Prisoner – now fully in control of his own dream – actually appears to enter the room in which No. 2 and the Village scientist are watching the dream on the screen, so that he can mock them further for their failure. This time the device of the ‘TV within the TV show’ is used for cruelly ironic effect. Just as the Village authorities want to know why The Prisoner resigned, we the viewers are waiting to find out the same information ourselves. When the mask is pulled of ‘D’s face to reveal the face of Number 2 (an action which prefigures one of the key moments in the final episode Fall Out) the joke is on the viewer as much as it is on Number 2 himself. For the next fourteen weeks McGoohan and his co-creators will continue to tease the audience in this way. Just as the Village authorities want ‘information’, so do we.

But, as The Prisoner snarls in the credit sequence:

                                 “You won’t get it !”

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four: free for all

  In Free For All, the first of the episodes to be written and directed by McGoohan himself, The Prisoner leads us into a darker, more mysterious narrative realm. Although their execution may have been rather bizarre, previous episodes had still been broadly based on various elements of the secret agent genre. Questions had been raised which we as viewers would clearly expect to be answered before the series ended. Yet by the time of Free For All the discerning viewer can already guess that it is possible that the series is in fact never going to deliver any ‘easy answers’.  The episode also broadens the political allegory of the series by showing the Village authorities, with their slick techniques of image manipulation and social control, as the ultimate ‘spin doctors’. It presents a complex, ambiguous, narrative in which the boundary between objective reality and the subjective perception of the protagonist becomes increasingly blurred. With The Prisoner being heavily drugged with some kind of semi-hallucinogenic chemicals throughout, the episode takes us on a kind of ‘bad trip’ through various states of reality, as his growing confusion manifests itself in increasing paranoia, anxiety and vulnerability. What makes this all the more chilling is that, this time, The Village authorities seem to have little concern with their usual preoccupation of finding out why The Prisoner resigned. Their intention seems to be more to break down his inner psychic strength, to demonstrate to him that, if necessary, they can manipulate him in ways that will be excruciatingly psychologically painful and that ultimately he will not be able to resist them.

McGoohan’s personal input in writing and direction here is bold and imaginative. He produces a number of memorably surreal moments which can only lead us to question the reality of what see. The first of these occurs in the opening scene when Number 2 calls up and invites The Prisoner to his office in the Green Dome. The Prisoner refuses to go, whereupon the door bell rings and No. 2 appears instantly at his door. By this point in the series, the viewer will be familiar enough with the geography of  the Village to know that it would have been impossible for No. 2 to have covered that distance in a couple of seconds. The moment after The Prisoner has made his speech announcing that he will be running in the Village election, the entire crowd in front of him suddenly reveals that they are brandishing large ‘Vote No. 6’ placards behind the ‘Vote No. 2’ placards they had previously been holding up. They all begin chanting his name together. It is as if every moment action has been perfectly choreographed. When The Prisoner delivers a radical, anti-Village speech he is actually encouraged by No. 2, who is attempting to delude him into thinking he is taking part in a real democratic process. The crowds ‘spontaneously’ mob him and shower him with confetti. McGoohan’s impressionistic style of editing here features a montage of close-ups of The Prisoner’s increasingly dazed and confused face juxtaposed against shots of the crowd.  These visual effects vividly convey his confused mental state.

The scenes in the underground Council Chamber (which we see here for the first time) are some of the most impressively realised in the whole series. The Chamber itself is a bold example of futuristic design, with its circle of high-backed metallic chairs. The Villagers, in their striped shirts and undertakers’ top hats look strikingly bizarre. As The Prisoner is ‘cross examined’ by the Council more subjective camera shots convey his descent into mental breakdown. Then suddenly we see him falling down a red tunnel or chute, like Alice down a rabbit hole. He is then subjected to a sinister ‘Truth Test’, conveyed by silhouette on the huge screens behind him. Finally he breaks down, runs in panic out of the building, grabs the first boat he can find and tries to escape, before being brought back by Rover.

It has already been suggested that being ‘Rovered’ has some mysterious effect on those who experience it. Perhaps the balloon itself administers some kind of passifying ‘drug effect’.  Whatever the reason, after this experience it appears that The Prisoner has really ‘bought into’ all the indoctrination.  When he makes his final speeches, they are completely devoid of his previous ‘revolutionary’ statements, which are replaced by bland and meaningless platitudes. The Village crowds, who appear to be ‘pre programmed’, naturally respond with enthusiasm.  After winning the election by a ‘unanimous’ margin he is escorted by No. 2 to the Green Dome, where he runs amok, broadcasting to the Villagers that they are all ‘free to go’. Nobody responds. He is then beset by Village guards seeking to restrain him. As he tries to escape into the various subterranean tunnels beneath The Green Dome he glimpses a group of Villagers, in white robes and sunglasses, apparently engaged in some kind of worship of Rover.

In Free For All McGoohan gives one of his most powerful performances as he portrays The Prisoner’s descent into drug-induced dementia. Veteran British film actor Eric Portman, who had appeared in several of Powell and Pressburger’s 1940s classic films, lends considerable gravitas to his smooth but ruthless version of No. 2.  Rachel Herbert does au unforgettable turn as No. 58, who supposedly cannot speak English and who is assigned to be The Prisoner’s ‘helper’ in the election campaign. Through most of the episode she scampers around frivolously, jabbering away in Russian and giggling. Then, in another one of the episode’s most memorable moments, when confronting The Prisoner in the final scenes (when she herself is revealed as the real ‘New Number 2’), she becomes harsh and dominating, and speaks in perfect English, informing him that they have many ways to break him and that this ‘is just the beginning’. The Village authorities, having noticed that one of The Prisoner’s weaknesses is for young women who seem to need ‘protecting’, have exploited this throughout.

The episode is full of jarring moments when reality seems to shift before our eyes. The Prisoner is a series with an extraordinary focus on its one (and only) central character and in Free For All McGoohan effectively merges the outer world of the Village with its protagonist’s inner consciousness. From now on, we will never be able to be quite sure what is real and what is not. A television series gives a storyteller with a unique opportunity to present character. Through regular viewing every week the audience can begin to identify with the character in a way that no other storytelling medium allows. In The Prisoner Patrick McGoohan exploits this relationship cunningly, representing his main character as a combination of sophisticated action hero and mythic protagonist, incontrovertibly (or so it seems) on the side of ‘good’ against ‘evil’, standing up for his role as an individual against the suffocating and constraining bonds of society’. We could easily be him, we feel, in that kind of situation… Like him, we may want to escape from the constraints of our lives, to throw off the oppressive forces surrounding us. But although Free For All establishes The Prisoner as a political allegory, from here onwards it creates the world of the Village more and more as a reflection of The Prisoner’s own deepest terrors. As a political allegory The Prisoner clearly owes a debt to Zamyatin, Fritz Lang, Huxley, Orwell and Kafka, the progenitors of various fictional ‘future distopias’. Yet it also has a further quality, an almost Shakespearean intensity of examination of its central character, a nameless ‘everyman’ figure who appears to be an ‘innocent’ victim of the forces that are oppressing him. In The Prisoner the Village authorities are engaged in a search for the fatal flaws in his character which they can exploit. They do not wish to destroy him but to co-opt him, to ‘suck out his soul’ and replace it with that of an automaton.

The Prisoner’s struggle throughout the series will be focused on his need to assert his individuality against those who wish to steal it. Thus his position represents that of all of us in age of mass technology and mass media manipulation. Yet The Prisoner is not merely a victim and the series is already offering us glimpses of the uncomfortable ‘realities’ that will emerge in the final episodes. Free For All already begins to hint that, somehow, he is responsible for all of this himself,  and that the ‘prison’ he finds himself in may well be the ‘prison’ of his own mind.

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five: the schizoid man

The Schizoid Man carries The Prisoner even deeper into psychological territory, and features another attempt by the Village authorities to ‘scramble’ his mind by introducing a man into the Village who is his exact physical double. The man is given The Prisoner’s flat and his number and The Prisoner is told that he himself is ‘Number 12’ (‘12’, of course, being the number reached when ‘6’ is doubled). Anton Rogers, playing a suave, smooth-talking Number 2, tries to convince The Prisoner that the ‘double’ is the ‘real’ Number 6 and that his job as a Village agent is to impersonate the man to try to ‘break’ him by challenging his sense of identity. This, of course, is what The Village authorities are actually trying to do to The Prisoner himself. The ingenious story, by one of Britain’s most experienced TV screenwriters Terence Feely, is particularly confusing, especially for the casual viewer. That, naturally, is part of the point of the point of the story.

The two ‘doubles’ are put through a series of tests intending to establish which one is ‘The Real Number 6’. The Prisoner naturally expects to win these but, unknown to him at present, at night he has been subjected to brutal electroconvulsive ‘aversion therapy’ techniques which have now made him left rather than right handed and preferring flapjacks to bacon and eggs for breakfast. A mole on his wrist has disappeared and has appeared in the same place on the double’s wrist. In various sporting contests The Prisoner finds himself being continually defeated, despite his previous status as a swimming and fencing champion. He almost reaches the point of mental breakdown before he begins to remember flashes of the ‘treatment’ he has been put through.  By deliberately electrocuting himself he is able to reverse the process, leading him to confront the imposter, who – under pressure from The Prisoner – reveals his name is Curtis.  After a struggle between the two, Curtis gives the wrong password to Rover, who smothers him to death. The Prisoner then attempts to escape by pretending to be Curtis. But a few personal details give him away and the helicopter which is supposed to be airlifting him away returns to the ground. The bars slam over his face again.

Feely’s intricate plotting is cleverly accomplished, although there are a number of anomalies in how the story pans out. For Rover to suddenly kill someone for giving the wrong password is inconsistent with its behaviour in the rest of the series and The Prisoner seems to find it rather too easy to wrench information from Curtis. The ease with which he reverses the conditioning is also rather too convenient. The scenes where The Prisoner confronts Curtis (and wins a ‘punch up’ with him) seem to us today to be the least believable in the episode, though it is perhaps unlikely that contemporary audiences would have been quite so discerning. Despite this, the episode as a whole is very memorable, much of which can be put down to the subtle way that McGoohan plays the two characters slightly differently, Rogers’ performance as a rather slimy Number 2 and (perhaps most strikingly) the young actress Jane Merrow, who plays ‘Alison’, a friend of The Prisoner’s who has been practising a mind reading act with him. At the cumulative point of the contests Alison is called upon to choose which of the two ‘Number 6’s’ she has the established mental link with. She has no choice but to choose the imposter, for which she later expresses her regret. Having a character not known by a number being engaged in the kind of activity which it is highly unlikely the Village authorities would actually allow may be another inconsistent detail, but Merrow’s performance in this rather haunted-looking role is highly engaging and convincing.

The episode is also highly effective in visual terms. The effect of having ‘two McGoohans’ onscreen is done by using conventional split-screen effects. This was a well established technique but is achieved seamlessly throughout. The ‘imposter’ wears a white jacket to identify him, a necessary visual device without which the viewer would be utterly and hopelessly confused.  Much of the story of The Schizoid Man is told visually and the novelty of having ‘two Prisoners’ within the visual established setting is very striking. While the episode lacks the dream-like ambiguity of Free For All, it again presents much of its action subjectively from The Prisoner’s point of view. Its manipulation of plot confusion, which certainly involves the viewer, has a maddening logic which is very distinctive of the series. One of the major themes of The Prisoner is how social control can repress an individual’s consciousness of self, and The Schizoid Man provides one of the most searching examinations of this theme. The episode also provides some reflection on the crudity and barbarity of much of the behaviourist practise which was being applied within the mental health system and infers that such methods could well be used by a totalitarian state to control its citizens. Thus, despite its flaws, it succeeds in extending the allegorical scope of the series.

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six: the general

 In The General  the emphasis shifts from the Village authorities’ investigation of The Prisoner to their manipulation of the entire community. The plot centres around ‘Speedlearn’, a new form of brainwashing which is being used in the Village. Ostensibly it is being used to ‘teach’ a nineteenth century history course which, by means of the Village’s mysterious ‘futuristic’ technology, can be memorised by anyone who watches a Speedlearn TV broadcast. The Villagers are, as ever, very enthusiastic about what their masters have decided they should engage themselves in, and are seen busily ‘testing’ each other on their knowledge of the course. Everyone, naturally, is word perfect, though the course merely teaches its ‘students’ to ‘parrot the facts’ rather than show any understanding or apply any reasoning to them.  Number 2 (played again by the nervous Colin Gordon who featured in A, B and C), boasts at one point that what is happening is merely a trial for the possible future brainwashing of whole populations.

Naturally, we are in the realm of dystopian satire here, although to call The General ‘an attack on the conventional education system’, as many commentators have done, may be a misreading. In fact the satire is directed far more towards the way that various forms of propaganda can be ‘pumped out’ to a receptive population via the mass media – a sly comment, perhaps, on what McGoohan regarded as the rather ‘moronic’ mentality of  much contemporary TV. The General, however, is one of the more overtly melodramatic episodes of the series. The final revelation that the mysterious ‘General’ is in fact a giant computer is rather predictable. Number 2 boasts to The Prisoner that The General can ‘answer any question’. The Prisoner types in the question ‘WHY?’ and the machine explodes, killing the Professor. The moral of the story (written by Lewis Grieffer) is, to say the least, blindingly obvious. The mechanism of introducing a sympathetic Village official (Number 12, played by John Castle) who helps The Prisoner gain access to The General, is reasonably well handled, though the characterisation of The Professor  as a rather stereotypical ‘dozy scientific genius’ who has created The General is very conventional.

Despite such limitations, The General remains one of the most fondly remembered Prisoner episodes. After the heavy psychological stresses of A, B and C, Free For All and The Schizoid Man, here there is little personal threat to our hero and he can happily ‘play detective’. Perhaps the most inventively comic scene is the one in which The Prisoner, having been given a secret access code by Number 12, attempts to infiltrate the Village broadcasting system, intending to broadcast a message condemning Speedlearn which has been secretly recorded by The Professor.  Disguised in the Village’s regulation top hat, morning coat and dark sunglasses, The Prisoner inserts a card in a machine which is then taken and read by a tiny mechanical hand while a robotic Village voice explains that putting the wrong code number in ‘will be fatal’. McGoohan plays this with characteristic deadpan cool. The following scenes where he dispatches various guards are the kind of tongue in cheek ‘play fighting’ which often featured in shows like The Avengers.

However, The General does touch upon some ‘deeper’ themes. The Prisoner’s dismissal of the brainwashed population of The Village as ‘a row of cabbages’ is splendidly contemptuous and his ultimate destruction of the ‘infernal machine’ is certainly enjoyable. The depiction of the exchanges between The Prisoner, who is determined to expose The Professor’s plan and The Professor’s wife (sensitively played by Betty McDowell) touch upon some important issues related to moral culpability.  When she rather desperately insists to The Prisoner that she and her husband are working in The Village voluntarily she seems to be quite knowingly trying to justify the fact that she and The Professor are in fact merely ‘being used’. The episode’s most moving moment occurs in the final frames, after The Prisoner has delivered his ‘unanswerable question’ and The Professor has been killed by the exploding machine. In a brief, silent, tableau The Prisoner approaches her as she sits in grief on a bench, but then moves on as if he just cannot think of what to say. This final touch adds an odd but effective counterbalance to the prevailing humour of the episode. The General also points to a shift in emphasis of the series from The Prisoner’s attempt to escape (which he does not try to do at all here) to his involvement in the machinations of Village politics. As the series progresses, this will increasingly become his main preoccupation.

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seven: many happy returns

Many Happy Returns is a crucial and often undervalued episode of The Prisoner. It comes at a point in the series where we have become accustomed to the set up in the Village, and the relationships within it. Now we are suddenly and unexpectedly transported outside our ‘comfort zone’.  We have already seen a number of surreal or ‘weird’ scenes, especially in Free For All and A, B and C; but these could be explained as being seen from The Prisoner’s point of view when he was under chemical ‘mind alteration’. What happens in this episode is never really given any logical explanation. Perhaps the whole thing is a dream – though, if this is the case, perhaps the whole series is a dream. Certainly events in this episode progress with a kind of dream-logic, where fantastic things occur, hopes and raised but then dashed with a sickening sense of inevitability.

The Prisoner wakes one morning to find that the Village is entirely deserted. This is, of course, a considerable shock to him but he soon rallies and builds himself a raft to escape. He sets sail, carefully logging the days and hours at sea. After an encounter with some nasty gun runners who try to kill him, he is washed up on a shore which, to his great surprise, turns out to be none other than that of England. After stowing away in a lorry which drops him in central London, he revisits his old address where the current incumbent, Mrs. Butterworth – a rather attractive and somewhat flirtatious middle aged woman – feeds him and lends him some clothes. Then he goes to see his old bosses and struggles to convince them about his capture and incarceration in the Village. Finally they agree to travel in a British jet plane to find the location of the Village. As soon as he does, the pilot grins at him, says ‘Be Seeing You’ and pushes the eject button. Soon he is back ‘home’ in a Village which is now occupied again as normal. He is greeted by ‘Mrs. Butterworth’ (in reality the new Number 2) who brings him a birthday cake.

In a sly reference to Kafka, the director is listed in the credits as ‘Joseph Serf’, in fact a pseudonym for McGoohan himself. McGoohan takes the radical step of making almost the entire first half into a ‘silent movie’. Only when he speaks to Mrs. Butterworth does he actually have a conversation in English with another character. The sequence where he fights the gun runners features typical ‘action hero’ dynamics but is justified by the need to maintain the tension in the story during the fairly lengthy sea voyage. What is most impressive about McGoohan’s directorial approach, though, is the way he uses the characteristic patterns of visual repetition of a long running TV series for clever ironic effect. Although he has escaped from the Village and is (apparently) back in the ‘real world’ we then see him re-treading the steps we have become so familiar with from the series’ dramatic and engaging credit sequence. After spending time in the London flat where he is originally gassed and captured, he drives off to see his former employers in the distinctive hand built sports car that we glimpse him driving at the beginning of every episode. The first person he sees there is the official to whom he delivers his resignation every week. It is as if we are somehow being ‘led backwards’ through a series of events that we are by now very familiar with.

The other especially distinctive feature of this episode is the acting by the three principal guest stars, Georgina Cookson (who plays the rather impishly seductive Mrs. Butterworth) and those two renowned British character actors Patrick Cargill and Donald Sinden, who play The Prisoner’s bosses in London ‘Thorpe’ and ‘The Colonel’.  All three seem to assume a sense of knowing irony, as if they are playing their parts in a psychological game, the result of which is inevitable. There is an especially memorable moment when, just after The Prisoner has taken off on his quest to locate the Village, the two bosses stand on the runway and The Colonel shakes his head knowingly to Thorpe before delivering the deliciously ambiguous lines ‘He’s an old, old friend who never gives up’.  Certainly McGoohan was fortunate to be able to procure the services of two such accomplished actors for what are little more than cameo roles. Whether Thorpe and The Colonel are actually in on the Village authorities’ plot is left for us to decide. Just before the plane takes off, a suspicious-looking ‘milkman’ arrives on the scene and appears to take the place of the official pilot. Whether this is done with the consent of the bosses remains ambiguous.

This is only one of the ways in which the episode leaves us to wonder exactly ‘what is going on’. Is all this real, or not? The fact that The Prisoner is washed up, as if by accident, on the south coast of England is incredible enough. When he arrives the first people he meets are Romany gypsies who do not speak English, further delaying the dramatic realisation of where he actually is. When he arrives at a road and looks through the bushes the viewer is given one of the series’ most effectively defamiliarising ‘jolts’ as the sight of that most distinctive piece of ‘national iconography’, the British bobby with his distinctive pointed helmet, appears in front of us. And although the scepticism of Thorpe and The Colonel at The Prisoner’s story is believable, as is the way he has to work hard at convincing them to authorise a reconnaissance mission, the way events unfold through time now becomes very strange. Whereas the ‘silent’ sequence in the first half of the episode apparently takes several weeks, the action of the second half seems to take place within the space of two days. We know this because, when he first talks to Mrs. Butterworth, she reveals that the next day is his birthday. (The date given is actually McGoohan’s real birthday). Back in The Village, she presents him with the cake on what must obviously be the following day. Naturally she says ‘Many Happy Returns’ to him, the irony of which is glaringly (and infuriatingly) obvious.

There are a number of logical questions raised which lend credence to the interpretation that all these events have been some kind of hallucination or dream. Why was the Village deserted? How come the only characters he actually speaks to are really working for the Village (if we accept, as seems highly likely, that The Colonel and Thorpe are ‘in on the act’)? How is it that, despite the fact that he is now in the presence of familiar work colleagues, we still do not find out his name? At one point The Colonel (in an apparent joke) actually calls him ‘Number 6’. And how has Mrs. Butterworth managed to reappear in the Village so soon? We are left with a nagging feeling that perhaps the entire set up has been a more sophisticated version of the deception practised on The Prisoner in the earlier Chimes Of Big Ben.

In terms of the development of the series, Many Happy Returns marks a significant turning point. After this The Prisoner clearly realises that his goal of a ‘conventional escape’ is unrealistic. It seems certain now that his own employers must have been involved in his incarceration in the Village and that the Village itself represents some kind of world wide organisation which has – at the very least – prominent agents in top positions in governments throughout the world.  Perhaps it even controls those governments. The implications for the extended political allegory of the series are considerable.  The Village now becomes symbolic of social control in a way that makers the issue of whether it represents ‘The East’ or ‘The West’ irrelevant. It now becomes increasingly clear that the only way that The Prisoner can reach his goal of truly becoming a ‘free man’ is by subverting and eventually destroying the structure of the Village itself.

Many Happy Returns is a brilliantly audacious piece of televisual art, demonstrating clearly that McGoohan understood that the medium of television could be used in its own distinctive way to present a political and philosophical discourse on ‘the state of mankind’.  By relying on our accumulated knowledge of and familiarity with various elements of the series, he lures the central character (and by implication the viewer) into an apparent ‘escape’ which only leads to a greater and more profound ‘imprisonment’. Many Happy Returns signifies that The Prisoner has become far more than a story about a secret agent, and its subtle use of the medium of television already points the more discerning viewer towards the kind of expansive, mind-boggling and (for a television series) utterly unprecedented directions that it will take in its concluding stages.

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eight: dance of the dead

One of the most remarkable things about The Prisoner is that it manages to incorporate a great variety of dramatic modes in the course of its seventeen episode run. While Many Happy Returns incorporated its dream logic into an action-adventure based scenario, Dance Of The Dead is more obviously surreal and contemplative. Its plot, such as it is, almost seems irrelevant as the viewer is sucked into its mysterious visual and verbal enigmas. Oddly, perhaps, both episodes are scripted by the same writer, Anthony Skene (who also wrote A, B and C). Here the direction is by another one of McGoohan’s major collaborators, Don Chaffey, an accomplished movie director well known for his special-effects-laden fantasy Jason And The Argonauts (1963). Chaffey brings to the episode a sophisticated awareness of cinematic mise en scene, especially in his use of costume, lighting and locations, which help create several scenes that are especially unsettling.  Also particularly impressive is the performance of Mary Morris, an actress who had previously played the part of Peter Pan on stage, as the only female Number 2 who occupies an entire episode. (I have included a chapter on sexual politics in The Prisoner in my book Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner which refers in some detail to this episode).

Dance Of The Dead centres around a ‘carnival’, supposedly an annual event organised by the Village, participation in which is – as usual – hardly a matter of personal choice. The episode begins with attempts by a ruthlessly sadistic Village scientist played by the craggy, rather scary-looking Duncan Macrae, to extract information from The Prisoner by means of torturous behaviourist ‘therapy’. This is quashed by Number 2, who insists that more subtle means are more appropriate. Again the importance of not damaging The Prisoner is stressed. The Village authorities are particularly keen to try to ‘convert’ him to their side. In this episode The Prisoner himself seems rather depressed and lacking in his usual defiant spark. While normally he is courteous to women in a rather old fashioned way, here he finds himself having to deal with them more dismissively. He is particularly rude to a rather cheerfully annoying young woman who has just been appointed as his maid and sneers at her carnival costume. He is also very aggressive to a pale, nervous woman who has been given the job of his observer. We see him disposing of his drugged cocoa and escaping into the night, to a cave on the outskirts of The Village where he finds the dead body of a man which has been washed up on the shore.  In the only hopeful moment in the episode, he plants a ‘message in a bottle’ in a plastic pouch inside the man’s wallet and drags the body out to sea, in the hope that some help may come from the outside world as a result. At this point he also encounters the pathetic figure of Roland Walter Dutton, his former colleague, who has been severely  tortured and ‘broken’ by the Village authorities and is quite aware that they will soon ‘finish him off’.

The scenes depicting the Carnival itself become increasingly bizarre as the ‘carnival’ comes to bear more and more resemblance to a rather avant garde stage production. Every character appears in a costume. Number 2 is Peter Pan (a male character traditionally played on stage by a woman), the Village scientist is Napoleon and the observer is Little Bo Peep. The Prisoner’s allotted costume is the old suit he wore before being captured. Naturally, he is appearing ‘as himself’. The encounter between The Prisoner and Number 2 on the beach (examined in more detail in Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner) is full of strange, disjointed, almost Pinteresque dialogue. The carnival itself is a riot of colour, with Villagers appearing in a range of fanciful and exotic costumes. The depiction of the carnival is a remarkable piece of visual realisation, with the contrast between the brightly coloured costumes and the blank, lifeless expressions of the Villagers being especially chilling and evocative of the ‘soullessness’ and pretence of the ‘compulsory fun’ that the supposed celebration represents. In fact the whole event has been set up as an excuse to conduct a theatrical ‘trial’ of The Prisoner, in which Number 2 is the judge and the ‘jury’ consists of Little Bo Peep, Napoleon and the creepy ‘Town Crier’ (played with great menace by Aubrey Morris). We also see Dutton, dressed as a Jester, now clearly reduced to a drooling shadow of himself.  The Prisoner is found guilty and a mob descends on him, supposedly ready to kill him. He escapes into another room where he is confronted by ‘Little Bo Peep’ and Number 2. Number 2 informs him that his ‘message in a bottle’ has been changed to give the impression to the outside world that he is dead.

The entire scenario has been a kind of sadistic masquerade, in which Number 2 has manipulated The Prisoner into a kind of ‘spiritual defeat’. The figure of the ‘expendable’ Dutton is presented as a kind of dire warning as to what could happen to him if characters like the Village scientist had their way. So Number 2 poses as The Prisoner’s friend and protector. Her revelation that, as far as the outside world  is concerned, he is now a ‘dead man’, is intended to be another factor in making him think that there is no way he can ever really escape and that his eventual capitulation will be inevitable. In both Many Happy Returns and Dance Of The Dead the female Number 2s have conspired to break his spirit of resistance. Dance Of The Dead is one of the darkest episodes of the series, with little leavening humour. It creates a compellingly claustrophobic atmosphere, illustrated by surreal and sometimes disturbing imagery. It presents ‘death’ in a number of ways, especially through the pathetic figure of Dutton, who to all extents and purposes is ‘already dead’. Being ‘broken’ by the Village results in a  kind of ‘spiritual death’, from which there is of course no ‘escape’. The episode ends with the unstated threat hanging over The Prisoner that this kind of ‘death’ is the one that may well await him.

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nine: checkmate

 In this series and in my book Be Seeing You: Decoding The Prisoner I have dealt with the episodes in the order they were broadcast. There has been some debate among Prisoner fans over the years about what should be considered the ‘correct’ running order of the series. Of course, The Prisoner is basically a TV ‘series’ rather than a serial, although its premise demands ‘introductory’ and ‘final’ episodes. The conventions of a TV series demand that the majority of episodes can be watched without the viewer necessarily having seen previous instalments. In this way viewers can ‘latch onto’ a series at any point.  So many of the arguments about ‘series order’ are actually rather spurious. For instance, there are some who insist that Dance Of  The Dead should come earlier in the series merely because The Prisoner utters the words ‘I’m new here’. There is, however, a fairly strong case that Checkmate, which was broadcast ninth, should be watched earlier. With its focus on establishing the visual locations around the Village, it would perhaps work better as the second or third episode of the series. Also, The Prisoner displays a certain naivety about how the Village works here which conflicts with the lessons learned in Many Happy Returns and Dance Of The Dead.  On the other hand, it may be argued that Checkmate justifies its position as the ‘middle’ episode of the series because it marks a ‘last gasp’ desperate attempt by The Prisoner to escape from the Village, along with his first serious attempt to destabilise its hierarchy.

Checkmate is directed (like Arrival and Dance Of The Dead) by Don Chaffey in a visually lavish style. It makes great use of the locations in Portmeirion, showing us a number of vistas unseen in other episodes. Its plot revolves around a human chess board, one of the most distinctive visual elements of the series. The chess game, which we are presented with at the beginning of the episode, is a clear metaphor for the Village’s control over its ‘subjects’. The story begins with The Prisoner, noticing that one of the ‘human chess pieces’, referred to here only as ‘The Rook’, has disobeyed instructions and moved to an unassigned place on the chess board (before being taken away to the Village ‘hospital’ for ‘readjustment’). The Prisoner identifies The Rook (and the old man directing one side in the game) as potential allies and sets out to find out ‘who are the Prisoners and who are the Warders’ in the Village.

In order to do this he takes on the persona of a ‘Warder’ himself on several occasions, to test out who responds submissively and who does not. He gathers together a band of ‘Prisoners’ and plans an escape attempt with them, which involves the construction of a home made radio to send out an SOS message for help to passing ships. This is complicated by the authorities brainwashing another ‘piece on the board’, a young woman referred to here as ‘The Queen’, to fall in love with him. The locket she carries around her neck with his picture is in fact an electronic device which is supposed to register her despair if he attempts to escape, thus warning the authorities of his plans. Realising this, he foils the plan by taking the locket away from her. Eventually The Prisoner and his co-conspirators stage a ‘coup’ by taking over Number 2’s office. The Prisoner responds to a signal from a nearby ship and rows out alone to meet it. The ship, however, is controlled by the Village and The Prisoner is confronted by a screen on which the smooth-talking Number 2 (Peter Wyngarde) speaks from his office, having convinced the conspirators that The Prisoner was a ‘Warder’ not a ‘Prisoner’ and having reassumed control. After a hasty fight sequence The Prisoner attempts to take control of the ship but, inevitably, Number 2 engages Rover to bring the vessel back and quash the escape attempt. The Prisoner’s big mistake had been that, once confronted by what seemed like the opportunity to escape, he chose to do so alone rather than go back to include his fellow ‘Prisoners’. Thus he is hoisted by his own petard and earns their mistrust.

Although it uses neat and effective visual symbolism, Checkmate is really one of the series’ more ‘lightweight’ episodes. Although it provides McGoohan with the chance to engage in some neat comic acting, the introduction of the (forced) ‘love interest’ by The Queen seems somewhat contrived. The use of the Villagers as mere ‘pawns’ (as referred to earlier in Arrival) on a chessboard is visually appealing but rather limited as an actual plot device. The notion that the Village contains so many potential resistors seems to contradict most of what we have been told in previous episodes. Although they score an easy victory in the end, the Village authorities’ power here seems rather oddly limited. They lack the apparent omnipotence they display in Free For All, Many Happy Returns and Dance Of The Dead and they seem rather too preoccupied with the idea that The Prisoner might actually escape. The way in which the ‘rebels’ can take over Number 2’s office without the intervention of the usual security guards rather stretches the credulity. After the surreal terrors of the previous few episodes, Checkmate is rather too neatly tied up.

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ten: hammer into anvil

Hammer Into Anvil is the first of a series of episodes in which The Prisoner begins to turn the methods of the Village against itself.  Since early episodes like A, B and C it had become very apparent that the Number 2s were themselves Prisoners, subject to the control of whoever was at the other end of the outsize red telephone placed prominently on their desk. We presume, of course – although we are never told – that this is Number 1.  On several occasions we see the Number 2s being apparently afraid that their failure to ‘break’ The Prisoner will signal not only their removal but their demise. Here The Prisoner senses this key weakness in the power structure of the Village and exploits it to the hilt. Hammer Into Anvil is a dramatic investigation into the psychology of totalitarian political systems, in which our hero exploits the paranoia inherent in all such systems, be they fascist, communist or nationalist. Its plot is perhaps the most cleanly structured in the series and it balances a number of comic moments against instances of violent rage with great effectiveness.

Much of the reason the episode works so well is that the highly literate script (written by poet Roger Woddis, a writer whose work deals prominently in ethical questions) allows full rein for the acting talents of McGoohan (here at his cynically controlled best) and Patrick Cargill, who plays the increasingly paranoid Number 2. Cargill (who had also played a brief, but different, role in Many Happy Returns) was another one of the major TV actors recruited to play The Prisoner’s main adversary. He was adept as a light comedian and entertainer (his most famous role being in the contemporary sitcom Father Dear Father) but also at playing particularly twisted villains. In the oft-repeated 1960 children’s TV serial The Long Way Home he played an especially sadistic leather-coated Nazi, Herr Grosnitz. In Hammer Into Anvil  his character is immediately revealed as a sadist in the first scene where he torments a young woman (number 73) in the Village ‘hospital’ so much that she commits suicide by throwing herself out of a window.  The Prisoner is soon on the scene and vows to take revenge, a threat which Number 2 dismisses with sneering contempt, telling The Prisoner that he will ‘break him’.

The Prisoner executes his campaign with brisk efficiency, exploiting the weaknesses her can already sense in his adversary. In the Village shop he carefully listens to six copies of the same record (Bizet’s L’Arsienne Suite), knowing that the shopkeeper will report his actions to a puzzled Number 2. Then he leaves blank pieces of paper hidden in the stone boat, which Number 2 immediately has analysed by sceptical Village scientists. Later he leaves a message in Spanish – a quotation from Don Quixote – in the ‘Personal Ads’ column of the Village newspaper. He rings the hospital and leaves a cryptic message with one of the doctors about a ‘report on Number 2’.  In each case his actions are reported by Villagers but Number 2 fails to see that he is being deliberately provoked by the scattering of meaningless clues. By now the increasingly paranoid Number 2, who has taken out his anger on those who have reported the ‘suspicious behaviour’, is convinced that The Prisoner is actually a ‘plant’ sent by The Village authorities to entrap him. The Prisoner’s tactics grow increasingly bizarre. He buys a cuckoo clock from the Village shop and leaves it outside Number 2’s door. Number 2 has it taken away by Village bomb disposal experts, who discover it is a hoax. He attaches a meaningless coded message to a pigeon which Number 2 has shot down. Meanwhile Number 2’s loyal acolyte, a young man called Number 14, vows to ‘destroy’ The Prisoner on Number 2’s behalf, but The Prisoner deliberates subverts his position by meeting him in a café and appearing to whisper ‘secrets’ to him.

As a result of all these actions Number 2 – now convinced he is the focus of a conspiracy by everyone that surrounds him – turns on all his staff, dismissing not only Number 14 but also the familiar bald-headed Village controller and even the mute, ever-loyal midget butler. Alone in his office he is confronted by a triumphant Prisoner, who – playing along with Number 2’s paranoid theory that he is indeed a ‘plant’ – convinces him to resign, arguing that the actions Number 2 has taken against him have been disloyal. Number 2 is now a psychological wreck and The Prisoner’s plan has worked perfectly. His boast that he will be ‘Hammer Into Anvil’ (quoting Goethe’s poem Another) to destroy The Prisoner has been dramatically reversed.

Hammer Into Anvil is one of a number of Prisoner episodes that could easily be adapted as a stage play, with its clearly defined focus on dual protagonists. Its clever use of references to Goethe, Cervantes and Bizet are well integrated into the episode’s thematic structure.  Cargill’s performance as Number 2 is one of the most memorable in the entire series. At the beginning he adopts the kind of smooth, practised persona audiences would have been familiar with from his appearances in a number of popular television shows. But as the episode progresses he becomes increasingly nervous and prone to outbursts of sudden anger, screaming madly at his subordinates as he dismisses them one by one. In contrast, McGoohan begins by being angry but becomes more and more controlled as the episode progresses. In this episode, The Prisoner remains in control throughout. He has now discovered how to isolate and exploit key weaknesses in the Village’s power structure and will continue to do so in the episodes which follow.

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eleven: it’s your funeral

In It’s Your Funeral The Prisoner delves even further into the internal politics of the Village. In Hammer Into Anvil he had learned that he could become a ‘player’ by exploiting the weaknesses of the Village’s system of psychological control. Now he takes the process even further by backing one member of ‘the establishment’ against another.  Although the Village authorities attempt to use him as a pawn in their game, he reverses the process and begins to manipulate the situation himself. He is first approached by a young woman, Number 50, who claims to be trying to enlist his help in stopping a plot to assassinate Number 2 which, if successful, will apparently lead to reprisals being taken against the whole Village. The Prisoner is naturally dubious, assuming this is another plot by the Village authorities to use his weakness for helping ‘damsels in distress’. Indeed, as The Prisoner is fully aware, Number 2 (Derren Nesbit) is observing the whole scene from his office.  But when he later realises that Number 50’s father, the Village watchmaker, is indeed building a bomb to blow up Number 2, he comes to believe her story. Thinking he is protecting innocent fellow-Villagers he then informs Number 2 of the plot against him. Number 2, however, does not appear to take the threat seriously.

The reason for this is explained on The Prisoner’s next visit to the Green Dome, where he is surprised to see a different, older Number 2 is in place. This Number 2 (Andre Van Gyseghem) now claims that all the other Number 2s were mere interim replacements for himself and that he is the ‘real’ Number 2, who has arrived for his Retirement Ceremony on the Village’s upcoming Appreciation Day. He counters The Prisoner’s warning of an assassination plot by showing him (faked) film of him reporting assassination plots to all the previous incumbents of the swivel chair. It becomes clear to The Prisoner that he has been caught in a plot by the ‘new’ Number 2 to kill the ‘old’ Number 2. The assassination will then be blamed on ‘terrorists’ and reprisals taken, so strengthening the ‘new’ Number 2’s regime. The Prisoner then intervenes by intercepting the watchmaker, taking away the device for detonating the bomb (which has been placed in the official Village seal of office that will be ceremonially handed over from one Number 2 to another) and giving it to the ‘old’ Number 2, so allowing him to escape in the Village helicopter.

After the precisely structured plot of Hammer Into Anvil, It’s Your Funeral has a rather convoluted (and scarcely credible) storyline. Writer Michael Cramoy’s interpretation of Village internal politics seems to be generally inconsistent with the rest of the series. The watchmaker’s daughter claims that she is involved in ‘jamming’, a process by which ‘subversive’ Villagers can ‘fight back’ against the authorities by creating false conspiracy theories to create confusion. It seems unlikely, from what we know of the Village’s methods so far, that anyone who practised such techniques would not immediately be dealt with most severely. In this case the fate of the girl and her father at the end remains unknown. The device of introducing the ‘real’ Number 2 (and his explanation about previous Number 2s) is unconvincing as we have been led to believe that most of them have actually been removed because of their failure to ‘break’ The Prisoner). The watchmaker himself is something of a stock ‘mad scientist’ character and the plot detail of having the bomb in the Village seal of office is really rather silly. It is all too easy here for The Prisoner to turn the tables on the ‘new’ Number 2. The issue of the supposed ‘reprisals’ that might be taken against innocent Villagers is clumsily handled – The Prisoner seems to swallow the watchmaker’s daughter’s explanation of this piecemeal. Ultimately one also has to ask why he really cares about the plot and the ‘reprisals’ idea seems to have been thrown in rather carelessly as justification for his concern.

Despite the existence of the ‘murder’ plot It’s Your Funeral is most notable for its comic elements. The scenes where The Prisoner takes part in the strange game of ‘kosho’ (which also featured more briefly in Hammer Into Anvil) that involves the participants bouncing around on trampolines dressed in helmets and red cloaks are also quite amusing, though they have no real relevance to the plot. McGoohan’s dryly measured performance includes some deft comic touches, especially as he concludes his ‘business’ with the ‘new’ Number 2 by assuring him that he is sure a similar arrangement will befall him on his retirement. The notion of the Village having an ‘Appreciation Day’ is very much in character with the inane façade of ‘community life’ and ‘democracy’ that we see throughout the series. The unveiling of a completely featureless monument on Appreciation Day decorated by the single word ‘ACHIEVEMENT’ is an effective ironic touch.  But the Village in It’s Your Funeral does not seem to be the sinister ‘totalitarian state’ which appears in many of the other episodes. The very idea that rival Number 2s would jostle for power in an environment that is so utterly controlled by ‘the powers that be’ seems unlikely. There is, of course, only one real power in the Village and that is the unknown person on the end of that red telephone…

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twelve: a change of mind

A Change Of Mind is a disturbing, bitingly satirical and visually arresting episode in which the Village authorities wage a full scale psychological battle with The Prisoner. Roger Parkes’ script creates a sense of the fervid intensity of Village ‘mob rule’ that is only equalled in the earlier Free For All. McGoohan’s own direction brilliantly exploits the setting of Portmeirion and the established iconography of the Village to create a truly unsettling effect. John Sharp, as the pudgy, soft spoken Number 2 creates an air of subtle menace and McGoohan is called upon to show us a range of moods from acquiescence to anger. The episode completes a trilogy – with Hammer Into Anvil and It’s Your Funeral – of episodes in which The Prisoner intervenes in Village affairs and comes out victorious. But whereas in the previous two episodes he is not himself specifically the focus of the authorities’ efforts, here the full force of their methods are turned against him in one of their most effective attempts to ‘break’ him. The episode contains several particularly poignant moments and marks the last instalment in which the setting of Portmeirion is prominently featured in terms of dramatic location shooting.

The episode features various members of the Village tormenting, denouncing and ostracising The Prisoner. It features the series’ most effective portrayal of the Village as a paradigm of Orwellian totalitarian rule, with the actions of the Villagers being reminiscent of those of many ‘ordinary citizens’ under Stalin and Hitler. The story begins in the Prisoner’s ‘exercise area’ in the woods where he is set upon by a group of Village thugs who accuse him of being ‘antisocial’. This is the first of a series of terms used in the episode to denote the refusal to conform. The Prisoner dispatches the thugs but is then called to appear in front of the Village Committee to explain his ‘bad attitude’.  On the way in he sees an accused Villager confessing that he has been ‘inadequate’ and ‘disharmonious’. Many hints have been given through the series that the Village achieves social control through torturing, drugging and operating on its ‘citizens’ and here these themes are brought to the fore, rising as they do to a crisis of social paranoia. At the same time the visual contrast between the Village ‘jolly uniforms’ (of vaguely Edwardian ‘beach costumes’ combined with undertakers’ top hats) and their actions is thrown dramatically into relief.

The Prisoner’s first encounter with the Village ‘Committee’ is relatively mundane, as he is warned against being ‘disharmonious’ and the ‘chairman’ of the group ends by suggesting they all ‘have a nice cup of tea’. But, under the constant surveillance of Number 2 and his assistant, the stony-faced Number 86 (Angela Browne), he encounters more and more evidence of the steps the Village will take to make its citizens conform. In the hospital he encounters a twitchy, clearly brain-damaged man who claims to be ‘happy now’, having been subjected to what seems to have been a brain operation to remove his ‘aggressive tendencies’. We also glimpse another man in the hospital being subjected to brutal ‘aversion therapy’ to ensure that he conforms. Soon The Prisoner is called before the Committee again and told he will be soon be subjected to ‘instant social conversion’. He does not yet know what this means but his experiences in the hospital seem to suggest that the Village is now prepared to operate on his brain to secure his co-operation.

Of course, such a procedure could have been carried out on The Prisoner at any time since his capture.  But the Number 2s have always been prevented from doing this by the imperative – clearly directed from Number 1 – not to ‘damage the tissue’. The goal of the authorities has always been to win The Prisoner over to their side.  This has not changed. But now Number 2 enacts a clever plot to convince The Prisoner that, this time, they are prepared to go further than before. As the episode progresses the way the images and events pile up in front of The Prisoner become increasingly rapid, strange and surreal. The second encounter with the Village Committee sees him being spun round rapidly, lights flashing, before everything goes black. When he opens his eyes the room is suddenly empty. On returning to the Village streets he finds the Village newspaper declaring that he has been declared ‘unmutual’. He is attacked verbally and physically by the umbrella-bearing, matronly ladies of the ‘Appeals Sub Committee’ who berate him for his ‘unmutuality’.  Meanwhile the other Villagers ostracise him by refusing to engage in the usual inane pleasantries. This seems to have a considerable emotional effect on the normally impervious Prisoner. By now, the viewer can conclude that he is being drugged and that what we are seeing – conveyed memorably by the intense pace of events being depicted – is very much the subjective impression of someone who is ‘under the influence’.

The operation to ‘lobotomise’ The Prisoner is carried out in such a way as to convince him, in his drugged state, that it is real. It is televised in front of the whole Village. Afterwards he is welcomed back into the ‘Community’ by the compliant Villagers and Number 86 is sent to ‘look after him’. But when he sees her dropping something into his tea his suspicions are roused and he only pretends to consume the next ‘dose’. Now his faculties begin to return. He tricks Number 86 by switching tea cups with her so that she quickly becomes extremely ‘stoned’. There is a memorably comic scene when they both sit on a bench and she declares ‘I’m high… I’m higher than Number 2.” From here on, The Prisoner takes control. Realising that the operation was a fake and that the majority of the Villagers are, like him, probably under ‘chemical control’, he plots a devastating revenge on Number 2. He hypnotises Number 86 to report to Number 2 that the plan has worked and that he is ready to comply with the authorities’ wishes. When he meets Number 2 he says he wants to make a full confession in public. In the final scene, with the whole Village assembled, he begins by professing his loyalty then suddenly changing tack, taking Number 2 completely by surprise. Having got the crowd behind him, when he suddenly declares that ‘Number 2 is unmutual!’ the Villagers join in with him. The episode ends with Number 2 being ignominiously pursued by a crazed mob.

So The Prisoner has successfully discovered and exploited his captors’ key weaknesses. His realisation that he can use his guile and intellect to manipulate the Villagers to his own ends gives him a confidence that he has never had before. This success points towards the themes of the final episodes of the series, in which his moral and psychological tussle with his captors will reach its bizarre and ultimately mind boggling conclusion…

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thirteen: do not forsake me oh my darling

As The Prisoner moves towards its conclusion we are presented with a series of episodes that take us away from its by-now-familiar structures. The first three of these veer wildly off in different and wholly unexpected directions. Do Not Forsake Me is arguably the least effective episode in the entire series. It shows clear signs of being ‘thrown together’ in a very short time and its plotline is largely a mixture of pseudo sci-fi and clichéd spy genre elements. And strangely enough, it hardly features Patrick McGoohan at all. In fact the episode had to be concocted without him owing to his commitments for filming his role in the thriller movie Ice Station Zebra. There are very few Portmeirion exteriors and much use of standard ‘stock footage’ of foreign lands as well as clips from earlier episodes of the series. As a result the episode sorely lacks the visual richness that characterises most of the series. With its contrived plot, conventional fight scenes and unconvincing locations, it often resembles one of the weaker episodes of Danger Man.

The story centres around a plot by the Village to get hold of Professor Seltzman, an elderly scientist who has invented a machine which can transfer the mind of one person to another (and vice versa). The Village already has possession of the machine but needs Seltzman (who has disappeared) to show them how the reversal procedure will be carried out. A Village operative known as ‘The Colonel’ (Nigel Stock) is flown in to be the subject of the experiment and naturally it is The Prisoner who will be the one his mind is exchanged with. Thus it is engineered that Nigel Stock, not McGoohan, plays the main role here. Stock, an accomplished actor who was very familiar to contemporary audiences for his role as Dr. Watson in the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes series, plays the part reasonably well though he does not attempt in any convincing way to imitate any of McGoohan’s mannerisms. When The Prisoner wakes up in this unfamiliar body he is very shocked and confused – especially as his memory has of his stay in the Village has been temporarily wiped. But he knows immediately that he must find Seltzman (who he had had contact with on one of his last assignments before being imprisoned) to get the process reversed. This leads him on a trail that first involves attempting to convince his former employers who he really is (although they don’t seem convinced), then piecing together some photographic evidence he had left behind to find Seltzman’s location. He then takes off in his car and drives to the village in Austria where Seltzman is posing as the local barber. But both Potter, a British agent and a sinister unnamed Village operative have been on his trail. After a confrontation with Potter, The Prisoner is gassed by the Village man and is brought, along with Seltzman, to the Village. There Seltzman reverses the operation but plays a trick on the Village authorities. The Prisoner’s mind is returned to his body, but Seltzman places his own mind into ‘The Colonel’s body and escapes while his own body (housing The Colonel’s mind) dies from the trauma of the procedure.

The ease with which Seltzman escapes is one of the episode’s major anomalies. We see the helicopter taking off with him in it, but Number 2 seems powerless to recall it. And what will happens when the helicopter lands on ‘Village territory’ at the other end? The final scenes of the episode seem especially ‘rushed’ and unconvincing. The scenes in London featuring The Prisoner’s fiancée Janet and her father, the Secret Service boss Sir Charles, are also very redolent of standard TV ‘spy story’ conventions. The need not to ‘name’ The Prisoner when he is in a normal social setting also leads to a number of awkward exchanges. At one point he refers to himself by the hitherto unheard-of code name ‘ZM73’. At Janet’s birthday The Prisoner (Stock), trying to convince her of who he really is, kisses her passionately. This is the only time we see The Prisoner indulging in any kind of ‘love making’ in the entire series. It is certainly hard for the audience to really believe that this is the same person. And while the nature of the plot creates plenty of scope for the kind of dreamlike hallucinogenic imagery as seen in A Change Of Mind, Free For All and other ‘subjectively’ shot episodes, the opportunity is missed.

There are a few aspects of the episode, however, which widen the scope of the series and there are a few effective moments of quirky self-reflective humour. Do Not Forsake Me is the first episode to begin with a prelude to the main credit sequence, presaging its complete absence in succeeding episodes. When the sequence is introduced, it is also shortened. We also see Stock re-enacting the credit sequence by driving the car into the familiar underground tunnel and striding down the iconic dark corridor towards the office we’ve seen him resign in so many times. The use of another actor to play The Prisoner is arguably a radical move (certainly unknown in 1960s British TV series) and again the scope of Village activities is extended far beyond the Village. To some extent these defamiliarising elements prepare us for the far more radical changes which lie ahead. Vincent Tilsley’s script has a few clever moments. When the British intelligence officers in the pre-credit sequence look through a series of slides to try to find the evidence of Seltzman’s location that The Prisoner later unearths, particular emphasis is put on slide ‘Number 6’. The waiter who greets The Prisoner in the village of Kindersfelt, Austria,’s first words are ‘Welcome to the Village’. And, in a little joke that the public (not knowing the whereabouts of the series’ main location as yet) would fail to understand, Seltzman’s previous address is given as ’20 Portmeirion Road’. Overall, however, the episode’s failure to convince in the absence of McGoohan only serves to throw more light on what a powerful authorial presence he has throughout the rest of the series.

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fourteen: living in harmony

Television is a particularly intimate medium. The existence of a long-running TV series demands great loyalty from its audience. In the pre-video era viewers even had be prepared to organise their lives around being in a particular place at a particular time to watch their favourite show. For such intense interest to be sustained, audiences had to personally identify with specific characters and enjoy the  reassuring familiarity of established settings. However, the most memorable episodes of a TV series are often those in which a sudden shift or reversal happens in the particular established pattern. A good example of this was Mirror, Mirror, an early episode of Star Trek in which the cast were suddenly plunged into an alternate universe where we saw what a ‘bad Spock’ and a ‘bad Kirk’ would be like and how, under slightly different circumstances, the beneficient democracy of the Federation could have become an ‘evil empire’ bent on military conquest. The episode was especially successful in that it helped define both the characters and the political background of the series by presenting their antitheses. Thus the pattern of familiarity was redefined by a deliberate dramatic transgression. Such transformations can be defined as being especially televisual –that is, they use the specific characteristics of the medium of television to create a particular aesthetic result. A similar effect in more recent times was achieved in an episode of the long running Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) called Once More, With Feeling (2001) in which (as the result of the casting of a supernatural spell) all the characters began bursting spontaneously out into song. Here the defamiliarising effect is achieved through the deliberately signposted use of another well known genre (the musical) being superimposed on the already-established generic setup of the show. Much of the effect comes from the shock the audience experiences by having their familiar expectations shifted. Yet such ‘genre-bending’ also necessarily requires considerable suspension of disbelief in the audience. Therefore, these transformations have to be achieved by using a certain tone of playfulness, in which programme makers and viewers appear to ‘co-operate’ in a self consciously ‘knowing’ (and intimate) way, with each other.

Living In Harmony’s sudden and (initially) unexplained shifting of The Prisoner into a Western setting is more than just a comic parody, despite its playful use of Western conventions. The episode – which was written and directed by McGoohan’s most sympathetic collaborator David Tomblin (from a story by Tomblin and Ian Rakoff) – is staged and filmed in a subtly surreal style which is highly appropriate for the story.  Much of Living In Harmony is shot ‘straight’ but at times we notice that the camera seems a little ‘wobbly’ and that there is an unusually prominent use of close up shots at times. The camerawork is naturalistic enough for us to believe, for a time, that this is a ‘real’ western but veers away from conventional techniques just enough to make us doubt the veracity of the story. The plot features a number of familiar elements taken from different types of western. The reluctant sheriff who will not carry a gun recalls High Noon, the protagonist being nameless is a feature of the then-contemporary ‘spaghetti westerns’ directed by Sergio Leone and featuring Clint Eastwood, as is the ‘Mexican’ character. Valerie French plays Kathy, the ‘saloon girl with a heart of gold’ who features in numerous westerns.  There is also the inevitable climactic ‘shoot out’ scene.

The outstanding feature of the episode is the extraordinary performance of Alexis Kanner as ‘The Kid’. The young, impulsive ‘punk’ gunslinger is another standard western figure, but here Kanner plays the character (who is mute throughout) as dangerously twitchy, lascivious, trigger-happy and ultimately psychotic. It is a highly theatrical, expressionistic performance, and Tomblin pays much attention to the way the character is lit in a number of scenes where the camera lingers upon him. Kanner was a highly promising young actor of prodigious talent, who had played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook. He had made a name for himself in 1966 in his brief role as the highly unconventional DC Matt Stone in the long running British police series Softly Softly. His performance here gives the episode a highly discomforting quality which may have contributed to the decision by CBS not to include the episode in the first two American network runs of the series.

The episode begins with a credit sequence which (to some extent) parallels the familiar opening of The Prisoner, but in a western setting. We begin with a shot of a horse instead of a car. McGoohan (referred to here as The Prisoner) is seen handing in his sheriff’s badge. When he tries to leave the town he is set upon by a gang of toughs, who are seen beating him up as the ironic title Living In Harmony comes on screen. He is deposited in the middle of ‘Harmony’, the Western town where the story is set. Upon entering a saloon he finds his whisky being shot away from him by The Kid, whom he subsequently (and completely coolly) knocks out. He talks with Kathy, the saloon girl, who (as we might expect) seems to be attracted to him. Then he confronted by The Judge (David Bauer, the real ruler of the town of Harmony) who tries to persuade him to resume his position as sheriff. He refuses but is prevented from leaving town again when the horse dealer asks for an extortionate amount of money for a horse. Meanwhile, in a rather shockingly violent scene Kathy’s brother is lynched and hung by an angry mob, showing us how violent and corrupt the town is. The Prisoner is put in jail, supposedly for his own protection, while a crazed, wide-eyed Kid (currently employed as his jailer) practises poses with  his gun in front of him. Kathy arrives at the jailhouse and pretends to seduce The Kid, her real intention being to steal a key to help The Prisoner escape. When The Kid falls drunk, he escapes from the jail and steals a horse but is recaptured again as he tries to leave town.

Deposited back in the saloon, he finds himself in the middle of a mock trial, conducted by the Judge, not of himself but of Kathy for helping him escape. He is told she will be released only if he resumes his role as sheriff. He agrees to do this but refuses to carry a gun. Immediately he is challenged by the town ‘roughnecks’ and gets into several fights. When The Kid shoots and kills a harmless local in the saloon merely for flirting with Kathy, a ‘concerned citizen’ called Jim approaches The Prisoner and offers to help him ‘clean up the town’. Jim, however, is murdered by the ‘bad guys’. Then, in perhaps the most disturbing scene in the episode, The Kid strangles Kathy to death when she refuses his advances. This is the final straw for The Prisoner.  He straps on his gun and meets The Kid in a shoot out, which he wins. The shoot out is at first filmed conventionally, but when The Kid falls dead he seems to topple over suddenly in a most un-naturalistic way. The Prisoner returns to the saloon for a final confrontation with The Judge and a gang of four of his men. He manages to shoot The Judge and most of the gang but is finally shot himself.

At this point the pretence of the Western setting is abandoned. Instead of dying, The Prisoner merely holds his head as if the bullets have given him a very bad headache. He falls to the ground but moments later we see him in his ordinary Village clothes, wearing a set of headphones.  Soon he discovers that what he thinks are the figures of the other main characters in the story are in fact just life size cardboard cut outs and that the town of Harmony is really just a façade of buildings set within the Village. Meanwhile, back at the Green Dome, we see the same actors who played the Judge, the Kid and Kathy, now in their ‘real life’ roles as Number 2 and his assistants Number 8 and Number 22. It is revealed that the whole scenario has been created by giving The Prisoner hallucinogenic drugs and that everything else has been done by technology and autosuggestion. Number 2 expresses anger that the plan, devised by Number 8, has failed. The Prisoner then appears in the room. He surveys the faces within and leaves in silent disgust. Number 22, now overcome with emotion, follows him back to the Harmony setting, pursued by Number 8. When they reach the saloon Number 8 suddenly reassumes his psychotic ‘Kid’ persona and kills Number 22. He then climbs up to the balcony and dives off, killing himself. Number 2 arrives too late to prevent any of this and stands in despair, while The Prisoner walks off in disgust.

Living In Harmony is a stunning and groundbreaking piece of televisual art, brilliantly conceptualised and executed. Having broken down the pattern of familiarity the audience is used to, it gradually reintroduces it. The entire plot, after all, is yet another attempt by the Village authorities to ‘break’ The Prisoner. In this case the pressure to conform is represented by the way in which he is manipulated into first donning the sheriff’s badge and later the gun. The transposition of the story into a different generic setting strongly suggests that the kind of power structures and social manipulation seen in the Village are rooted in historical contexts and the existence of the episode further widens The Prisoner’s allegorical significance. There is always a Number 2, it suggests, and behind him a Number 1, whatever scenario is being enacted. The episode is, like much of the series, also very much a product of the ‘psychedelic’ era of 1967-68, here perhaps most explicitly as it is revealed that the entire western scenario, as we the audience see it, is a hallucination brought out by the use of a LSD-type substance. Tomblin and McGoohan here are literally taking the audience on a ‘trip’. A ‘bad trip’, perhaps, as this is actually the most violent episode of the series.

In addition to its considerable cinematic qualities, the episode is also highly theatrical in its conception and execution. The setting of Harmony is in itself a kind of stage set and the main story is a kind of ‘play within a play’. Kanner’s eye-catchingly physical performance is unforgettably compelling. When knocked out and later shot by The Prisoner he does indeed fall over exactly like the cardboard cut out he is later shown to be. His final fall from the saloon balcony is similarly theatrical. Ultimately the story unfolds as a tragedy. Both Number 8 and Number 22 have been drawn too far into the drama and cannot escape the destinies of the characters they are playing. Living In Harmony thus gives us multiple levels of meaning. It is an entertaining genre romp, an allegorical tale, a cinematic discourse and a theatrical tragedy all rolled into one. It suggests that television, so often seen as the source and location of the banal, can be an all-encompassing art form with unlimited potential.

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fifteen: the girl who was death

Following the wildly different scenarios of the last two episodes, The Girl Who Was Death takes us off on a mad ride in an entirely different direction. Although the normal credit sequence is restored, we are plunged without explanation into a very peculiar romp which turns out to be a ‘fairy tale’ that The Prisoner is telling to some Village children. Although most episodes of The Prisoner include some humorous content, The Girl is the only one which can be called an outright comedy.  Although the episode takes place in 1960s England, it has a stylised neo-Edwardian feel which recalls many episodes of the contemporary Patrick MacNee-Diana Rigg era of The Avengers. Although we get a short final scene with Number 2 and his assistant bemoaning the fact that The Prisoner has ‘given nothing away’ (Naturally his storytelling efforts are under surveillance), this is clearly not a serious attempt by the Village to extract information. The episode works as light relief in between the dark Living In Harmony and the demanding theatrical-cinematic extravaganza of the concluding episodes. Writer Terence Feely (who also wrote The Schizoid Man) had worked on early episodes of The Avengers and had written for The Saint, Thunderbirds and other popular series of the day.  Here he lets his imagination fly as the episode moves through a range of very different locations in rapid succession.

The story is a kind of ‘boy’s own spy drama’, in which a nameless secret agent (played, naturally, by McGoohan) is on the trail of a Schnipps, megalomaniac scientist who plans to launch a rocket which will blow up London. The ‘girl’ of the title is Schnipps’ daughter Sonia, a very stylish and sexy young lady who is also a ruthless murderer. Much of the episode consists of her efforts to despatch our hero. She does this in a series of colourful ways, firstly with an exploding cricket ball, a poisoned pint of beer, a suffocation attempt in a Turkish baths, an exploding radio in a Tunnel Of Love ride at a fairground. In each case he maintains his cool and survives. The sequence in which he (very calmly) orders a long succession of strong alcoholic drinks to make himself sick after the poisoning attempt demonstrates McGoohan’s exquisite comic timing. He appears in various disguises, including a full ‘deerstalker and sideburns’ Sherlock Holmes. Eventually he follows the girl to an abandoned stock yard where he has to negotiate his way through an elaborate series of death traps while being continually regaled by her seductive tones. Thinking she has finished him off she takes off in a helicopter (which, improbably, he clings to the bottom of to follow her) and lands in a field near the lighthouse where Schnipps and his troops are based. Schnipps has a full blown ‘Napoleon complex’. He is dressed as the Emperor himself and, having captured The Prisoner, explains to him his dastardly plans to destroy London with the lighthouse (which is in reality a rocket) and divide the country amongst his ‘marshals’. But The Prisoner has already disabled Schnipps’ soldiers’ weapons and he escapes, leaving the lighthouse (with Schnipps and Sonia inside it) to blow up.

The episode manages to cram a great variety scenes into its forty eight minute time span, so never letting its comic momentum slow down. David Tomblin’s direction is full of surprising visual juxtapositions. The performance of Kenneth Griffith, a Welsh character actor of considerable gravitas (who later made a name for himself as a leading documentary film maker), as the megalomaniacal but dithering Schnipps, is a great comic turn and Justine Lord as Sonia is suitably cool and stylish.  To some extent the episode is a kind of tribute to its stable mate The Avengers, but it takes all that show’s comic elements and exaggerates them wildly. There is no doubt that McGoohan and Tomblin are purely engaging in some fun here, but the exercise is carried off with considerable panache, demonstrating again that the basic scenario of The Prisoner could effectively be adapted into a range of different genres. That ‘Schnipps’ and ‘Sonia’ later turn out to be Number 2 and his assistant in ‘real life’ shows that The Prisoner is still cocking a snook at the Village authorities. As the episode ends he stares into the camera with a twinkle in his eye and whispers …Good night children… everywhere… the famous end-catchphrase of the BBC’s Children’s Hour.

 It can be argued that to some extent the elements present in The Girl Who Was Death prepare us for what happens in the final two episodes. The ‘lighthouse that is a rocket’ presages the ending of Fall Out (in which Griffith reappears in a more serious role) and the theme of childhood will be the major one in the next episode, Once Upon A Time. Along with Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling and Living In Harmony, the audience should be prepared (if they are not already) for a very unconventional ending to the series. Yet McGoohan was about to unleash two episodes of an unsuspecting public which were to take not only The Prisoner but the medium of TV drama itself into unknown, unheard of regions…

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sixteen: once upon a time

In order to properly gauge the impact of its iconoclastic concluding episodes, it is important to remember that The Prisoner was a mass audience show which included many of the typical conventions of slick 1960s TV action-adventure series. There are highly stylised fight scenes and car chases (accompanied by dramatic theme music) and the episodes, for all their groundbreaking thematic concerns, tend to follow a formulaic structure. Although the protagonist does not necessarily ‘win’ each conflict (as he would in Perry Mason or The Avengers) each of the first thirteen episodes returns us at the end to the familiar scenario of the Village. Viewers could therefore ‘pick up’ on a series at any point in its transmission. The distinctive iconography of The Prisoner – the penny farthing, the midget butler, the bizarre costumes and that ‘weird balloon’ – was another source of attraction for the mass audience. Then there was the presence of McGoohan himself, whose ‘action persona’ attracted male viewers and whose apparent indifference to ‘romance’ made him a figure of fascination and fantasy for female fans. But what most attracted viewers to The Prisoner, and ‘hooked’ them into following it week by week, was its building series of enigmas. Right from the beginning (as we see in the credit sequence) it had posed a series of questions which, as yet, we still had no answer to. Who ran the Village? Where was the Village? What on earth was ‘Rover’, the strange balloon – like guardian of the Village?  Why did The Prisoner resign? Would he manage to escape and if so, how? And, perhaps most pressingly of all by now, Who was Number 1?

It’s important to remember that the mass 1960s TV audience was very attuned to contemporary ‘secret agent’ dramas. The 1960s was, after all, the height of the Cold War and the threat of world wide nuclear war was omnipresent throughout the decade, even after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had abated. Popular books, films and TV series about spies were hugely popular, ranging from John Le Carre’s cynically realistic and morally ambiguous novels such as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965) to the spoof American series Get Smart  (1965-67). In Britain Danger Man, The Avengers and Man In A Suitcase were extremely popular TV series and of course the James Bond films, beginning with Dr. No in 1963 were massive world wide successes. With the existence of the real Cold War making such stories rather politically sensitive there was a tendency for the hero figure to discover that his enemies were not in fact the Soviets but a ‘third force’ (often led by a crazed megalomaniac) intent on world conquest. The epitome of such villainous figures was Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who featured in the Bond film Thunderball as the head of ‘Spectre’, one such ‘third force’. By the time of the final episodes of The Prisoner it was already pretty clear that the Village was some kind of ‘third force’ whose its powers on a world wide scale seemed to be extensive.  Thus, it was natural for many of the audience to assume that the shadowy figure of ‘Number 1’ might be some cat-stroking power-crazed figure like Blofeld, bent on world domination. There is little doubt that McGoohan deliberately played upon such expectations. Yet in fact, until he wrote the final episodes, even he himself did not know who ‘Number 1’ was.  Those who expected a conventionally ‘satisfying’ answer to the question of who the leader of the Village was (not to mention all those other questions) to be delivered were to be sorely disappointed.

Instead, we are presented with two episodes which break all the rules and conventions of popular TV series and take us into the realms of absurdist drama, psychological and philosophical symbolism and ‘psychedelic’ fantasy. Both are written and directed by McGoohan and demonstrate his great abilities as a theatrical writer and a cinematic artist, as well as his tremendous range as an actor. Once Upon A Time is a theatrical tour de force, quite explicitly based around Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech from As You Like It and heavily influenced in its form by Pinter and Beckett’s dramatic techniques, especially the veiled threats of violence implicit in Pinter’s dialogue and Beckett’s absurdist exchanges. The story also has a definite Oedipal theme. Most of the action takes place in ‘the Embryo Room’, which exists in the ‘bowels’ of the Village somewhere beneath the Green Dome and is set up like a minimalist piece of ‘in the round’ stagecraft. Here Number 2 engages with The Prisoner in a procedure called ‘Degree Absolute’, a psychological ‘duel to the death’- a kind of last resort for the Village authorities who have continually failed to ‘break’ him. Leo McKern, who played Number 2 in The Chimes Of Big Ben, is recalled for this ultimate challenge. As before, The Prisoner himself is heavily drugged (and probably ‘brainwashed’ by the mysterious Village ‘mind machines’ like the overhead light in his apartment which descends down upon him). He is regressed to childhood and taken through a series of ‘test’ situations which simulate those of a journey through life. Because of his drugged, infantilised state he accepts the ‘theatrical’ minimalism of the ‘stage set’ as real. Number 2 plays a series of authority figures – father, schoolmaster, employer, interrogator…

The encounters between the two are intended to break The Prisoner’s resistance and make him conform to the ‘paternal’ authority of the Village; to identify in his childhood identity the core of his rebelliousness and to change and co-opt it. In order to achieve this, various scenarios are enacted. In the beginning The Prisoner is a small child, licking an ice cream. Then Number 2 is his schoolmaster, threatening him with the punishment of ‘Six of The Best’. Later were see him at graduation day, being rewarded for his efforts. Number 2 plays his employer, whispering to him that he has been selected for ‘top secret’ work. He also plays his sports coach, goading him in a boxing batch and later a Judge with The Prisoner as a defendant in a road accident case and a Nazi interrogator with The Prisoner as a captured World War Two airman. The exchanges are characterised by a number of absurdist single word dialogues, moments of extreme violence (with the ever-present silent butler intervening at one point when The Prisoner attacks Number 2 and pins him to the floor) and ever more desperate attempts by Number 2 to force The Prisoner to tell him why he resigned.

Gradually the power balance between the two men changes as The Prisoner grows more and more into his real adult self. We get a strong sense that Number 2 has been prepared to undergo the same psychological ‘brainwashing’ as The Prisoner in order to take part in this ‘ultimate experiment’. As the episode nears its close The Prisoner begins to get the upper hand and the ‘Degree Absolute’ clock begins to run out of time.  Finally Number 2 realises he has lost and, now ‘imprisoned’ by The Prisoner behind the bars of the ‘self contained vehicle’ at one end of the ‘stage set’ he hears the words ‘DIE SIX DIE!’ being repeated and collapses, apparently deceased.  The Village Controller arrives and promises to take The Prisoner to Number 1.

Once Upon A Time takes the audience through a series of intense psychological states. The Village’s attempt to ‘get inside The Prisoner’s head’ is its most thorough yet, but even when reduced to a child like state The Prisoner still has an implicit sense of what is ‘secret’. All through the series the successive Number 2s had been obsessed with the notion of trying to find out why The Prisoner resigned from his job. This has becomes a potential symbolic ‘breaking point’. If he gives them this information, they feel, his further ‘confessions’ will follow. The Village’s intention has always been to try to win him over to their side, so that his talents can be put to their use. This struggle symbolises that way in which society attempts to force individuals to conform to its norms’. McGoohan himself is playing a game with the viewers, challenging them to see beyond the obvious. Here The Prisoner transcends its own status as a socio-political allegory and begins to enter the realm of the spiritual and the transcendent. The Prisoner here becomes an ‘everyman’ figure being taken through the stages of life and being confronted with an invasive evil spirit – some might call it ‘Satan’ perhaps, but certainly it is a stealer of souls. His struggle to keep his ‘secrets’ represents any individual’s battle to maintain their essential self worth against the external forces which continually seek to destroy it.

And yet… The Prisoner’s supposed triumph may be nothing more than an illusion, a façade created by the Village to give him the impression he has ‘won’ the battle. After all, it is they who have defined the terms of the conflict. When he sees Number 2 die his face shows no triumph, only a grim anger.  There seems little doubt that, in the course of the mental and physical struggle, the two combatants have seen much of themselves in each other. Number 2 is, after all, also a Prisoner. As, the series now suggests, are we all…

But the question remains to be answered:  Of whom or what are we a Prisoner of? What is the force that holds us all down, stops us realising our full potential? Who is it that wants to steal our souls in exchange for material wealth and comfort? Who, indeed, is Number 1?

It is worth bearing in mind the oft-repeated Village slogan here: …Questions are a burden to others. Answers a prison for one’s self…

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seventeen: fall out

 Nothing you can do that can’t be done….

 And so, finally, we get all the answers (or do we?) The Prisoner escapes (Or does he?) and triumphs over his captors (Or does he?) And, yes, he finds out who Number I is (Or does he?)

Does Fall Out depict a resolution to the enigmas posed by The Prisoner or is it itself a further enigma, an extended joke at the expense of the audience or does it reveal fundamental truths about the modern condition?

The neckbone, certainly, is connected to the headbone…

With the extraordinary final episode Patrick McGoohan pushes the scope of The Prisoner to the furthest reaches of his imagination. Fall Out is a triumph of instinctive art, composed in a solitary continuous frenzy by McGoohan. It defies every dramatic convention established in the history of television. By then, he could do what he liked.  The series had been cancelled anyway. So… what the hell?…  He had now assumed full authorial control. Fall Out is a kind of spontaneous composition, written in the same kind of spirit as Kerouac’s On The Road, Ginsberg’s HowlA Day In The Life. It is a kind of howl of protest against rational logic, a summation of the spirit of the times (1967-68) when ‘revolution’ was certainly in the air. Its first airing was an iconoclastic moment, as important in the history of televisual art as the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring was to modern classical music or Bob Dylan’s 1966 performance of Like A Rolling Stone at Manchester Free Trade Hall in response to the audience cry of “Judas!” was to modern rock and roll. Of course they booed, they howled in protest. McGoohan himself claimed he was ‘hounded’ out of the country after the episode was shown. The tabloid newspapers joined in the ‘protest’ against this ‘rubbish’ he had foisted on us. He never worked in Britain again. But here, as in those other moments when the artist faces the derision of the audience, McGoohan delivers his most powerful and imaginative demonstration of the potential of his medium as an art form. He lays down a gauntlet few have ever tried to pick up.

And the thighbone’s connected to the shoulder bone….

After his triumph in Once Upon A Time The Prisoner is escorted intro a large underground chamber. As he walks through the subterranean passageways a jukebox plays The Beatles’ psychedelic anthem All You Need Is Love. On reaching the chamber he is told that soon he will be introduced to Number 1 but that first ‘certain formalities’ have to be fulfilled. He sits quietly in a throne-like chair, saying little, a detached smile on his face, and watches the ‘trial’ of two ‘examples of revolt’: first, a young man, Number 48, dressed like an early hippie in flowery shirt and top hat and secondly, Number 2, who is, by some mysterious process, brought back from the dead. He then is escorted to meet Number 1, who though he glimpses only briefly turns out to be himself, or at least an evil, leering version of himself.  Then, with the help of Number 2, Number 48 and the butler, he attacks the guards and in the confusion escapes from the Village. A rocket rises from the Green Dome, presumably containing Number 1. The Prisoner and his compatriots escape in the self contained vehicle featured in Once Upon A Time. Soon, having dropped Number 48 on the way, they are on the road to London. When they arrive Number 2 returns to what was obviously his previous position, in the Houses of Parliament. The Prisoner, accompanied by the butler, stands surveying the scene. In the final scenes we see him back in his car in a repeat of the first scene of the credit sequence, driving at great speed towards us. The bars slam in front of his face.

McGoohan himself is, oddly, mostly an observer. He has very few lines in the entire episode. The main dramatic energy is supplied by three other actors. The returning Alexis Kanner gives another mesmeric performance as Number 48, involving his rendition of the old spiritual ‘Dry Bones’ which (in a surreal ‘Hollywood musical’ moment) the entire cast of judge and jury join in with. Leo McKern plays a newly ‘liberated’ Number 2 no longer in thrall to his masters and Kenneth Griffith (Schnipps in The Girl Who Was Death) plays The Judge, who presides over the ‘trial’ scene. This scene is given a very strange edge by the fact that the jurors are wearing white robes with half-black/half-white animal masks covering their faces. When the Judge speaks they all bang their fists down in unison and when The Prisoner tries to speak they all shout him down by talking very loudly at once. The Prisoner is told he can ‘lead them or go’ and, naturally, chooses to accept his passport and a large wad of cash before being introduced to Number 1.

All through this scene, a large rocket with a kind of prominent winking ‘eye’ (from which steam emanates) can be seen. This is where, by way of a spiral staircase, The Prisoner goes to meet Number 1, who stands at the controls of the rocket. When Number 12 turns round he is wearing a hood. The Prisoner pulls this back to reveal a monkey mask. The Prisoner rips this off and there, for a split second, he sees his own face. Number 1 runs away, laughing demonically.  This is clearly the crucial moment – the final revelation of the entire series. Yet it is presented in such an offhand way that the casual viewer could easily miss it. And there were no domestic VCRs in 1968 to wind back the action…  So not only does McGoohan make the final revelation of the identity of  Number 1 completely bizarre and logic-defying, he also forces us to rub our eyes and try to believe that we really saw that… No cat-stroking megalomaniac. No new Hitler about to take over the world. When The Prisoner finally looks into the face of the one who controls everything, when he tries to reveal who the source of all this evil is, he sees only himself. But only for long enough so that he, and we, can question the entire thing. Is this real? Is this a dream, or a hallucination?  Has the entire episode been yet another set up? Is it really possible that that voice on the end of the big red phone all through the series has been none other than The Prisoner himself? Is that why there were so many instructions ‘not to damage the tissue’? So, in that case, is he really a Prisoner at all? Is any of what we have seen in the last seventeen weeks real?  Just what kind of bloody game has that McGoohan been playing with us?

 Fall Out proceeds with a kind of mad, relentless, logic. The figures behind the animal masks are like the TV audience itself, a Greek chorus baying for blood or shouting in agreement at the raising of a gavel or the holding up of a hand. They are the forces of unthinking conformity, those who obey unquestioningly, those whose souls have truly been stolen. The Village itself is a kind of vision of hell, or perhaps purgatory, where soulless minions mindlessly do their masters’ bidding. And outside the Village is the real world. To reach London The Prisoner no longer has to sail the oceans or be transported in aeroplanes. Because the Village is just down the road. The Village is round the corner. The Village, ultimately, is in our own heads. We are all Number 1, the ‘one’ who must be ‘looked after’.  We must not ‘damage the tissue’. As the butler enters The Prisoner’s house in the closing scenes the door opens automatically, just like it does in The Village.  And as The Prisoner rips off that monkey mask to reveal his own face staring back at him, we see the final bars from the end of each episode crashing down in front of us as a voice calls out ….I! ….I!….I!….  and ‘I’ is ‘1’ and ‘1’ is ‘I’ and (to paraphrase John Lennon) ‘we are all together’.

However one might interpret the final episode of The Prisoner, it seems to be clear that McGoohan is giving a message of individual responsibility. In allegorical terms, we all live in the Village. We are all Prisoners. In Fall Out McGoohan asks us the Final Question of so many he has asked us throughout the series. ‘How far’ he asks us ‘are we prepared to go to be free? ’ In Fall Out  he stages a ‘revolution’ in which the voice of youth, the voice of the establishment and his own voice join together in the struggle for freedom. Today we live in a world in which – as the series prophesised – technology would give our ‘masters’ the means to control us not by brute force but by subtle and all-embracing forms of social control. In the Post 9/11 world, where governments use the fear of terrorism and the technology of computerisation to attempt to gain more and more control over each individual citizen, The Prisoner is even more relevant than it was when it was made over forty years ago. And, though Fall Out was made during and was clearly influenced by, the ‘psychedelic’ era of the late 1960s, the message of individual responsibility it sends out is no ‘hippie dippie’ fantasy. Despite its fantastical setting, it presents us with the hardest and harshest of truths. If we want to sit back and acquiesce to the creation of a new totalitarianism, we can just let it happen. We can be, as The Prisoner describes the Villagers, …a row of cabbages… The only way to change things is to change ourselves, to take full and rational control, to fight the oppression with our own will power (even if we are declared ‘unmutual’). But first we need to overcome that soothing voice in our ears that is forever telling us not to fight back, to acquiesce to the inevitable. Now we know who that voice belongs to. It is the voice of Number 1…

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