Number Six Was Innocent - McGoohan and The Prisoner

McGoohan in his own words: “George Markstein was brought in as Script Supervisor and George also brought to us something that none of us had the right experience to garner – he brought writers of with a particular bent of mind. They weren’t Danger Man writers… and I’m very grateful to him”

2011-12-28T12:41:00.002Z

It only takes a casual perusal of internet information to notice there is a lot of niche interest about the creative Hows&Whys of the 1960’s TV show, The Prisoner. Here’s one webpage that is replete with several of the errors and factual misconceptions that I have discussed in many of my previous blogs.
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/prisoner.htm
Recourse to published books only emphasises the disparity that has arisen between authored information and the factual evidence to support them. The notion that the Script Editor on The Prisoner provided the story theme and the initial original driving energy for the show is promoted in every book on the subject. The extract below comes from one of the most recent official books, published in 2007. The creationist theories always reach back to the groundless and well-denied assumption that The Prisoner was somehow a direct sequel to Danger Man, that then became ‘psychedelic’. This notion was largely preset into the fan community by memoirs initially obtained from George Markstein, many of them "off the record" and so, these offstage whispers embroidered a legend that now often accepted at face value, even though every piece of hard evidence contradicts the concocted story.

Patrick McGoohan's interviews bewteen 1965 and 1969, in many magazines, made clear where the ideas had come from and how they were developed. In 1977, when academic interest about the show took shape in North America, he made attempts to explain it again, in an interview with Canadian TV. Viewing the footage nowadays he seems visibly less than comfortable about revisiting his past but he did it anyway – he seems to have been a courteous man. A couple of years later he repeated the exercise for an audiotaped interview, on behalf of the growing British fan club. However it still wasn’t enough. Fans can never have enough information, and always want fresh information. They interviewed whoever was prepared to talk to them and gradually a divergence of opinion developed about where the show had come from and how it had begun production. The divergence was given solid form by 1982 when Time Out published an article, which laid the schism open to the outside world:

The article seemed to unequivocally make the claim that McGoohan both plagiarised and defrauded the Script Editor and stole his idea. It might be expected that a ‘fan club’ would have been the first to protest, but reading the article reveals that it was in fact the fan club who were involved in all this revisionism in the first place! I guess any journalist is entitled to write a polemical article, but in fact, most authorised writing since has adopted much the same story. The only conclusion to draw is that the journalist was used by the fan organisations to deflect any criticism that might otherwise be generated from Patrick McGoohan, who by now was their fan club ‘Honorary President’. It seems likely that McGoohan, living a long way away in America, had no idea what was being written about him in Britain because a couple of years later he agreed to take part in a TV documentary for the new British TV channel, Channel 4. Produced by some of the same personnel responsible for the Time Out piece, it seems that as McGoohan involved himself in that production, he became aware of what was being said about him, because after his filming was completed, he then withdrew all his previous agreements to take part. The programme broadcast went ahead anyway, but has never appeared on any dvd extras. The quote at the head of this blog is from the interview McGoohan gave for that production. His generosity makes a startling contrast to what others seemed to be saying about him. The surprising thing is that when you look at all the relevant memoirs and contemporary facts about the Production, they invariably seem to directly contradict this fan-babbled story that first emerged in 1982, and yet has been sustained ever since by the many writers and varied authors. Like speedlearn students they seem to know everything and yet understand almost none of it.

All of this ancient controversy about the relationships between the script editor and the producer of the show does highlight a puzzle over exactly how the scripts were obtained for The Prisoner, and then how they were refined, over the course of the whole project. Patrick McGoohan seemed fairly clear about the role of his script editor, and what he had expected from him:

George Markstein was brought in as Script Supervisor and George also brought to us something that none of us had the right experience to garner – he brought writers with a particular bent of mind. They weren’t Danger Man writers…. None of them were. They needed this stylistic, futuristic thing, and he knew a number of them and brought them in, and I’m very grateful to him.

Perusing the available and various memoirs of actors and crew involved in The Prisoner gives the impression that actually very few of them seem to have had any contact with George Markstein at the time, although more than one of them seem to have had dealings with him in subsequent years, when he became established with TV companies in an executive position. Derren Nesbitt was exceptional in that he was quoted as saying he had ‘been brought up with’ Markstein, an unexpected memoir that has never been detailed further, so far as I know. Notwithstanding this, when Mr.Nesbitt is quoted about his inability to grasp what on earth the episode, It’s Your Funeral was meant to be about, he speaks of asking Robert Asher the director for information, and challenging McGoohan himself, but Mr.Nesbitt makes no suggestion he asked George Markstein for clarification. This old blog of mine gives some background to all the mild controversies surrounding the episode Mr. Nesbitt starred in, It’s Your Funeral.
http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/10/mcgoohan-in-his-own-mind-i-know-what.html

The frequent absence of much comment in the memoirs of others about the man whom the cult fans claim ‘created’ the series seems increasingly odd. However, as might be expected, he is mentioned a lot by the various scriptwriters. This combination of contrasting facts seems to confirm that the writers and the filmmakers seem to have been kept quite separate, and the only conduit between all these creative personnel was via the channels of Patrick McGoohan and David Tomblin. Several of the writers are referred as receiving briefings or having meetings with Mr.Tomblin, and certainly he recalled having meetings with writers. He said,

Writing was a bit of a strange area for me because I'd never written before. Patrick came in one day and said "I've seen Lew Grade, we've got the money, we've got the series - so write the first story." So I got hold of George Markstein and we sat in a room for some time and eventually came up with Arrival. I did find that when we interviewed a writer, no matter how many details you gave them, they came back with an entirely different story - although this was only because the series was so different. So in the end, detailed storylines was the way to approach it to keep it all the same sort of style.

[Were many re-writes necessary?]

Quite a lot, yes... because people maybe got hold of the general idea, but because they hadn't seen any film at that time they were going off at tangents which didn't work to our conception.

George Markstein [was] a fount of information. He knew all the writers, so he'd bring them in and we'd talk... sort of suggest a theme to them. We did approach some very big writers but they said the money wasn't good enough, and why should they work that hard for that little money when they could sit at home in a warm study and write a book for fifty times that amount!

The changes wrought upon the physicality of Rover, made entirely without reference to the script editor, serves to emphasise the point I made in my previous blog about how Mr.McGoohan utilised his assembled creative personnel to serve his own stream of consciousness, using them – rather than negotiating with them. It also seems that many ideas and tropes of the series were only developed after that initial filming schedule was carried out.

One of the principal and most in-depth memoirs that emerged over the years was actually written by someone who came late to the production. Ian Rakoff then left over twenty years between the events and writing his book, Inside the Prisoner.

His reminiscence made a good attempt to balance his own subjectivity with accurate recall. It appears he only joined the project around April 1967, after the bulk of filming was complete. He is one of the few to mention the presence of George Markstein around the production offices at that time, but he seems to confirm Mr.Markstein was at least still present (whereas that 1982 Time Out article states George Markstein left after the sixth episode had been made). Ian Rakoff says, “…we were introduced in passing, to George Markstein, the script editor. He was flustered, moving fast and didn’t look at all happy… He looked like a man with a jolly disposition under normal circumstances…” Mr. Rakoff seemed not to get to know him much at that particular time, but, like other crew and actors, he recalled meeting him again over subsequent years and liking him. Ian Rakoff was unique however as the only one of the filmmakers (other than David Tomblin and Patrick McGoohan) to have some direct hand in scripting, himself. He was the acknowledged instigator of the episode Living in Harmony. By then however George Markstein certainly had left the project.

Another of the last couple of episodes made, The Girl Who was Death was scripted by Terence Feely, who had earlier written Schizoid Man. Mr.Feely was to become quite close to Everyman for some time because he spoke in one memoir about how he had hoped to be involved with Everyman in some future projects, after The Prisoner was completed. One of these projects involved the possibility of making a filmed version of Brand in Norway, a project we can know was at the planning stage as long after, as 1969, since Patrick McGoohan gave an interview in Oslo, in that year, to Jeannie Sakol, of Cosmopolitan. Mr. Feely evidently had become close to the producers by the time of The Girl Who was Death but it is also notable that in a memoir about the much earlier writing of Schizoid Man Mr.Feely only talks about how he negotiated with Patrick McGoohan over aspects of the script, with no mention of any other script editing input from anyone else. This may of course simply illustrate how friendly he and Mr. McGoohan had evidently become. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG4bS247fDA&feature=related

The writer who supplied the most scripts (other than McGoohan himself) to The Prisoner was Anthony Skene. He is credited for three. Two of them ended up with some sense of continuity between them. Dance of the Dead seems to contain suggestions that the mysterious pilot from Many Happy Returns has turned up as the dead body washed up on the beach, and later indicated as being in No2’s mortuary filing cabinet. As I also mentioned in another blog, there is also the intriguing presence of a black cat, which is in only those two episodes as well. The eventual ordering of these two episodes, in that order, seems to show that the producers viewed them as having continuity too. However, whilst Dance of the Dead was one of the first scripts ready for filming, Many Happy Returns was the last of the initial thirteen scripts to enter production. Memoirs from Mr. Skene however say he was specifically asked to write Many Happy Returns by David Tomblin, so any storyline connection between the scripts must not have been his own origination. Mr.Skene also commented in a memoir about his first contribution (Dance of the Dead) that he was given no guidance at all, “the show was a cosmic void” he is quoted as saying. That was at a stage where his only input seems to have been via George Markstein. His third supplied script was A,B&C, an episode certainly unrelated to either of the other two, and eventually broadcast as number three; and completely unrelated to The General, although fans of course try to make connections between the two nowadays due to the presence of Colin Gordon as No2 in both episodes. The unmasking of No2 at the end of A,B&C seems to prefigure the unmasking of No1 as exploited by Patrick McGoohan in his own final episode.

Lewis Greifer (under his aka of Joshua Adam) was the writer for The General. He had long been a friend of Patrick McGoohan and he once described the two of them as being ‘boozing buddies’. Mr.Greifer also said he was a previous associate of George Markstein, and that these two had actually been introduced to one another by him, after Patrick McGoohan had enquired whether Mr.Greifer himself would be willing to be the Script Editor for his projected new show. Given that George Markstein joined the crew of Danger Man in 1965 as a ‘consultant’ these stories seem to be a little challenging in their entanglements.

Mr.Greifer was a very active member of the Writers Guild. This Trades Union was especially virile in the years of the 1960’s, expanding from being a small union for screenwriters, increasingly to include professional writers of other persuasions, such as novelists. It was embroiled in 1965 in industrial unrest and Lew Grade, on behalf of ITC, was notable in leading the employers to agreeing new deals for writers over such matters as Royalties and Residuals –payments due to writers over and above their fee for providing creative works. It has been claimed by fans since that Greifer said that he and George Markstein were discussing The Prisoner long before the series was ever begun, but this slightly baffling notion has never really been explained, although of course one explanation for this could lie in the fact that presumably McGoohan must have intimated to Greifer what he was asking him to be script editor for, and so, consequent to this Greifer would have explained some of it to Markstein, when he was suggesting Markstein to McGoohan as an alternative.

Going back to The General, it is an irony that Mr.Greifer himself reminsiced that his script was instantly liked by McGoohan, but not so much by Markstein! Once again though, this script seems to been instigated not by George Markstein but by David Tomblin who requested that the episode be written to utilise a lot of footage already filmed. This was also a stipulation for It’s Your Funeral. It seems to be requirements such as these laid upon the scriptwriters that demonstrates how the Producers communicated between the filming process and the writing of scripts, and emphasises perhaps another reason why David Tomblin said, “… so in the end, detailed storylines was the way to approach it…”

Given McGoohan’s statement that introduces this blog, it seems that when George Markstein was suggested to him by Greifer as Script Editor for The Prisoner. McGoohan thought that Mr.Markstein would do as well as anyone. Patrick McGoohan obviously was aware that George Markstein been appointed Script Editor for Danger Man, by Sidney Cole, and he was a member of the Writers Guild. So for McGoohan, George Markstein seemed to tick all the boxes; he would naturally have assumed that Markstein would be able to access other members of that Union, to write for the series. Reviewing the writers who eventually did take part in writing for this show however, it seems that Roger Woddis was really the only one obtained who was not routinely a TV scriptwriter. He supplied the script for Hammer into Anvil.

Michael Cramoy certainly never wrote for Danger Man, but he had written for Ralph Smart’s The Invisible Man, supplying the key pilot script for that show. He had also written for the world-famous American show, Dragnet. He wrote It’s Your Funeral, which ironically is often labelled as incoherent, by Prisoner fans. As mentioned, it would seem that this script was as much commissioned by David Tomblin as anyone else because the writer was asked to create scenes that could utilise already-shot footage.

Gerald Kelsey was a founder member of the Writers Guild and contributed two scripts, but only one was filmed. Checkmate contained the archetypical human chess match scenes. His script was one of the only five to be ready by the time filming began in Portmeirion. As Anthony Skene similarly remarked, Gerald Kelsey reminisced that he was given no real guide when he thought up Checkmate, but rather was asked to imagine, “… the craziest things you could think of…”. Contrary to many fan claims made over the years about The Prisoner beginning life as a mere sequel to Danger Man, it is instructive to note that neither Mr.Kelsey nor Mr.Skene intimated they were asked to write the further adventures of John Drake – a character they would have been quite familiar with and a project that would hardly require them to think of the craziest things you could think of.

The other single-episode writer was Roger Parkes. He recalled being introduced to the project via Moris Farhi – indicating that McGoohan’s hopes about how the networking of writers would operate was at least slightly effective. Ironically, Mr.Farhi’s proffered script never made it as far as the series. It is instructive to note how disorganised the scripting process was however when he was asked for his contribution by George Markstein. In a memoir, Mr.Farhi recounted the events, “… George said it was a good idea… ‘Go away and work on it’… Then I was called by George…” Mr.Farhi then explains how he had to submit his synopsis on a Friday. On the Monday following he was then told he had to submit the completed script by the Friday of that subsequent week! When he protested this left him not enough time, George Markstein advised him to write one act per day! Fahri did manage to do this, then he had to make revisions on the Saturday, and then ‘clean it up’ on the Sunday. Despite this monumental effort his script was not used. The script-commissioning process seems to have been quite chaotic, and it would appear that this was only sometime around October, 1966. The project was six months old and scripts had evidently not even been commissioned in good enough time, never mind written.

Roger Parkes did have his script accepted however, writing Change of Mind. As this episode was only the ninth script to enter the filming process, it makes the apparent panic over Moris Fahri’s script even more curious. In previous blogs I have mentioned that it seemed surprising that barely five scripts had been ready prior to location filming commencing in September 1966, considering the project went *live* on 16^th April. Roger Parkes recalls being advanced £200 for his script and ultimately being paid a total fee of £1,000 (equivalent to £12,000 nowadays).

Mr.Parkes recalled Change of Mind as being his first big script commission, so it might be guessed that senior writers such as Gerald Kelsey would have received fees commensurate with their own expertise, and even where scripts were not used, advances were properly paid for the work that was done. Roger Parkes is another professional who maintained contact with George Markstein over the ensuing years and even joined him in some minor litigation against ATV over Royalties, presumably those they considered due from worldwide showings of the show, which became a staple in America especially on their many syndicated television stations. The Prisoner was repeated in Britain in 1968/69 but then not shown again on UK television until 1976. However in those countries with a more diverse broadcasting network it became a worldwide hit and was regularly being used. This is also contrary to the claims in the official histories (such as the one pictured earlier) about The Prisoner being a commercial failure - another complete myth that fanbabble maintains in the teeth of it being verifiably a claim without foundation.

‘ [it]… was considered an expensive, commercial failure at the time of its original transmission’

Such is the nature of cultism I suppose. In fact, as Mr.Parkes makes clear, the opposite seems to have been the case

...the topic that we always discussed ad nauseum, was why we weren’t getting any royalties for The Prisoner…it was well over five years, with the show, by then, shown to multi billion audiences worldwide before our legal threats to ATV finally produced a trickle of royalties."

One well-known contemporary writer who did not write for The Prisoner was Robert Banks-Stewart and I was amused to read an interview he gave about another old series and how his remarks seem to emphasise the frequent furore amongst the scriptwriting fraternity about who did what. It coincidentally includes a reference to the writer who supplied two scripts for The Prisoner

I wrote the first few scripts of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook, but the story editor, Vincent Tilsley, then wrote an episode, which was, naturally, to become the first on air, thus gaining for himself both the initial good reviews and apparent credit as the creator.

http://entertainment.stv.tv/tv/208370-robert-banks-stewart-on-creating-charles-endell-esquire/

In 1966, Vincent Tilsley was arguably the most experienced scriptwriter to contribute to The Prisoner and he wrote one of the very first scripts that were ready in time for the location filming at Portmeirion. His first script ended up broadcast as Episode Two. Like Anthony Skene he acknowledged being given very little idea what to write about. In fact Vincent Tilsley's description of the whole process indicates the same feeling that something was going wrong in the script commissioning process right from the beginning, with hints of the same sort of last-minute chaotic appraoch that was recounted by Moris Farhi:

George Markstein, who I knew personally, phoned me up, came round to see me the same morning – he was along in half an hour, it was that quick. He brought a script with him of Arrival …He told me that Patrick McGoohan was star of the show…That was about it. Markstein asked me if I could think of a story. As far as I remember… I don’t think there was a second visit, I thought of one there and then. I don’t always think of things that quickly, but as it happened I thought up Chimes of Big Ben.

Mr.Tilsley was also behind the script that became Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. This script is frequently described in fan books as having been commissioned during some desperate scramble for ideas as the episodes began to run out in 1967, but in fact, in his own reminiscence, Mr. Tilsley recalled being asked for a second script 'almost immediately' after the acceptance of Chimes of Big Ben. This means his second script was likely to have been commissioned around October 1966. Once again, the story being told fails to match any facts at all. It becomes tiresome to recount, when every example seems the same. I have touched on all of this in my blog referenced earlier, when I wrote about the evident difficulties that the Prisoner was experiencing by the Autumn of 1966:

This set me to wondering what on earth was going on? McGoohan’s show had been green-lit by Lew Grade on 16th April 1966 and it was not until September 1966 that the production team went to Portmeirion. Four months and only two complete scripts? Presumably one of these was Arrival, and the other Free for All – written by McGoohan himself. I have mentioned in several of my earlier blogs that George Markstein had (at the time of his appointment by McGoohan's Everyman) almost no experience of television script writing. This huge weakness at the core of McGoohan’s Everyman operation was costing the producer dearly as four months on, barely two scripts were ready and McGoohan had written one of those single-handed. Incredibly, Markstein has since been lauded over the years by fan faction as some kind of guru behind this seminal series. The truth could barely be any more of a polar opposite. The answer actually becomes obvious by studying the very accounts of the production history of the show that these same fans have collected ! Like many things that the official fans came to believe and have faithfully disseminated since, these claims seem to have been proven false by the very same history their various convention interviews have laid bare

Collect the facts, ignore them and then make up a story they like better instead seems to be the nature of cultism. This reached a pitch for Vincent Tilsley, when he appeared to post his own retraction on an internet message board. It's not something you're ever likely to read in a book:
"About a week before Christmas '66 George Markstein and I were sharing a minicab back to London having had a long script conference at Borehamwood. I can't remember much about the conference but can remember a lot about George's uncertain mood. Needless to say, the conversation on the way home continued to be entirely about the series, with George still in touchy vein, full of angst, critical of almost everyone and everything. When I tried to change the subject by asking him what he'd be doing for Christmas, he neatly sidestepped his way back into obsessiveness by saying, "Well, funny you should ask that – I'm not sure. I had this dream last night. I was at home Christmas morning with the family, when it suddenly occurred to me that Patrick hadn't actually said I could have the day off…"
And so to the rest of the story as now printed [in the official book].
"Nothing true about the tale, therefore, other than the fact of George Markstein's telling of it. I didn't believe he'd had any such dream, of course, nor did I ever think I was supposed to. He'd just made it up, as his way of saying "And to make things even worse, Patrick seems to think he's God Almighty…" but at the same time trying to warp his ire up in an amusing story form rather than have it sound diminishingly whinging.”
You will find this *story* in more than one book about The Prisoner, but it always presented as if the events between the people *actually* happened, whereas in fact, the entire tale was merely an entertaining fiction. That seems to have been what sparked Mr. Tilsley to make the realised, when he realised how his tale was being misrepresented.

This is certainly my final blog of 2011, and this seems a good time to make it my final blog on this particular Roll. As is apparent, I am getting to the stage of referencing myself, and that is always a dangerous thing to find. I did once plan to stop this Roll at 17 after all. My main intent was to declare that Number Six was Innocent and perhaps I have done all that can be done in that regard.

Be seeing you, and I’m obliged.

Rover and Out

Anyone happening upon this final page is however cordially invited to peruse the previous 52 articles as well. One a week for any year you like. I will still be an active blogger on other rolls, and so please leave any comments on these ageing pages, if you wish, secure in the knowledge that they will be read by at least me, and I will make replies, if I feel that I have something worthwhile to add...... and I usually like nothing more than............ One Moor Thing...... ;-)

McGoohan in his own words: “I was writing as well, and I was directing, and supervising, and editing the incoming scripts, and editing in the cutting room. So it didn’t leave much time”

2011-11-16T22:12:00.001Z

One of the things that becomes apparent from looking into the production background of The Prisoner show is that in many ways the show had to become almost as a flow of consciousness – both of McGoohan’s own, but also by his adapting to his collaborators. However, other than with a few individuals, little of this seemed to be two-way. He appears to have liked to make use of creative serendipity but avoided analysis, inspection or too much consultation.

The team that Patrick McGoohan built around himself is often portrayed as mostly his previous co-workers from the Danger Man project. That most of the crew had worked with McGoohan at some point in the past is certainly true, but then McGoohan had been on the British TV and film scene for over a decade by then, and in the UK this world was not so large. Earl Cameron commented, “it was very seldom I would go to a studio and not meet two or three actors I had worked with before” The last 13 to 15 episodes of Danger Man were made at Shepperton, after over 30 others had been made at Borehamwood. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Jack Shampan had dropped out of the Danger Man project when that transfer to a new studio occurred, the same went for Gino Marotta. Riffling quickly through the main crew that worked on the final 13 episode season of Danger Man reveals that only six of the regular crew on the Shepperton episodes ever did work on The Prisoner. All of these in-demand professionals were well used to the vicissitudes of their profession and when the fan clubs quoted George Markstein’s comment: What a lot of the people in the studio wanted was to keep their jobs! http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/markstein.html His misrepresentation and their gullibility has confused much about the production background to The Prisoner.

When Patrick McGoohan and David Tomblin came to create a production crew. there is nothing more natural than that they would first ask those technicians they knew already, that is obvious, but it is equally obvious that there were many who they either did not ask, or who not interested. On the other hand, as my previous blog demonstrated, there were one or two people that Everyman was very keen to have: Bernie Williams, who was busy working at that time on The Quiller Memorandum, and Jack Shampan, who was even busier, making three feature films in 1965/66: Modesty Blaise, Finders Keepers and Cuckoo Patrol.

Having the technicians in place was one thing, but what of the directors and actors? To some degree, solving one problem could help resolve the other. Patrick McGoohan certainly pursued Don Chaffey to be his Film Director.. A big question might be why? McGoohan already had a very capable director in David Tomblin and had his own experience of directing episodes of Danger Man. In an interview for the UK Channel 4 documentary Six Into One, Don Chaffey described what happened:

I was about to do another feature over in Ireland and Pat suddenly came along and said he had this idea and I said, Great! Good! Do what you like with it, and he said No, I’d like you to direct the first episodes to set a style…And I just refused point-blank ….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJD7GEru6h0

However, McGoohan did not want to take No for an answer; and so he didn’t. As Don Chaffey relates the continuing story, Patrick McGoohan took advantage of the fact that pair of them were not just colleagues but their families were friends too, and so McGoohan asked Don Chaffey’s daughter to intercede and she ultimately persuaded her father to read over the scripts that were available at that time. Perhaps her enthusiasm fired his own. Either way, his answer changed to Yes.

so I read them and Pat came over to Ireland… and I agreed to do it

Why was Patrick McGoohan so determined to have his occasional collaborator involved? They had made The Three Lives of Thomasina together and Don Chaffey had directed 13 Danger Man episodes, most of them consecutive to each other. This meant the two men had spent much of 1964-65 working closely together. Indeed, in 1965, Don Chaffey noted their relationship in a periodical of that time:

Of course if you read the official stories, you will get a very different impression; when Don Chaffey is mentioned in Prisoner histories he is often only mentioned in passing, and ascribed little significance,

but he was undoubtedly very important to Patrick McGoohan, and far from leaving the show after some deterioration in relationships, it is apparent from Chaffey’s own words that he had agreed to direct the first episodes and not to be the director of the whole series. In relation to McGoohan’s enthusiasm to have him involved, it might also be significant that Chaffey had directed two of the episodes of Danger Man that bear most comparison with aspects of The Prisoner: These were Colony 3, and The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove.

However, I suspect the principal reason why Patrick McGoohan (with his Producer’s hat on) wanted the involvement of Don Chaffey was because Chaffey was such a professionally respected director. Everyman was an unknown company, Patrick McGoohan was a very respected actor but he had never produced a show before; David Tomblin was very capable but only proven as an Assistant or Unit Director. Everyman had a crew of technicians how were they going to also attract the amazing cast of actors that was found? Actors of the stature of British veterans like Eric Portman and Mary Morris; Peter Wyngarde, Patrick Cargill and Donald Sinden and many others who played relatively small parts, but who carried considerable cachet, Virgina Maskell in the first episode was said to have been directly cast by Don Chaffey, as was Norma West. Adding Don Chaffey to such luminaries as Brendan Stafford gave the Everyman project an impressive professional credibility.

I think also McGoohan would have been only too well aware of the huge task he had set himself. As he said himself, “You cannot do a thing like that by yourself” He would know only too well the potential chaos of a location shoot and the logistical difficulties of organising one; he knew the value of an experienced professional who had his own strong will and ability to get things done. To illustrate this there is an amusing anecdote told by Raquel Welch about her breakthrough role in One Million Years BC. In her biography she recalled that she felt she had some ideas about her role and so approached the director, who was Don Chaffey. She told him she'd been reading the script and had been thinking…

“But he cut me short. "You were thinking?" he said, and there was no attempt to conceal the amazement in his voice. "Well, don't." 'And just in case I hadn't got the message, he spelt out exactly what he expected of me. '"You see that rock over there? That's rock A. When I call action, you start running over to rock B, which is over there. When you get halfway between the two, pretend you see a giant turtle coming at you, and you scream. Then we break for lunch. Got it?"

It’s not difficult to imagine that a man with that sort of iron discipline and the will to get the job done was exactly the sort of man Patrick McGoohan needed and wanted on his side. Norma West recalled how hard McGoohan was working at the time of the location shooting at Portmeirion where she spent two weeks.

The production was on location at Portmeirion for the best part of a month, working all the hours that were needed to get the job done. Don Chaffey was evidently very conscious of the philosophy behind the Rover and offered his own version of what the blob was all about in one tale, referring to faceless blobs of bureaucracy. He would perforce have become involved with McGoohan, Williams and Tomblin sorting out exactly how to use the balloon version of Rover that they had invented on that location shoot, to take over from the original motorised version.

As an aside, this whole situation illustrates the way history by memoir was so relied on by Prisoner fans, and has so muddled the real history. When Dave Rogers came to author his excellent Prisoner/Danger Man book for Channel 4 in 1989, he naturally relied on the accounts he was given by the fans; his book was endorsed by the principal fan club. On page 133 he touches on the controversy back then about the evolution of Rover,

“When summing up the ‘facts’, one must take into account the following: there is certainly no meteorological station near Portmeirion, no photographs of the [motorised] version of Rover exist, and no extras ever saw it! In fact many people, including noted Prisoner authorities…. believe that it never actually existed, or if it did, was rejected at the planning stages”

This was the interpretation of the experts after ten years of study. Yet, two years before their ‘study’ even commenced Patrick McGoohan had described the Rover machine – but his clear and concise account was discounted because no ‘extras’ recalled the machine...? It’s all quite laughable in hindsight, but illustrative of the way the cultism developed and why McGoohan said he was glad people enjoyed his work but felt that cults had their own agendas.

Norma West told of how she worked with Don Chaffey as her director and he also helped the Everyman team locate further technical personnel too. Tony Sloman (film librarian back at MGM) recalls himself being hired by Bernie Williams upon Don Chaffey’s recommendation, after the location shoot was over. As well as having influences over how the evolved version of Rover was presented and used, Don Chaffey also inevitably exercised influence upon the key presentations of Arrival. He was not just the director in Portmeirion – it is easily overlooked that back at the MGM studios he continued to craft the five episodes that he had undertaken to direct, to set the style. He said he was integral to the creation of the opening montage and he certainly must have been.

The elements of film that go to make up that archetypal sequence were in fact all shot before the crew ever went to Portmeirion. So the compressed opening three minute long resignation scene that was further truncated to form the introduction to most episodes could fashionably be termed an opening minisode and be attributable to the production team feeding back into the scripts, where that sequence is laboriously repeated at the head of every episode's shooting script. I began this blog by saying that in some ways The Prisoner developed as a flow of consciousness, but clearly there was enough scripted to capture the imagination of Don Chaffey and draw him into the project, but it is also true that subsequent scripts were being sculpted with close regard to what had been caught on film already. Bernie Williams in a recent commentary described the way the team ‘used’ the ballon form of Rover back at MGM studios. He recalled them using backlot shots of the Rover, to infill for Portmeirion because whilst at Portmeirion, “we hadn’t figured out who he [Rover] was….”. As they built the character of the balloon, so they were inflating the ideas and tropes of the series.

However, there is a problem understanding how the film crew could influence the writing because so far as is apparent, the twain rarely met. There is almost no mention in production crew memoirs of them having contact with George Markstein, and there seems good reason to believe he had little to do with the show, once they had returned from Portmeirion. Lewis Greifer, his friend, stated that George had no input after Christmas 1966. But it is equally clear that scripts must have been commissioned before then, so in that way, there was no reason he should have much more input. But how could the scriptwriters have been advised? How could they know “what’s it all about?”. In my next blog I will take a look at those writers and how Patrick McGoohan interfaced with them.

Moor words next time, but just before I go, the quote that heads up this particular Blog came from a three-part biographical feature authored by Barbara Pruett for the US magazine, Classic Images in about 1986. You will find that in many *authorised* Prisoner books, Patrick McGoohan will be referred to as personally reclusive and refusing to co-opearte with any attempt at biography. Well, as Ms.Pruett's fine feature proves, he was neither reclusive nor secretive, just selective about who he talked to - and perhaps who he *authorised*. My blog is of course entirely unauthorised and completey unofficial. Be seeing you.

McGoohan tells his story: My production manager, Bernard Williams... wonderful fellow…says… "What's that?" And I said, "I don’t know. What is it?" He says, "I think it's a meteorological balloon." And he looked at me. And I said, "How many can you get within two hours?"

2011-11-03T22:06:00.001Z

There are times when I have come across something old about the background to the making of The Prisoner and I think to myself, How come I never knew that before?. I came to the conclusion some time ago that the principal reason for this was that most published writers did no real research of their own; rather they re-digested information that had been given to them by some scion of the various fan organisations that had done so much background research about the show in the preceding two decades. I had always been intrigued that such a young (25) and apparently inexperienced man as Bernard Williams became Production Manager on The Prisoner, and that he was also consulted with, and listened to, by Patrick McGoohan. However when another blogger posted a twenty year old fan article recently I was both baffled and educated, simultaneously.

http://david-stimpson.blogspot.com/2011/10/out-of-archive_20.html

There seems little mention in publicly published sources about Bernie Williams being involved on the Danger Man project. This seemed so new to me that I even re-read one or two of those books to check I hadn’t missed something. I then even wondered if Bernie Williams had made the entire story up, as there seem some evident anomalies in the job titles he refers to, but there seemed no reason for him to do so, so I looked at it from a different perspective.

There was something of an enigma here, because at no point does the name Bernie Williams appear on the credits of the Danger Man show. However, after a little research, I realised that Mr. Williams’s involvement was via his employment at the MGM Studios rather than via Ralph Smart’s Pimlico Films. Bernie Williams had originally obtained work at Borehamwood via his father’s influence. His dad was employed in the Security department at the London studios. Bernie recalled beginning his movie career in the Stills department at MGM, at around age 15. This was in the late 1950’s. He thence moved through a variety of roles in the subsequent years. He must have been deputed to work closely with the MGM filming days of Danger Man, seemingly as early as 1960, and certainly between 1964 and 1965. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Frank Maher (the Prisoner stunt-co-ordinator and double for McGoohan) had mentioned that Mr. Williams was the person who had originally introduced him to Patrick McGoohan, and Mr. Maher described Bernie Williams as being a production manager. Frank Maher became involved with Danger Man only for the 1964-66 hour-long episodes, seemingly confirming that Bernie knew Patrick (and David Tomblin) from the time of the first series back in 1960.

……. - remember Bernard Williams?
The Prisoner production manager?

Yes. He was a friend of mine and he said
"I want you to come and meet somebody."

He took me along and it was Patrick. That was just before Danger Man.

http://www.theunmutual.co.uk/interviewsmaher.htm

The book issued by Network with their dvd set of The Prisoner spots that Bernard Williams was of some more significance than generally noted, when it says on page 17, “Other crew members recalled that Patrick employed David Tomblin and Bernard Williams separately away from Danger Man to set is the new show” However despite the startling interview with Mr. Williams, directly contradicting the general thrust of the published explanations of the production history of The Prisoner is words are not only largely ignored in such published works, but much of his information seems actively to have been ‘struck from the record’.

The real problem with the distortions of the history does not just lie over who got what credit, but rather that in trying to make history fit an untrue version of events, the very history itself gets distorted, often beyond proper recognition. The sources who have created the settled and authorised story of the making of The Prisoner evidently spotted that Bernie Williams’s account would throw a spanner in their nicely spun tale and so they simply did not supply it to the various authors. If you read these books you will find them replete with references to arcane Fan-Club material, such as 'Alert-Issue3' or 'Number Six-Issue 5'. Anyone outside of this old Club archive can neither verify nor interpret what may or may not have been written in these old fan magazines. Sometimes the interview quote has clearly been interpreted to mean what the authors want it to mean, whilst with awkward cases, such as what Bernard Williams had to say, it seems the files are simply deleted. It is a delightful irony that fans of this particular show have behaved in such a prisoneresque manner, but has made for appalling Archive TV history.

Here is Bernie Williams’s account of the conception of the rubberised Rover, which happened not in a script conference, but on location, as filming was underway. It’s interesting to note that if you read the tag-line for this particular blog you will note that Patrick McGoohan gave Bernard Williams the credit for recognising the strange shape in the sky whereas Bernard Williams rather seems to want to give the credit to Mr. McGoohan. There’s a lesson about comrade-ship in that contradiction.

The long-told Club fables about how The Prisoner was intended to be a series of 13 episodes, followed by another 13 episodes is also directly contradicted by Bernie Williams – another reason to censor his memoir of the production history. He also explains why he did not take part in the final four episodes, which has oft-puzzled me as he was clearly so enthused about the project otherwise.

The official books could never explain or acknowledge the influence and movements of Bernie Williams without also contradicting the mythology they had previously created about how The Prisoner had begun and especially how it was developed. They also would have alienated the Club sources they evidently were reliant upon for their information. As a result Bernie Willams's words were simply ignored because he did not fit with their version of history, a method of making history also used in other connections, as I described in one of my early blogs. http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/08/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-ladies-and.html

Bernie Williams told an especially interesting story about his understanding of where and how the idea of The Prisoner originated, which totally contradicted the settled and authorised version you will often read in books.

My earlier blogs have provided proofs to show that The Prisoner project was underway even whilst the episodes of Danger Man were still being made, so at first reading this memoir seems to contradict those facts. However, once you understand that Bernie Williams at that time was employed at MGM Borehamwood, rather than directly by Ralph Smart’s Production Company, then suddenly his memoir makes sense. The hour-long series of Danger Man ceased being made at MGM in Borehamwood after 32 episodes, at which point a final 15 were made at Shepperton. With that in mind, the party Mr. Williams is referring to also seems to be mentioned in a September, 1965 profile article about Patrick McGoohan.

http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/tvtimes/Sept1965/pdf.pdf

This documents that a wrap party was held to acknowledge the ceasing of production at Borehamwood in April 1965. That some kind of farewell was likely to be prompted is emphasised by the fact that Jack Shampan declined to transfer to Shepperton, as did David Tomblin initially, and obviously Bernie Williams would have remained at MGM. Mr. Williams would also likely have been chasing after his first individual credit - for his work on The Quiller Memorandum; the making of which movie was well underway by the summer of 1966. His involvement on the Quiller movie also evidences the tightness of the schedules for his even taking part on the production of The Prisoner, and this in turn illustrates the close relationship that pre-existed between himself and McGoohan, with McGoohan preferring to choose to employ him despite his constraints involving a major movie around the same time.

Unlike Jack Shampan, Jack Lowin, the cameraman on Danger Man stayed with the Pimlico operation as it transferred to Shepperton and he is more often quoted by official prisoner sources. One of his memoirs also touches on the origins of The Prisoner. The Network book mentioned earlier, quotes him on page 26:

“[McGoohan] had read this book, which I believe was an American book… he was obviously fascinated by it… he was talking of a sequel to Danger Man for a retired agent.”

Lowin speaks of McGoohan mentioning this book whilst they were still making Danger Man and his reference to a retired secret agent (rather than a resigned one) chimes exactly with the notions that Bernie Williams speaks of, where he implies that McGoohan was becoming intrigued with what would happen when a secret agent could no longer be a secret agent. What would be more natural for Patrick McGoohan to do, after someone at his Danger Man wrap-party had discussed this conundrum with him, than to then begin to read about the subject. In 1965, there was no shortage of books about the world of Cold War espionage, especially in America, which McGoohan visited for the first time (since being born there), with his wife, in 1965. Of course any fan of Danger Man would also know that this question about spies retiring had already been asked in the episode Say it with Flowers. Drake is posing as a taxi-driver and picks up a respectable-looking businessman – who is actually an intelligence chief. Drake opens the conversation as a normal cabbie:

Where to Sir?

Switzerland

Why?

You never met Hagen did you

Who’s Hagen?

Rather a dubious character

Should that concern me?

As a freelance agent he’ll work for any side, so long as the money is right

Uh Huh

We never trusted him too much, although mind you, he’s been extremely useful to us in a number of instances

And now he’s not quite so useful?

We’ve lost contact. We don’t know what’s happening to him. Maybe he’s gone over 100% to the opposition, which would be uncomfortable. That’s for you to find out

Err.. perhaps he’s just decided to retire!

Retire??!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wwm2_JJLYY

This episode was made in October, 1965. It was getting nearer and nearer to the last acts for John Drake.

But there is another man who was key to the success of the Prisoner project and who is also glimpsed but rarely and then only briefly, in most published Prisoner histories. He was another personal associate and personal friend of Patrick McGoohan and had a long working history with him, just like David Tomblin, Brendan Stafford, Jack Lowin and Bernard Williams. Most published histories will tell you glibly that he and McGoohan had a fall out, but the truth is far subtler than that because they remained firm friends.

Moor information next time.

McGoohan pay his compliments:"when I was making The prisoner I found it necessary several times to leave him in total charge" and "His work on The Prisoner was superb and his contribution to the show far beyond his nominal status. He’s the tops"

2011-10-24T23:01:00.002+01:00

In my previous Blog I mulled over the possibility that the first half of Arrival was thematically and structurally influenced by a now long-forgotten American propaganda movie called Red Nightmare. Of the three writers of Arrival I felt it was David Tomblin, with his film-making background, who was most likely to be aware of this old plot format. I was interested to note therefore, that in a 1988 exploration of the series, it was remarked that he was responsible for the first half of Arrival:

The Arrival appears to be a fusing of two separate stories, one by Tomblin showing the arrival of McGoohan's character in a Village where he is given the Number of 6, and Markstein's more conventional thriller plot where Number 6 enlists the aid of a woman to help him flee the Village, not knowing she is a mere pawn of the Village controller, Number 2.

http://www.the-mausoleum-club.org.uk/timescreen/Trial%2011/ts11.htm

However it would appear the influence of David Tomblin’s experience goes even deeper. David Tomblin had long been associated with Ralph Smart and was Assistant Director on a progenitor of Danger Man in 1958. This was The Invisible Man. Several plots of this series were revamped to fit with the later exploits of secret agent John Drake, as played by Patrick McGoohan. One plot that was left behind was one called Picnic with Death. However, a little taste of it remarkably, seems to have been carried by David Tomblin into The Prisoner

This early episode in the series opens up with Peter Brady, the invisible man, being driven by a security operative to a destination. Brady is annoyed that his government is controlling him because he wants to be busy trying to find the cure for his condition, whereas they keep using him to perform otherwise impossible missions – utilising his invisibility! With this background, the following conversation is occurring between a sour-tempered Brady and his minder. Brady is complaining that they are late and he is not allowed to drive.

If I could drive my own car, you wouldn’t have to put up with me

No dice! You’re not allowed to drive! Chief’s Orders! You’re an official secret.

Chief’s Orders?! Security?! You people forget that I’m a human being.

I’m surprised that I haven’t been Government-stamped and filed away in a top secret file!

I’m sure that anyone familiar with The Prisoner will pick up the resonance implicit in that line of dialogue, and if you are not familiar enough to spot it, I cannot imagine why you are reading this blog at all! But, you are very welcome. Remarkably, in the further phases of the plot the existence of an invisible man is revealed to some members of the public, after a minor car accident. In order to maintain secrecy the governement 'disappears' sixteen witnessess, including two news reporters. A newspaper magnate confronts a government official who has ‘disappeared’ the sixteen witnesses, protesting:

I, the owner of two newspapers am here to ask what is it all about?!

I’m sorry Lord Brooksley; it’s Top Sceret

But fourteen men know about it already! It can’t stay top secret for long!

That’s why we’re worried. We’ve got to stop wild rumours from spreading.

This intriguing storyline is soon dropped however and knowledge of the invisible man does become public and more reporters seeking the story besiege his house (just as the reporters in the Prisoner besiege Number Six, once he has become a candidate for election in Free For All) Another scene harks to Arrival with Brady’s sister (he lives with his sister) pulling back curtains to reveal a very familiar style of window, but rather than focussing on her looking out – the camera emphasises those looking in.

Anyone who has watched this show will also have noticed that occasionally Mr. Invisible makes an exit, saying “Be Seeing You” - a singular irony from a man who could anything but be seen! David Tomblin was not by nature an academically creative author and it seems reasonable to assume he sought his ideas from his own experience, and indeed his other writing credits on The Prisoner are all noted as being due to his modifying stories, rather than originating them from his own imagination. He seems to have been a craftsman in more than one way. Patrick McGoohan certainly was his number one fan, saying this about his former partner when the pair of them were re-united on the set of Braveheart, on which movie David Tomblin was an Assistant Director.

we are very close friends, I remember him on the first television series I was in: ' Danger Man '. David was the assistant director on the hour long episodes. We have grown to be very good friends> When I was making The Prisoner I found it necessary several times to leave him in total charge because I was working all day as an actor and often as writer and director. I found it necessary to have someone to trust, that was David, since then he has done a lot of work as assistant director.

If there is a problem he is the best in the world !

http://mcgoohan.bravehost.com/2.html

Patrick McGoohan plainly admitted in interviews that his show derived from such modern classics of the time as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. However it would be easy for the casual researcher to also conclude that those sources were of literary influence. In the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four it seems just as likely that that influence was televisual. 1954 Britain had been transfixed by a BBC production of the novel. It incorporated televisual screens that watched the watcher, slogans that defied reason, the numbering of citizens, illicit drinking dens and even a crystal ball made a short appearance (but that was for lovers to stare into and dream).

In some ways The Prisoner was an emotional antithesis to this TV play that had transfixed a nation of TV watchers over a decade before. Whereas the tale of Winston Smith was a tale of the attempt of Love to triumph over Totalitarianism by hiding from it, the tale McGoohan was to craft involved a man avoiding all emotion except that of anger and who used a single-minded determination to power his attempts to smash the Totalitarianism of the village and escape it. The opening scenes of Nineteen Eighty-Four have the narrator remarking that what we are about to see is the vision of one man. A later line refers to the fact that, “Nobody ever sees Big brother”. This is the conundrum Number Six was to grapple with all of his series – meeting Number One – or not. Much of the second half of the 1954 TV film has Winston Smith being toyed with, by O’Brien, a veritable Number Two. Another significance is the fact that O’Brien is served by a butler. The butler is short and small in build, and whilst he is spoken to, this butler himself never speaks at all. Remind you of anyone?

The broadcast of this play in 1954 sparked a reaction not unlike McGoohan was to achieve 13 years later, which is an odd congruence, if less of significance.

What seems less coincidental is the effect of another TV show that has recently become re-remembered. Many archive TV enthusiasts have been comparing The Strange World of Gurney Slade to The Prisoner. This review is as good as many:

By this point if you’re thinking “The Prisoner!” you’re doing no more than I did. The unreliable central narrator is taken to massive lengths in that show’s “The Girl Who Was Death”, and large tracts of episodes four and six play out like “Once Upon A Time” and “Fall Out”. I’d be willing to bet that at least one person on the production team for The Prisoner saw this at some point. I’m not claiming for one minute that Patrick McGoohan nicked any of this – just that the idea may have percolated unconsciously in someone’s head.

http://ladydontfallbackwards.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/review-the-strange-world-of-gurney-slade/

Whilst this reviewer makes the point that I’m not claiming for one minute that Patrick McGoohan nicked any of this – just that the idea may have percolated unconsciously in someone’s head most do not seem to have taken account of the fact that a major influence of Anthony Newley permeates The Prisoner from the opening episode. His pop record of 1961 was evidently as popular with Patrick McGoohan as ‘All You Need is Love’ was to become in 1967. Just on the off chance that any non-fan is still reading this, I would just explain that the the tune to "Pop Goes the weasel" percolates The Prisoner as incidental music throughout many episodes.

All of these things do not mean that I imagine any of the writers of Arrival were fitting together a jigsaw of deliberate ideas – entirely the opposite. One of the things that seems to have constantly baffled fans of this show is where it all came from – how it began. This puzzle has led them, in many cases, to the idea that it began as a sequel to Danger Man: that Patrick McGoohan stopped playing John Drake so that he could once again play John Drake, an absurdity sadly encouraged and exacerbated by the attention they paid to tales George Markstein told them about the inspiration behind his novel, The Cooler, that he wrote in 1974.

One thing that is quite noticeable is that George Markstein is smugly glib about the origins of the show.
Well, the first episode's called 'Arrival' and that's all it is - his arrival in the Village. It shows the prisoner - the secret agent - resigning. He hands his resignation to me which is very apt in a way as I'm the evil genius of the whole thing ... and then it shows him being kidnapped and waking up in the Village with its way of life ... every Rover ... everything we've grown to love or hate as the case may be.
http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/markstein.htm

Both David Tomblin and Patrick McGoohan were always quite vague, if not deliberately so - with Tomblin professing to have no idea what series McGoohan even intended to make when he first got the financial backing from Lew Grade. Markstein's very glibness when he was interviewed actually gives away that he is back-fitting events, because as is well-known now (but was not at the time) the amorphous Rover that he clearly is referencing did not exist as a concept when the Arrival was written. Rover was originally designed as a queer looking wheeled vehicle, like an automaton police car - complete with blue flashing light on the top.

There is a fourth man man however who is curiously absent from most official accounts of the making of this intriguing show. He had experience to bring to the series that would fit directly into the style of The Prisoner. He had been the Unit Manager of a film called The Quiller Memorandum. The style of the dialogue in The Prisoner is sometimes referred to as Pinteresque. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for The Quiller Memorandum and there is much about that movie that could be described as prisoneresque – if such an adjective were to exist. It’s set in perhaps the archetype of a real enclosed village: West Berlin itself. You can get a small flavour of the movie here, but it needs to be watched in the whole to appreciate it's existential style being squeezed into the format of a secret agent story, just as McGoohan was doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbTKJVyv3zs

This fourth man, and a man strangely absent from most official prisoner history books, is the man credited by Patrick McGoohan himself, of having been the inspiration for the Rover that we came to know and love in the series. His name can be seen in the opening credits of both the Quiller film and the Prisoner show. I have sometimes wondered if the Production Manager is normally accorded such a large credit on a TV show – the whole screen to himself.

Mr. Williams had some forthright things to say about the making of the series, but curiously you will find little mention of him in any official prisoner history. He crops up of course, but nobody mentions his experience of the Pinteresque movie he came fresh to the prisoner from, but most remarkable of all is the fact that no official sources seem to dwell upon the fact that he was a ‘2nd assistant director’ on Danger Man, (his position did not merit inclusion on that show’s onscreen credits). His ability to influence McGoohan was due to this association; he was a professional friend of Mcgooohan just as david Tomblin was. Mr. Williams was the person who had originally introduced stuntman Frank Maher to McGoohan, another crew member who had some level of frindship with the prisoner creator. Whilst Mr. Maher is frequently and lengthily quoted in official prisoner histories, there is scarcely ever any mention of Bernard Williams, about whom Patrick McGoohan once remarked,

“His work on The Prisoner was superb and his contribution to the show was far beyond his nominal status. He’s the tops.”

In my next Blog you will find out why the authors who have controlled the information about this show for so many years have chosen to make Mr. Bernard Williams largely an Invisible Man in archive TV history. You will be seeing him more clearly next time.

Oh... Just one more thing. As this blog has in part been pointing out how Patrick McGoohan freely gave unstinting praise to those contributors to his Prisoner project, it would be remiss of me in my small blogging project not to mention once again my friend and collaborator: the Sheriff of Harmony, without whom much of my information would perhaps have remained in the limbo of the lost past. I'm Obliged.

McGoohan in his own words: They're making bigger and better bombs, faster planes,.. I hate to say it, there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hasn't been used.

2011-10-05T13:08:00.002+01:00

Reviews of The Prisoner often refer to the paranoid nature of the Village and its inhabitants, and the paranoiac behaviour of Number Six. His constant search to discover what side people were on and his refusal to trust anyone can seem positively weird nowadays. However, in the Cold War era such a notion was self-explanatory. Everyone knew which side of the Iron Curtain they were on. The fear of the NATO states about the USSR, China and Communism generally tends nowadays to be dismissed as having been merely some kind of ‘Red Scare’ stirred up by democratic politicians. The dreadfulness of the Vietnam War was challenging opinion about who exactly were the ‘good guys’ and who were the ‘bad guys’ in the world and indeed whether the price of this form of ‘fighting for democracy’ was worth paying. The apparent clarity of the Second World War and the naïve innocence of the 1950’s began to be overwhelmed by the increasing scepticism of many citizens about whom in the world they could trust. Hence the question Number Six was asking, “Whose side are you on?” takes on a whole new possibility of meaning. In 1962 though, there were those who retained complete faith in the side they were on. One of those men was Jack L. Warner.

In 1962 he commissioned a new movie that is so much a throwback to the simplicities of the 1950’s that some sources today will tell you it was produced in that decade. The inclusion of the Dragnet TV star Jack Webb as narrator possibly contributes to this erroneous notion. The film was made in black and white but the documentary-style ending sequences were in colour.

The movie ran for just under an hour. It was designed to be exhibited to American Service Personnel at US military bases all around the world – the intention being to entertain, inform, motivate and congratulate them about their military service and fulfilment of their citizenship duties. It was entitled Freedom and You.

A shortened version, of 29 minutes, was later released to schools and shown on TV, and this short-form of the movie carried a different title. With much less context because of the trimmed-out 20 minutes, the film was cut to resemble an episode of a popular half-hour TV Thriller. It was also given a snappier title: RED NIGHTMARE. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuvHBgHyHh0

Such context as this illustrates how the world of Number Six allegorised the political world of the 1960’s. As I discussed in my previous blog to this one, The Prisoner was commissioned on April 16th 1966, but it seems the exact scripting of the show remained quite fluid even four months later, when Everyman began location filming in Portmeirion (on September 5th 1966). The script of Arrival necessarily had to have been more firmly designed however, as it was being utilised to act as the functional introduction to the rules and default settings that would apply to the Village. David Tomblin and George Markstein were the credited writers, but Tomblin was quick to memorialise that Patrick McGoohan was significantly involved in the writing too. The first half of that episode seems to have used the events in Freedom and You/Red Nightmare as a structural template.

If you watch Red Nightmare you will find that the film begins with an opening long shot of “Mid Town, USA”. It quite resembles a village, with a tall spire at its focus. Is it in Kansas? It is not!

Jack Webb narrates that we are apparently in a facsimile American town, which lies behind the Iron Curtain! It is a training camp for spies and saboteurs! In Danger Man, an episode featured a facsimile British town behind the Iron Curtain called Hamden, the title of the episode is Colony Three. It was made just a couple of years after the release of Freedom and You. Rumours of spy training towns were often featuring in the press of those years. Whereas Red Nightmare is quite clear that Mid Town (as it is ambiguously named) is a purely communist plot, Colony Three reveals a degree of uncertainty about whether only one side knows about Hamden.

Red Nightmare gets its title from the dream sequence that begins about ten minutes into the film. The protagonist, who is an American Everyman called Jerry, dreams that his own actual town is now in a Communist America! A true red nightmare! There are some very close echoes of Red Nightmare evident in the first half of Arrival. The harmonies begin with one of the first things that Jerry does in his dream: this is to try to phone his wife on a public telephone. He is not permitted to make the call – the Operator is not especially helpful.

Your Permit Number please.
Permit Number? I’m afraid I don’t have a permit. I just want to call my house and talk to my wife.
No personal calls allowed without a permit from the Commissar. Now get off the line please.

Compare and contrast Jerry’s conversation with one of the first things Number Six does, once he finds himself in his unfamiliar village:

Number please.
What exchange is this?
Number please.
I want to make a call ...
Local calls only! What is your number, sir?
Haven’t got a number.
No number, no call.

In Red Nightmare it makes perfect sense for a public phone to be found at the drugstore, but why does the Village include the existence of a public phone in Arrival? Why would there even be a public phone in such a closed community? Nonetheless, as a dramatic building block in the plot of Arrival, this idea is just as effective as it is in Red Nightmare, and this is just the first structural similarity. Jerry is already inside a shop when he tries to makes his call, whereas Number Six makes his call out of doors and then finds his way inside a shop. Both baffled men eventually leave these shops in order to explore their strange new hometown. Jerry doesn't need a map.

In Red Nightmare, Jerry sees a small jeep appearing carrying a military man, who makes a speech to an assembling populace. In Arrival, something similar could be said to be happening as Number Six finds his way into a central plaza, where Number Two is barking platitudes through a hand-held megaphone, as mini-mokes tootle about aimlesly.

Both Jerry and Number Six mingle with the townspeople/villagers, expresing bafflement with the behaviour of the citizens they are surrounded by. Both protagonists seem equally unnerved and unsure what to say, or what to do, or indeed, whom they can trust.

As the action continues, a resort to violence eventually occurs. In Red Nightmare, a museum claiming that a Russian invented the telephone (rather than an American) enrages Jerry. In The Prisoner, Number Six only becomes enraged when he is asked about his Politics.

In both cases minor destruction ensues.

For Jerry, things rapidly go from bad to worse. His wife and children are cold to him because they are more interested in the welfare of the Party than the welfare of their husband/parent. Jerry’s workmates despair of his inability to meet his quotas. The townsfolk turn against him because he complains about the way things are being run, and after his vandalism in the museum Jerry is arrested, tried by a court where his only defence can be to confess, and very soon his nightmare ends with his execution.

The overall tenets of Red Nightmare are in some ways what Number Six is faced with as the episodes of The Prisoner unfold. The Prisoner is of course a fable based around the audience of 1966 and it’s preconceptions of Totalitarian Communism. For Number Six matters will proceed much more slowly and less terminally than they do for Jerry but at around the halfway point of Arrival, just like Jerry, Number Six is violently detained (after his initial escape attempt). In the case of Red Nightmare the protagonist finds his world has returned to normal as he wakes up in his own bed. Number Six wakes up in a hospital bed, only to find his nightmare continuing with a new Number Two. As both wake up, they look eerily similar.

In the closing sequences of Freedom and You, Jack Webb recites a stirring speech aimed at the watching servicemen (and women) of 1962/63 that his film was commissioned for:

Freedom!
No single word in all mankind has come to mean so much.
To prevent Communism from consuming the entire free world there stands but one man.
That man Is You.
The Individual.

George Markstein, was a London correspondent for the USAF staff newspaper published at the 3^rd American air force base in the UK, at Ruislip, London. This would be exactly the sort of establishment that Freedom and You would have been screened at. However, Markstein, in his reminiscences in the 1980’s only seemed to recall The Prisoner as a sequel to Danger Man. The fact that he simultaneously seemed unaware of Colony Three makes his passion for Drake seem surprisingly uninformed. There is a little more about Markstein and the process of script creation for The Prisoner here: http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/12/mcgoohan-on-peoples-minds-not-so-great.html

As a professional film-man there seems no reason why David Tomblin might not have come across this Warner Bros film at some time too, between 1962 and 1966. He certainly had direct exposure to the Danger Man episode Colony Three, which was based on the same Cold War legends of Spy Training Towns that are mentioned in Red Nightmare.

Patrick McGoohan spoke more than once about how his show had been an allegory. In many ways he was allegorising the Cold War itself - the world of hiding and finding secret information. The original film that Red Nightmare is extracted from - Freedom and You - concludes with an almost orgiastic display of American military hardware: shells are fired, bullets are shot and bombs are dropped. They all explode in glorious colour with no suggestion of the reasons for all this fall out. Patrick McGoohan was certainly utilising the same Cold War political attitudes that exist in Red Nightmare, but he used his village setting to re-address those political issues and posit whether there was really any difference between the two sides and allegorically reflect upon to what degree these political forces were simply mirroring personal choices that every individual person has to make every single day of their life. Whilst many films of the era may bear philosophical comparison with The Prisoner the structural similarities between Red Nightmare and Arrival suggest a somewhat more direct relationship between the two. Perhaps there is even a faint suggestion of Free for All in this brief frame from Red Nightmare.

Watching the Warner Bros film for the first time, a correspondent of mine also pointed out to me that when Jerry is talking to his wife and small children at home, a military recruiting officer (enlisting the older daughter) suddenly enters the house, without knocking or breaking down the door. There is no indication that the door needs to be unlocked – it just opens and people walk in. Just as Number Six seems to have no control over his own front door, neither does Jerry, in his red nightmare!

In 1977, when Patrick McGoohan was first interviewed specifically about The Prisoner, he remarked at one point:
“I had a whole format prepared of this ‘Prisoner’ thing which initially came to me on one of the locations on ‘Secret Agent’ when we went to this place called Portmeirion, where a great deal of it was shot, and I thought it was an extraordinary place, architecturally and atmosphere wise, and should be used for something, and that was two years before the concept came to me.”
http://www.cultv.co.uk/mcgoohan.htm

McGoohan was filming in Portmeirion in 1960 with David Tomblin, and that was two years before Freedom and You/Red Nightmare was produced.

In 1966 Patrick McGoohan went to Lew Grade with an idea that Lew thought so crazy it just might work, and afterwards David Tomblin recalled his friend and partner telling him that Lew had guaranteed the money they needed to make the show that he reminded Tomblin was, 'what we’ve talked about all these years’.

One other remarkable coincident similarity to The Prisoner that you will not see in Red Nightmare because it forms part of the extraneous material that was cut from the original hour-long Freedom and You, is the scene where there is a racing car at an airfield … and we see it approaching – from the far distance …

If you would like to know moor about Colony Three, and its pertinence to the format of The Prisoner, some previous information is here:

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/09/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-where-am-i-in.html

For moor on Red Nightmare, Conelrad is unbeatable:

http://www.conelrad.com/sovietamerica/red_nightmare.html

McGoohan in his own terms: "I didn’t resign, in any way"

2011-09-17T16:55:00.000+01:00

Thecreative origination of The Prisoner seems to have lain solely in the mind ofPatrick McGoohan. In my previous Blogs I have discussed the facts about howAmerican network interest in Danger Man had waned as quickly as the NielsenNumbers in 1965 and how McGoohan had said that the future of the show reliedlargely upon American interest (investment). However, there is also no doubt that he felt the show had run its course anyway. There had been over forty hours ofstories produced by then, so his misgivings seem quite understandable. The showalso faced a huge technical challenge to move into colour. It would havehad many expectations of it from the established audience. McGoohan said ininterviews years later that he had asked Lew Grade to switch the show into colourpreviously, but Lew had declined to do so on the grounds of cost. It may well bethat the failure of Danger Man to achieve the ratings CBS wanted in 1965 was due to the fact that in America colour was already becomingthe expectation and the monochrome adventures of John Drake seemed pale to theUS mass audience at that time, who now expected colour on their TV screens.

Nonetheless,it seems likely that ITC would have continued to produce the show anyway, asLew Grade was selling it all around the world by this time and John Drake wasat a peak of popularity even into 1966 in territories as diverse as Japan andArgentina. There was certainly no pressure on McGoohan to stop making the show;that seems apparent. However, his career to that date had demonstrated that hewas rarely happy to ‘stand still’ for very long. He once explained that onemain reason he had liked playing John Drake was that the plots allowed him, asa secret agent, to play a different role lots of the time – as Drake impersonatedsome character or other – and that this variety had made Danger Man not unlikeplaying Repertory Theatre, where he would adopt a character for two weeks at atime. The real nub of his problem may have been two-fold.

First,the budget would be constrained because of the lack of CBS interest; thereliance of ITC on American investment was constantly well-publicised by LewGrade himself, via his self-congratulatory press releases – the need to moveinto colour would exacerbate this problem of finance. McGoohan sought more quality both in scripts and production standards but was facing the inevitable fact that both of these would be increasingly under pressure.

Second,Ralph Smart had declined to be involved in any further series of Danger Man.Whilst there is no evidence that McGoohan and Smart had any close relationshipit does seem the case that Smart had been very much the driving force behindthe script-writers and the stories as well as the production standardsthemselves, but also that his touch was a light one and by no means was he ‘hands-on’. Asa consequence of Smart’s increasing absence from the scene (Smart was to have no involvement in the two colour episodes of Danger Man that were made), Sidney Cole becamethe controlling producer. He seems to have been more hands-on than Smartand this may well have not suited McGoohan, who often tried to assume anunofficial controlling role, as if he were an executive producer of Danger Man.Cole himself reminisced once that McGoohan had complained towards the end that things werealways done Cole’s way. Mr. Cole had pointed out to his star actor that this was because he [Cole] wasthe Producer.

These circumstances seemed to have left McGoohan determined to exit the show. He had gained a personal rapport with Lew Grade and his own professional self-confidence evidently allowed him to negotiate for his own preferences. Contrary to the conflation of his real life into the plot of The Prisonerby the traditional fan-base of The Prisoner however, there was no sudden or dramatic‘resignation’ a-la Prisoner Number Six. McGoohan explained more than once howevents developed: the quote that heads this blog is from the 1984 Channel 4drama-documentary Six into One Hisinterview was chopped up to fit the way the documentary was made and the rawmaterial has never been made available so we may never know what wassaid,other than the excerpts included in the broadcast. Evidently by 1984,Patrick McGoohan was aware of the fables being embroidered by his erstwhilefans, because one of the first things he is at pains to clarify is that henever resigned in any peremptory way from Danger Man.

I didn’t resign, in anyway, I just decided that……….. I enjoyed doing Danger Man but I thought thatwe’d done enough of them and the ideas started to get a bit thin and beforethey sort of got thinner and thinner and thinner, until there was nothingthere, I thought it was a good idea to stop; and I went to Lew Grade and saidthat would be about enough. And then discussions went on about other things.

http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/blog/index.cfm?start=1&news_id=201

My last blog providedclear evidence of the veracity of his statements and their consistency with contemporary accounts.

Patrick McGoohan's explanation seems to be fully backed up by David Tomblin’s account of how theshow began it’s first steps into life, with Tomblin not even fully knowing whatthe project was to be about!

Patrick came in one day and said, “I’ve seen Lew, we’ve got themoney, we’ve got the series.” Oh great I said – what series is that? He said,“Well you know, what we’ve talked about all these years, - and so on and soforth – so he said write the first story, so I said I’ve never written before,so he said “Well, we’d better start writing.

Thisseemingly odd state of communication (to modern minds) between the two men, whowere friends as well as partners in Everyman, was to some degree explained byBernie Williams, when he reminisced about his own personal interactions withthem.

The thing that was very noticeable forme when I met David and Patrick is that they were definitely ‘loners’; theywere ‘men’s men’. They didn’t talk too much about stuff and when they did itwas ‘intelligent discussion’ – serious thoughts ………..so somehow we just‘clicked’ and yet we didn’t talk too much about it. I just think we wereemotionally in the right place to make this kind of material and so it waseasy.

Inthat same 1984 documentary mentioned above, McGoohan went on to describe whathad been on his mind

What was the germ of the idea? How long had it been in myhead? Well, it was….. in my mind……. from the very early days, maybe from aboutseven years old, being the individual against the Establishment.... theindividual against Bureaucracy, the individual against so many laws that wereall confining…… the Church for instance – it was almost impossible to doanything that was not some form of sin…

Therelevance and importance of Portmeirion was also emphasised by McGoohan duringthe interview footage interspersed within that quirky, but very effectivedocumentary

I can remember precisely, we had two weeks of vacationfor the 39 half-hours of Danger Man, in North Wales, and one of the locationswas at a place called Portmeirion, and I had to do a shot out of one of theDanger Man episodes – driving in a - and I remember it - it was a bronze AstonMartin and I drove it down this little street in the village and stopped andhad to do a scene, and it was the first time I had seen Portmeirion and Ithought it was a miraculous sort of place, beautiful and already, in my head, Iwas astonished that I had never seen this in a film. I don’t know if it ever…..used it… This is a setting which could be beautiful enough, mysterious enough,and confining enough… to… be…. the base for our man in isolation.

BernieWilliams provides the final confirmation that although The Prisoner had been commissioned between Lew Grade and Patrick McGoohan on April 16th 1966, by the time he became involved the series' intentions were by no means clear to anyone other than Patrick Joseph McGoohan.

The first thing I think about The Prisoner is the wordNightmare…..Because it came up so quick, and it wasn’t developed! It wasdeveloping in Patrick’s mind but we were already rolling the cameras so we weretrying to get a grasp of what the series was about, and Patrick wrote the firstscript, Arrival, with David, Tomblin. It was really a question of sorting outwhat is this village, what is this man, what’s their motives, what’s hismotives, what’s this place supposed to be …….. and all these issues are beingdiscussed as we’re shooting!!

The original premise for The Prisoner seems to have been "the individual against the Establishment.... theindividual against Bureaucracy, the individual against so many laws that wereall confining".... and it is plain that McGoohan intended to make his tale carry some biographical resonances. His insertion of his own time and date of birth for his character, Number Six, makes that clear in Arrival. How he was to put across these ideas against a backcloth of the Cold War and the shadowy world of contemporary spy shows was the predicament McGoohan faced next. He intended no sequel to Danger Man, James Bond, Man from Uncle or any of those shows. He was ploughing his own furrow but although he seemed to revel in isolation, he was by no means ploughing alone. He had men like David Tomblin, Bernie Williams and Jack Shampan to help. In some of my earlier blogs I have touched on the raw materials he may have used from his own life and career experience In my next Blogs I will touch on a few of the things that seem unlikely to have found their way into the show by mere coincidence. Everything comes from somewhere.

McGoohan from his own Mouth: “Boredom was how it Began”

2011-08-22T23:20:00.013+01:00

For a show that has apparently been researched so much, the creative origins and inspirations of The Prisoner are cloaked in a remarkable obscurity. Patrick McGoohan once said it “grew out of boredom”, implying that he had tired of an endless round of the Danger Man that had occupied his time for a year and a half by late 1965. However, as my earlier Blog has pointed out…. http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/03/mcgoohan-in-mind-from-what-youve-been.html the situation was not entirely one-sided. CBS had found that the Nielsen Numbers were not on the side of Secret Agent, which was being outsmarted by Get Smart on NBC, in its prime-time-slot and it became apparent that the American sale of Danger Man/Secret Agent would not be renewed for 1966. The circumstances generally described in ‘official’ Prisoner histories is that Patrick McGoohan peremptorily resigned after two episodes of a projected new colour series of Danger Man had been made. However this is patently untrue as this newspaper report from April 1966 demonstrates:

The developing decisions were evidently being made as a progression, and without the temper and ego often suggested. From that article of April 16, 1966 it is clear that there had already been discussions about “another Adventure series”. These meetings were taking place before, and whilst, the two colour episodes of Danger Man were still being made. There was no sudden resignation. The ‘official’ books would further have you believe that The Prisoner began life as some form of sequel to Danger Man/Secret Agent. This story primarily has always relied upon the comments made by George Markstein to cult fans around 1979.

[Danger Man] was a very successful series, but they were planning to go better and bigger, and they were planning to go into colour and in fact I set up the first two colour episodes.

So, Danger Man was all set to continue, what do you make of what actually happened to Danger Man at that point?
Well, McGoohan quit! He got fed up. We all thought the series would go on. It was very successful, it had gone into colour, it was showing in America, but the pressure was enormous - a series turnaround puts an incredible strain on an actor and I can quite understand that he'd had enough - and he gave it up…………. What a lot of the people in the studio wanted was to keep their jobs! They hoped he'd go on doing a series and so I sat down at the typewriter one day - you know, any port in a storm - and typed a couple of pages. They were about a secret agent - and after all Drake had been a secret agent - who suddenly quits without any apparent reason, as McGoohan had quit without any apparent reason, and who is put away!

http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/markstein.htm

Whilst all this fan-babble makes for a great story to pass around the camp-fire, the actual historical facts show that narrative to be wholly inaccurate. The fact that the story is untrue might also be taken to impair the veracity of the story-tellers. By the end of that April of 1966, it was also made public that McGoohan was making one more TV series because he felt he owed it to the Medium.

What remains unclear is what exactly it was that Patrick McGoohan had been proposing to Lew Grade in the weeks prior to April 16, 1966; the ideas that would involve “a very different sort of character". The simplistic explanation might be to suggest that what was being proposed was exactly what we eventually saw on the screen in The Prisoner. That does not seem to quite pass muster though, because if the idea was fully crystallised and all the concepts visualised at the time of conception then there would no reason for the fact that so few scripts were fully ready by September, five months later. Nor would it explain why Bernie Williams, the Production Manager, commented that the series development “was all in Pat’s head”.

Patrick McGoohan spoke of a 40 page Presentation that he took to show Lew Grade and in truth their independent comments, over the subsequent years confirm that whatever the initial ideas were comprised of, they were not some continuation of Danger Man, as Markstein’s fan club has tried to maintain over the last thirty years or so. Grade himself made this direct reference in his 1987 autobiography, confirming he was in possession of a ‘portfolio’:

I had lunch one day with William Paley…. During the lunch……. I told him I had a project called The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan and showed them a portfolio of pictures of Portmeirion which was the location we intended to use. At the moment though, Patrick McGoohan only wants to make 17 episodes…….”

Patrick McGoohan extrapolated his description of that meeting too:

I had a whole format prepared of this "Prisoner" thing which initially came to me on one of the locations on "Secret Agent" when we went to this place called Portmeirion, where a great deal of it was shot, and I thought it was an extraordinary place, architecturally and atmosphere-wise, and should be used for something and that was two years before the concept came to me. So I prepared it and went in to see Lew Grade. I had photographs of the Village or whatever and a format and he said, "I don't want to read the format," because he says he doesn't read formats, he says he can't read apart from accounts, and he sort of said, "Well, what's it about? Tell me." So I talked for ten minutes and he stopped me and said, "I don't understand one word you're talking about, but how much is it going to be?"

http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/troyer.htm

One quote from McGoohan’s 1977 account is intriguing: So I talked for ten minutes and he stopped me and said, "I don't understand one word you're talking about, but how much is it going to be?" Another quote he attributed to Grade was, “It’s so crazy, it just might work!”

These various accounts certainly refute the various tales of The Prisoner being intended as a sequel to Danger Man. Given that CBS had only just declined to run Secret Agent for their 1966 Primetime season there would have been no logic for Lew Grade to seek to sell William Paley a sequel to that very same show ! Furthermore in this context, why should Grade have claimed to have “not understood one word” or thought “it’s so crazy” about a sequel to the adventures of John Drake? There can be no doubt that what McGoohan was proposing to Grade had some much deeper elements to it than even a slightly offbeat secret agent show. Lew Grade around that time was commissioning shows such as The Champions, which involved secret agents literally with super-human powers, as well as Randall & Hopkirk, which was a show about a private eye who was actually a ghost!! This indicates how Grade was no stick-in-the-mud for wacky ideas, and that whatever it was that McGoohan was proposing - was highly innovative. What is also unequivocal is that McGoohan had the village of Portmeirion at the heart of his concept from the very beginning.

The notion that The Prisoner began life as merely an ‘Adventure Series’ and only later mutated into the surreal is also revealed as false by viewing its first sign of creative life. The very first script written – a script written by Patrick McGoohan himself is demonstrably surreal. The first script written seems to have been Free For All, and not Arrival, as is usually claimed and popularly believed. The writing of Arrival was admitted by David Tomblin to have taken as long as a month. McGoohan’s script-writing commonly occupied him for a matter of hours – between 36 and 48, day and night. Compressing the working weeks into days by his eccentrically intensive creative method, McGoohan must certainly have produced Free For All first. There is a key piece of irrefutable literary evidence available to demonstrate that this is so as well. Proof if you like. And the proof revolves around the butler.

In the early surviving pre-shooting scripts that have surfaced over the years there are several of Free for All at various stages of development. None of them include the character of any butler. In Arrival however, a butler is included. However he is not the diminutive, silent version that became second only to Rover as a trope of the series. In the first versions of Arrival, this butler is visualised as over six foot tall, verbal and somewhat debonair (he is described as the sort of man who might drive a Jaguar) In his later fan memoirs David Tomblin recalled how McGoohan took the initial versions of Arrival and then made changes.
When we wrote the first episode, Patrick got very excited about it and then began to add touches ? he began to stylise it ? and it took on quite a different look. He was going sort of "over there" and I was trying to keep it "over here" because my sort of experience was heavily actionised
http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/shampan_tomblin.htm
One of the biggest changes was evidentially to the character of the butler. However, given that McGoohan’s own early scripts for Free For All include no butler at all, he plainly had not read/digested Arrival prior to his first writes of Free for All. This must inevitably mean that Free For All preceded Arrival.

All the other elements of the Free for All we eventually see on-screen are in place however, the complex word games, bizarre languages, drinking sessions with a pretending Number Two, brutal beatings at the end, and the hallucinatory visits to strange Committee hearings and Labour Exchanges. All these surrealistic and puzzling aspects remain intact to the filmed version. Many of the reasons that McGoohan’s proposed new show might have left Lew Grade “not understanding a word” are evidenced from the very beginning – the very first script. Claims that the show began with no more ambition than to be some ad-hoc continuation of the adventures of John Drake are provably false by inspecting the very evidence that the fan-clubs themselves have discovered, and then ignored.

I should emphasise that I do not intend by my descriptions to overly denigrate the actual sequel to Danger Man, which was Man in a Suitcase. However that show’s scripts lack the wit, cleverness and depth that McGoohan was bringing to bear in The Prisoner. To be honest Man in a Suitcase never really matches the wit, cleverness and depth that had pertained during the latter 45 monochrome Danger Man shows helmed between Ralph Smart and Patrick McGoohan either, but those momochrome films were of such stature that it is almost an unfair comparison to make. There are individual episodes of Man in a Suitcase that do hold up against its illustrious predecessor and that is to the sequel's credit.

Looking at that strangely unknown and misunderstood period of time between April and September of 1966 reveals a time pregnant with ideas that were beginning to rise into more fully-formed shapes, like the birth of the Rover itself they wriggled in various deformities before emerging full and rounded - as McGoohan inspired and guided and in turn became further inspired himself by the ideas he drew in to himself like a creationist magnet.

McGoohan in his own words: If people don't like it, there's only one person to blame - Me!

2011-08-06T17:32:00.027+01:00

This blogpost might make most sense if read in conjunction with the one immediately preceeding.

The opening quote to this blogpost is from an interview with Patrick McGoohan in 1967, as his new show was about to premiere in the UK. The same interviewer also noted:

"The idea is his own. He is also the executive producer. He has taken over direction of many of the sequences (but without giving himself a screen credit for this). He has buried himself in the cutting-rooms during the editing of the episodes. And he has worked on every script, irrespective of who may have written it,."

As mentioned in my previous blog-post, huge debate in prisoner fans circles swirls around the presence of Colin Gordon. One dismissive theory says that his two Number Two's are completely different persons within the fiction. Part of the rationale for this view lies in the common ITC practice of having the same actor play entirely different roles in different episodes. However most ITC shows of that time had no story arc or continual narrative. Their heroes would be introduced fully-formed and have many adventures and then the series would just be finished, with the hero vanishing in exactly the same form as he had first appeared. A relevant case in point is the sequel series ITC created to McGoohan’s very own Danger Man. Man in a Suitcase comprised 30 episodes and whilst the series did explain where McGill came from, it never gave us a cue as to his conclusion.

However, in the case of The Prisoner this reductionist rationale seems inadequate because McGoohan only intended a short limited series and could not have expected his audience to entirely fail to notice that one week’s new Number Two was later an old Number Two!! It suited his plot to overtly recognise and explain the recurrence of Leo McKern but he chose not to do so in the case of Colin Gordon. However, that they were the same person seems indicated by their both drinking milk, plus the addition of a line in the script where Number Two in The General acknowledges Number Six as being "an old friend". It is oft-claimed in Prisoner cult writing that because Colin Gordon displays abject defeat at the conclusion of A,B&C, that he was somehow doomed. However McKern failed to succeed just as much in Chimes of Big Ben, and he clearly was allowed back, so why not Gordon? Of course, I am hardly the first to stick with the intended order; once upon a time so did the 'official' promoters.

The previous experience of the pair meeting in A,B&C also deals quite neatly with the puzzle in The General that stems from the apparent unwillingness of the new old Number Two to get too involved with Number Six and also why Number Six 'sticks his nose in'. To defeat again the old but new Number Two gives a very simple motivation to the actions of Number Six in this episode. Speedlearn seemed not to be aimed at him especially and yet he goes out of his way to destroy it. Once you watch The Prisoner in harmony with the vision of it’s creator, Patrick McGoohan, then the series really does make more and more sense the moor you look at it, rather than less. Unfortunately whole generations have now been deluded into watching this show in such wilfully incorrect orders that many of the nuances have been either lost or utterly confused. Seldom can a fan-base have so debased the object of it's affections.

Perhaps the most ludicrous fan theory swirls around just one of the three appearances of Christopher Benjamin. His role as Potter in The Girl who was Death has been enough to launch a demented sub-cult about John Drake. Yet these same fans seem to entirely fail to take into account that a character called Potter appears in Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, but is played by a different actor altogether. Benjamin’s Potter is not even real within the fiction – he simply forms part of a visualisation of a nursery story that Number Six is telling to some children. Number Six visualising Christopher Benjamin’s face is of course perfectly in harmony with the fact that Number Six experienced this man as first a Labour Exchange official in Arrival and then apparently promoted to be assistant to Number two in Chimes of Big Ben.

Strangely, fans determined to only see meaning where they want to see it and ignoring the rest of the evidence often dismiss one of the most compelling cases for a deliberate reuse of an actor. Patrick Cargill’s turn as Thorpe in Many Happy Returns perfectly sets him to be the subject of the ire of Number Six in Hammer Into Anvil. Thorpe was especially unpleasant to Number Six in Many Happy Returns. Given that Thorpe was supposed to be on the side of the confused prisoner, this seems an odd trait to impose upon the character. One common fan criticism of Hammer into Anvil is about why Number Six is so determined to break that particular Number Two. After all, in previous episodes villagers have died and in the case of Cobb, the man was a personal friend of Number Six prior to his captivity, yet Number Six becomes positively enraged about the suicide of Number 73. Why? Well, if Thorpe was indeed the Number Two in Hammer into Anvil the reason WHY? becomes much more obvious; perhaps so obvious to Patrick McGoohan that he never even felt the need to explicate to the audience that it was the same man. After all, they had seen him (Cargill was a well-known face on British TV) only three episodes before. McGoohan didn’t consider his audience to be stupid. He couldn’t allow for cultists many years later of course. It is also a fact that Hammer into Anvil was produced prior to Many Happy Returns. McGoohan would have been very conscious that Cargill would certainly be recognised as his turn as Number Two was already in the can. It seems eminently reasonable to accept that he then made Thorpe antagonistic in this way expressly so that once the episodes were placed into his (by then) visualised order, there would be a continuity apparent between these two characters that would explain their behaviour without his having to script a tedious trail of reasons.

The brief appearance of Kenneth Griffith as the last Number Two we see, prior to the return of Leo McKern seems in no particular way to contradict why he should not have been appointed The President for the village rituals taking place in Fall Out. Indeed the proximity of the two episodes seems almost to demand that the audience takes this view and it could not have failed to be an obvious inference to Patrick McGoohan.

In a similar manner, although generally discounted amongst the serious fan base the audience seems almost bound to conclude that Number 48 is the same person within the fiction as The Kid/Number 8 was, from Living in Harmony. Just as with Kenneth Griffith, there seems nothing to obviate this possibility; indeed the first time we encounter Number 48 he is strapped to the same equipment as is used to resuscitate Leo McKern’s [dead] Number Two. Number 48 also wears a top hat, just as The Kid liked to do. Would McGoohan have directed and edited these episodes and really have assumed his audience would not make connections between these actors and the characters, just a week or two apart? It seems unreasonable to assume he was not taking all of this into account. That he was juggling with ideas and themes throughout the production and post-production allowed him to do this – he was literally writing the show as he produced it, in many ways.

One recurring actor may have passed him by however, and that was Larry Taylor. He is perhaps most obvious for playing Mexican Sam in Living in Harmony but he is also the Gypsy Man in Many Happy Returns

However this could raise the possibility that if the man who was Sam was outside the village when Number Six believed himself to be escaping back to London, then the gypsies in Many Happy Returns were actually a village observation team positioned to where Number Six would come ashore, making certain he was fit and fed, to carry on his journey, reach London and have his rendezvous with Mrs. Butterworth, his dream woman.

I would be the first to say that adding further storyline complications to the already labyrinthine plots of The Prisoner might be superflous. However, it is only by fully considering these various connections that enables the viewer to see that McGoohan was taking care to ensure that (so far as he could) all his episodes linked together in a rational, as well as creatively free manner He produced an intriguing but consistent narrative arc. He had no interest in tediously filling in the back-story gaps for the viewer, but where a careful and perceptive viewer chooses to look closely, all the episode sequences can be demonstrated to have a logical form. This approach bears witness to his detailed role as Executive Producer. Because of commercial production logistics some of these character linkages were clearly not scripted (it is said that Colin Gordon for instance only stayed to make The General as a favour to McGoohan, because no other actor was available to fit the production schedule).

McGoohan once criticised himself for not ensuring he had firm scripts and storyboards before starting filming, but the advantage this gave him was that he was able to juggle all the plot links he spotted and weave them into a complex series that still entrances the viewer all these years later. However, like any creative work, it primarily works when viewed from the eye of the man who wrote, directed and produced it.
.

My final point is perhaps one of the more esoteric, but it works so well, I am convinced McGoohan did it on purpose. When first scripted Dance of the Dead may well have been one of the possibly-intended second episodes un-edited by George Markstein; however some image quality issues led that episode to fall out of the show (as explicated in a memoir by Ian Rakoff). Reinstated later all the aspects of that episode that signal it to be a second episode, such as Number Six stating he is new to the village, are brilliantly and cleverly accounted for by its being placed immediately following Many Happy Returns (one of the last episodes to be produced) when Numbers Six was indeed freshly returned to the village!! By this method, McGoohan ensured all these episode dialogues still made sense when this segment ultimately was placed at number eight. McGoohan seems even to have taken one more step to cleverly draw the viewer into making sense of these episodes sequencing one another. In Many Happy Returns, a black cat appears as a mysterious presence, at both the beginning and the end of the episode.

In the segueing episode Dance of the Dead this oft-unremarked recurring actor reprises his role and is fully revealed to be part of the village apparatus of observation - in the light of the presence of Mary Morris, a witch's familiar could be implied. However, what the unresearched viewer would be unaware of is that the cat's involvement in Dance of the Dead was originally filmed months before Many Happy Returns was made. McGoohan seems to have spotted it as the perfect dramatic gimmick he need to ensure these episodes make perfect sense when placed next to one another, in the correct order.

Be seeing it.
Be seeing you.
Shiver my whiskers.

Larkin's Blog - Supplemental
13th September 2011
Reading a post at http://david-stimpson.blogspot.com/ reminded me of another ordering continuity that McGoohan/Everyman seems to have cleverly taken into account as the episode order was finalised for broadcast. In the concluding scene of Schizoid Man, the Number Two is chatting to the apparent Number Twelve and becomes suspicious about whether Curtis/Number Twelve is the man whom he appears to be. Number Six is definitively caught out by his ignorance of the fact that Susan, Curtis’ wife, was dead. However, immediately preceding that, they have an exchange that seems to first raise a doubt in the Number Two’s mind and leads to him to lay the Susan trap.

2: …..have you thought any more about that proposition I put to you when I arrived?
6: Sorry, I’ve had no time
2: But you must have some views?
6: I’m afraid not
2: Look old chap, we’ve been through some scrapes before, but we’ve never fallen out over them. The General’s not going to behead you !
6: We won’t know until I’ve reported to the General, will we
2: Report to the General? That’s a new one!

In the very next episode we meet The General. He is a computer. No wonder Number Two thought it a strange thing for Curtis to say, strange - if not out of order in fact! Whether this congruence of plot arose by deliberate pre-planning or was merely noticed, or inserted post-hoc, matters little. The important thing is that Everyman’s ordering of the episodes gives it the truest meaning. The devilish cleverness is often in the detail.

McGoohan made his own plans: "Each episode will be self-contained but part of a continuing story-line"

2011-07-23T16:47:00.004+01:00

My principal motivation in writing this Blog-roll was to make a place of reference for refuting the fan-created fallacy that The Prisoner was created and formed despite Patrick McGoohan, rather than because of him. Given the time, energy and creative devotion he applied to making this thought-provoking show happen at all, then develop and conclude it, this unfairly false history deserved to be debunked someplace.

Sometimes the fan-fallacies are geared to misrepresenting historical fact, but often there are also 'apparent' facts that they derive from the fiction itself. One of the subjects they have liked most to expound upon is Episode Order, and their supposition is that the episodes were broadcast in either an arbitrary or mistaken order. The implied barb that Everyman somehow lost control of the series is part of their contention that McGoohan had lost control of himself. This fundamental question was raised from the very earliest, when the Canadian enthusiasts attending the “Troyer Interview” complained that too much about the series seemed accidental. Because Patrick McGoohan himself emphasised that he was apparently making the show up as he went along, they found it difficult to credit that such a course of action was possible and therefore suspected something about McGoohan’s story could not be right.

This undercurrent of disbelief seems to have perpetuated itself in UK Prisoner fandom and led them to increasingly sideline McGoohan as an individual and search instead for some kind of ‘collectivist’ solution to this conundrum. This led to the notion that episodes were created in isolation, by distinct writers (mentored only by the Script editor) and the fact that there was any coherence at all was due to the inherent genius of these writers, and the genius of the other collaborators; genii which withstood even the erratic megalomania of McGoohan whose interference became signalled by his allegedly incoherent, but inspired final episode. In the light of all this misunderstanding, many fans find they have a self-righteous craving to undo the errors and so ‘make sense’ of the series. In fact, had they paid more attention to Bernie Williams, the production manager and Len Harris, the camera operator, they might have realised that the Collective was led and directed, even though some of them failed themselves to realise just what was going on.

Bernie Williams

"......it wasn't developed. It was developing in Patrick's mind but we were already rolling the cameras, so we were trying to get a grasp of what the series was about and.... er, Patrick wrote the first script, Arrival, with David. Tomblin; and it was really a case of sorting out... what is this village, what is this man, who are the people that's running it, what's their motives, what's his motives, where is this place supposed to be, should we let the audience know where it's supposed to be, are they the East, are they the West, all those issues were being discussed as we were shooting...... "

Len Harris

Patrick knew, it was all in his mind, how the stuff was going to be used – not too many people knew that. They knew there were some scripts about, not always complete, but you gleaned what you could from them. But pretty well all the arrangements were in his mind.

A news article from July in 1966 confirms the nature of McGoohan's grip on the visualisation of the the show he had yet to even begin. One of things that has puzzled me in the past has been why McGoohan ever elected to employ George Markstein, who had no real experience of script supervision. This article may perhaps explain a reason why. McGoohan's reference to *a book* that could be used as a reference point to view the series from is intriguing. Certainly Markstein was a competent journalistic writer and perhaps it was his failure to produce such a book that was one big reason for McGoohan's rapid change in attitude towards this erstwhile collaborator. Another thing about the making of this show that puzzles me is that it was commissioned on April 16th and yet it was not until July or August opf the same year that the first scripts seem to have appeared. It has struck me that one thing that was supposed to have been produced in this time was *the book*. This would have provided recruited script-writers with a clear reference-point to work from, whereas in fact all of the first batch of script-writers have attested that they were given very little clear guidance, and certainly nothing 'in writing'.

The existence of a story arc and episode order lies at the heart of many entertaining fan debates. Some influential Prisoner fan clubbers will remark that, “George Markstein supplied a 13 episode story arc”. However, the same Prisoner experts will also wax lyrically about how as many as three episodes were originally intended to become Episode Two http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Prisoner_episodes and indeed the principal fan club even persuaded A&E to release a dvd set with the episodes on the discs in their preferred ordering! It seems clear with all this debating that there was no story arc at the point of script commissioning. The fact that three of the first five episodes to enter production were geared to be Episode 2 (Free For All, Dance of the Dead and Chimes of Big Ben) no doubt added to the lack of confidence McGoohan increasingly had in his ineffective script editor, explaining why McGoohan evidently had side-lined him by Xmas of 1966.

Another key piece of evidence to demonstrate that episode order was decided post series completion rather than beforehand has been utterly overlooked by the fan studies over the years. In my earlier Blog I touched on the Canadian 13 episode series of 1967; http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2011/02/mcgoohan-in-his-own-words-noone-ever.html . It was only in the last year or two that my North American co-researcher, known as The Sheriff, clarified this ordering, in a showing, which even predated the first run in the UK. The circumstances of how and why the Canadian network ran with a 13 episode season remains something of a mystery, but it seems most likely to have been commissioned direct by some ITC executive, perhaps without reference to Everyman. The use of a different cut of Chimes of Big Ben, as the final conclusion might be significant. Many years later, when that different cut surfaced, to be marketed by the Fan Clubs as “the alternative” episode, Patrick McGoohan expressed annoyance and described this version as an unfinished rough cut that should never have seen the light of day. His reaction even indicates that he was never aware of what went on in Canada all those years before.

You see, that so-called lost episode just happened to be an unfinished cut of what eventually went out as ‘The Chimes of Big Ben’.

All the evidence points to the fact that the order of episodes was decided during post-production. Ian Rakoff’s memoir highlights the constant attention McGoohan was applying even to the editing and cutting processes and no doubt this allowed him to make the connections he wanted between the various stories and then assemble them into an Order that made a narrative.

Many fans contend the order applied was decided largely upon the basis of scattering the Portmeirion location episodes evenly, and whilst there is some merit to this notion, it is clearly not the only factor that was at work in McGoohan’s mind. Other fans contend that the Order was totally decided by ITC but it sems illogical to imagine that after all the attention McGoohan had paid to the production that he would then not have ensured a suitable episode order was suggested. The bizarre Canadian ordering emphasises how random an ordering could otherwise become, and the fact that the USA showing in 1968 almost replicated the UK one that had concluded a few months before seems to confirm that a determination was made over and above the Networks; indeed it would be nonsensical to think that the Network would not have demanded an approved order anyway. They were paying for the production and would not expect to have do the scheduling work for themselves!!

One way to emphasise the detailed comprehension McGoohan possessed over his series is to consider the occurrences of the various actors who appeared on more than one occasion in the series. Earnest fans seeking to demonstrate that the UK/USA broadcast order was inherently wrong in terms of the consistency of the fiction, often quote the significance of the presence of Colin Gordon as Number Two in two different and distinct episodes. They generally claim that A,B&C must follow The General based on the state of mind of the same Number Two in each episode. Another opinion within the cult is that there is NO significance in recurring characters and that it was simply standard practice in ITC series of those days to have the same actor portraying completely different characters within a run of shows. However this second reductionist view seems to be as incorrect as the view it argues against.

There are around 25 actors who recur within the series, other than McGoohan himself. Obviously Angelo Muscat as the Butler and Peter Swanwick as the Supervisor remain overtly consistent characters, whilst Leo McKern is overtly recognised within the fiction as being a returning or resurrected Number Two. This leaves around 20 actors who show up not evidentially as the same personality. Of these, many are just stunt-men appearing as henchmen or thugs so could easily be the same personality so far as the fiction is concerned. One or two others intriguingly remain consistently the same person. For example the actor playing the shopkeeper selling the map to Number Six plays no other part but is seen in two episodes as the shopkeeper. Another plays a psychiatrist in both her appearances; another remains in character as an ex-Admiral, whilst Patsy Smart only changes from being a waitress to being a maid – a perfectly feasible change of job within the village fiction.

There are however three actors with multiple appearances that are more ambiguous and often discussed in prisoner fandom:

Christopher Benjamin as Labour Exchange manager/Assistant to Number Two in Arrival & Chimes of Big Ben and Score-keeper/Potter [in the childrens story scetion of The Girl who was Death]

Patrick Cargill as Thorpe in Many Happy Returns and Number Two in Hammer into Anvil

Colin Gordon as Number Two in A,B&C and The General

However there are four others who also recur but rarely get discussed in this manner. These are:

Alexis Kanner as The Kid or Number 8 in Living in Harmony, a photographer in the story ection of The Girl Who Was Death and Number 48 in Fall Out

Kenneth Griffith as Scnipps in the story visualisation of The Girl Who was Death and Number Two in the reality section of that episode; and The President in Fall Out

Georgina Cookson as Lady at party in A,B&C, Mrs. Butterworth/Number Two in Many Happy Returns

Larry Taylor as Gypsy Man in Many Happy Returns and Mexican Sam in Living in Harmony

It seems to me that whatever explanation one chooses to apply, it has to be the same explanation for all of these characters. Patrick McGoohan was exercising close control over the show and could not have failed to be conscious of the recurrences. Would he really have expected his audience not to notice any of these faces being the same? Why did he always make Peter Swanwick a supervisor ? Why did the shopkeeper not pop up in other roles? Once you accept that McGoohan must have been conscious of these duplications it is also necessary, and possible to consider why he allowed some of them, and perhaps take account of his point of view..

In my next Blog I will discuss exactly this and how it demonstrated that not only was each episode carefully made, but the same care was applied to the way these episodes were ordered when the time came for their broadcasting, and how the strange unexplained 1967 Canadian ordering seems to add credence to what McGoohan said in July 1966, before a single frame of film had been shot:

"........as star and producer and even writer of some of the scripts of "the prisoner" I'll have only myself to blame if it's a lousy show. And that's the way I like it."

McGoohan in his own Words: "it's a step into cultism.. it's become a sort of entity in itself

2011-06-05T00:59:00.005+01:00

When the cult of the prisoner began, around 1976, the fans quickly moved from analysing the meaning of the show to analysing the making of the show. It’s difficult to discern how much of the original publicity material they had access to back then. I suspect it was not very much. As their interests grew, they relied largely on the memories of various personnel who had been involved in that making of The Prisoner. Perhaps the very first memoir was from Patrick McGoohan himself. This was obtained on teletape in Canada in 1977 and is now known as the Troyer Interview – after the name of the interviewer. A later interview was obtained by the leader of the UK fanbase at that time on soundtape, and that one became known as the Goodman Interview. Patrick McGoohan of course gave many interviews throughout his public career, so it’s only natural that none of them would necessarily be termed the McGoohan Interview. Anyhow, suffice to say that in both those interviews, Patrick McGoohan gave substantially the same story to the interviewer.

As the UK fan-base thirsted for more information however they followed an idea started by fans of Star Trek in the USA and began to hold Conventions. At these affairs they would invite guests – mostly actors or technicians from the production. They would ask them questions and later draw various conclusions from their answers. Some of the key personnel of The Prisoner were beyond their reach however. McGoohan himself was far away, as was Bernie Williams – both having moved to the USA. David Tomblin was busy making movies, whilst Jack Shampan refused to have anything to do with them. Some years later, Ian Rakoff quoted Shampan on the subject: “They keep calling me…… They must be nuts. Liking all that codswallop.” Another key member of the crew, Brendan Stafford seemed to remain utterly unknown to them. I only recently identified him in various Studio set still photographs.

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2011/02/mcgoohan-in-his-own-words-you-cant-do.html

However there were two groups of people associated with the production who became very available. The actors who played the many minor roles, and perhaps most significantly some of the writers associated with the scripting of the series. In 1979, around the same time the Goodman Interview was made, two writers were interviewed at one of the enthusiastic conventions. One was Lewis Griefer and the other was George Markstein. I’ve never seen a transcript of this interview or a recording of it – available for sale or otherwise. However 1979 seems to have been the year of cult decision. What was said did fortunately filter into the public sphere in 1982 and thus it is now possible to figure out what went on back then. Chris Rodley was evidently fed the information via the Fan Club, Chris Rodley posited an entirely different theory of the creation of The Prisoner than the one previously explained by McGoohan… at least twice. The first thing worthy of notice is that George Markstein seemed to have a somewhat similar view to Jack Shampan about the whole thing.

It might at first seem odd that fans so enamoured of this show should become so enamoured of this critical man, but he had an ace card in his favour. The fans had discovered that this was the same man who had appeared at the start of nearly every episode of the show – as the man to whom Number Six tenders his resignation. Of such arcania are cults built upon and this particular guy told them a story so radically different to the one their previous hero had told them that they simply had to believe in the NEW story – such is the human addiction to the novelty of the unexpected.

If George had been on his own at the time of the interviews in 1979, his claims might have been more discounted. However, he was not alone – he had back-up. Lewis Greifer corroborated him and repeated some of this corroboration to Ian Rakof in 1998:

“Lewis told me about George’s idea, which he hugged to himself for a long time after the war. George had worked on Stars & Stripes, the US Armed Forces Daily. It’s editor had CIA connections…… from these George learned about a secret wartime camp in Scotland. George had written something and then showed it to Pat.

Lewis described Pat as…….. totally instinctual…….. his later talk of the allegory and ideas that elevated the series… had occurred only on reflection – Post Hoc!”

So far as this writers caucus was concerned there were two people responsible for The Prisoner, and it was them !!
One correspondent of mine on the web who actually attended the 1979 interview wrote this to me once:
For starters, I was in the audience at the ICA 30 years ago when it was explained that Markstein was introduced to McGoohan by Lewis Greifer. Greifer stated that "[George Markstein and I] were discussing The Prisoner long before it started. George had worked on the Stars and Stripes and had discovered the existence of these camps where they kept people they didn't want wandering around".

The 1982 article by Chris Rodley makes no mention of Greifer co-creating the show but does expresss it thus

leaving McGoohan with just the role of megalomania.

This was the Big Idea the cult craved. This gave them ownership of their show and they have successfully sold their version of history to the world since. Their most recent version of the story has been published recently, all tangled up in the life-story of their Number Six, who they now find inextricable from a real person and varied actor and performer named Patrick McGoohan.

When I saw the cover… I knew I’d seen that picture before, and I was right – Even more amazingly they’re still selling parts of the same story they were selling back in 1982!!

What I find most bizarre is the that the later facts the cultists themselves discovered have never incorporated themselves into their creationist version of events. Facts such as that George Markstein never worked for the newspaper quoted by Greifer and therefore could not have known the editor of it. Facts such as that a British best-selling book mentioning the “secret camp in Scotland” was actually published in England several weeks after McGoohan began work on The Prisoner and this is almost certainly where Markstein first heard of Inverlair. Facts such as that Markstein was no more an ex-Intelligence agent than I am. Facts such as that it was precisely the *double-level* of meanings within The Prisoner that Markstein could neither comprehend or interpret and yet he is credited with that authorship. Simply reflecting upon Greifer's comments about McGoohan's lack of conscious deliberation about what he was doing seems absurd when taking into account that he was refering to the writer of Free For All, Once Upon A Time and Fall Out.

Longer-serving readers of my Blog will know I've been banging on about some of this factual evidence before. But for anyone new reading me…. Be seeing it:

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/08/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-ladies-and.html

I’ll be back next time with some more thorough dismantling of the lies and deceits created between 1979 and 1982 that persist to this very day in published accounts of this show, and the people who made it. Fact causes Friction it seems, whereas smooth lies only cause more fiction.

McGoohan in his own words: It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after.

2011-05-29T23:25:00.007+01:00

There are many websites willing to explain the origins of The Prisoner. This one of the more official and it speaks of one particular historical curiosity. http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/faq_02.htm

There was certainly a one-off play called "The Prisoner" starring Patrick McGoohan transmitted in 1963,
but it had nothing to do with the later TV series in any way.

Having dismissed this play as having no significance, the web-page does spend some time waffling about how Kenneth Griffith claimed to have been blocked from appearing in the TV play by Patrick McGoohan himself – a somewhat ridiculous-sounding statement, especially given that there is a far more interesting trivia about Griffith’s connection to this play. He actually appeared in the film version of 'The Prisoner' in 1955, as the Recorder. His credit reflects the fact that in this play/film the characters are not given names. Here he is alongside Jack Hawkins, who was playing the Interrogator: Checkmate.

Before it was ever a teleplay or a movie however, this play was in the theatre, in 1954. Anyone doing even a moments proper research on the play would have noted some thematic similarity with McGoohan’s 1967 TV project, and naturally the direct connection of it with McGoohan’s own personal portrayal of the Interrogator in 1963.

1954 Theatre Publicity

1963 TV Publicity

Watching the 1955 film rings one bell after the other. To start with, the starkly metallic main titles have a slightly Albertus feel about them.

As the story begins we learn that the prisoner is to be broken by non-violent means. In fact, the interrogator tells the prisoner that the prisoner’s body is sacred to the interrogator, or as Leo McKerns No2 would put it: “I want him with a whole heart. Body and soul”. However the Interrogators’ superior is impatient with the process, just as Leo Mckern’s No1 would be impatient with his methods.

"A week? That's not long enough!"

Kenneth Griffith’s character – the secretary or recorder – is involved in keeping the prisoner under constant surveillance and recording his words onto tape and vinyl. He is being trained in immorality by the interrogator he works for.

The interrogator himself has to explain and justify himself constantly to his superior, just like McGoohan's No2's are constantly having to do.

"If he'll answer one single question the rest will follow."

There are ideas of entrapment – the spider and the fly and questions like WHY? The interrogator in one crucial sequence takes his prisoner back to his childhood and indeed his school-days. The episode 'Once Upon A Time' is certainly a surrealistic and direct riff on this play, but McGoohan has a more optimistic resolutuion, with the prisoner overtly winning that time.

There are newspapers

and slogans on the walls

After the set-ups of the film, the story does indeed take quite a different course to McGoohan’s 1967 show but of course McGoohan was not copying someone-else’s tale. There is an interesting parallel to Ibsen’s Brand in that the Cardinal is finally broken in part by a revelation about his lack of love for his mother (Ibsen’s pastor allows his mother to die because she will not follow his teachings). This prisoner breaks down and says all the things the authorities want to hear. Once they have won, they release him because he is no longer a threat to them, once he has confessed.

Like many theatre plays did back then, The Prisoner holds it’s biggest message until the very end. The Interrogator discovers to his horror that despite the fact that he won the battle of minds and persuaded the cardinal/prisoner to make a comprehensive (but false) confession, this prisoner has ultimately broken the interrogator. The consummate professional realises that he feels regret for what he has done and pity for the prisoner who is now believed by his friends to have been a traitor and collaborator. He realises he can longer trust himself because he feels sympathy and so despite the fact that he has succeeded and has proved himself to be the winner - he resigns. His boss is baffled.

He tries to explain but his boss, the General, cannot fathom what this experienced professional is talking about and clearly distrusting the interrogator now, warns him that he shall have to seek further advice and then sends him into an adjoining room, which has bars on the windows. The film ends with the suggestion that we now have a new prisoner of conscience. It's almost like the much babbled-about prequel ideas that many prisoner fans have regarding their No6 being somehow behind the creation of the village in the first place.

The interrogator becomes a prisoner too
"I was a good man. But if you get him, he will be better"

In the recent (2007) deep analysis of The Prisoner series, on page 12, this play is mentioned –once – in passing and the subject does not crop up again.

As long before as 1977, in conversation with Warner Troyer in Canada, Patrick McGoohan said,

“this "Prisoner" thing ….. initially came to me on one of the locations on "Secret Agent" when we went to this place called Portmeirion, where a great deal of it was shot, and I thought it was an extraordinary place, architecturally and atmosphere-wise, and should be used for something

and that was two years before the concept came to me.”

McGoohan completed shooting the first series of Danger Man in Portmeirion for at the end of 1960. At the beginning of 1963 he made his TV version of Bridget Boland’s play. It was two years later.

So why do the official histories of McGoohan’s 1967 show seem so dismissive of this old play, of the same title, saying,
“it had nothing to do with the later TV series in any way” ?

This is clearly absurd as I hope my blog reader will have noticed. The reason seems to be because their creation story requires George Markstein to be attributed as having come up the original ideas for the show. Anything that demonstrates how Patrick McGoohan’s own career and indeed his own life was riddled with reasons why he would have “thought it up” are necessarily diminished because these FACTS do not fit with their own neatly published and polished tracts.

W H Y ?

Because you let them, that's why. Don't be a cabbage.

McGoohan in his own words: I try never to allow myself to be engulfed by outside pressures, though I might sometimes be, by my own.

2011-05-22T17:05:00.019+01:00

It’s Your Funeral is as complexly plotted an episode as The Schizoid Man is. Scanning a synopsis of both episodes can easily lead an inattentive viewer to all manner of misconceptions about what is going on within the episode. The plot of It's Your Funeral at first looks as if it will be a fairly obvious one. Number Six battling against an internal political conspiracy to assassinate an outgoing Number Two. Such conspiracy theory seems fairly routine nowadays, but of course in 1967, it was a relatively new past-time - four years on from the JFK tragedy. In 1964, news articles protested that there was unnecessary mystery.

For McGoohan to be selling a show telling a tale of the Village leader being assassinated by his own side must have seemed somewhat seditious perhaps, but the USA had a mature democracy and was no more likely to have been disturbed by that than it was by Living in Harmony, which episode was caused to fall from the schedules in part as a result of the 1967 assassination of JFK’s younger brother, Bobby, when the first showing of the series lost one week of it’s 17 and so was reduced to a 16 week slot.
as explained in this previous Blog of mine: http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/06/who-controls-past-controls-future-who.html

The complexity of It’s Your Funeral may even have affected the production of it. Derren Nesbitt is documented as having not understood what was going on, and said the episode’s director, Robert Asher concurred with him. This may be because the plot was so serpentine, let’s peel back the onion-skins and try to get some idea of what was going on: The episode opens with a young woman seemingly attempting to gain the help of Number Six in averting an assassination. However the viewer becomes privy to the fact that she is unknowingly being manipulated by the current Number Two to implicate Number six into a plot he otherwise would not know about. As so often is the case in the show, Number Six instinctively grasps all is not as it seems and shares the viewer’s suspicions. We see what he sees, but with more clarity than he ever can.

The episode then segues into a long sequence where a computer is deemed to be able to predict a man’s daily activities by the simple method of accumulating observations and deriving probabilities (much like internet marketing attempts nowadays). During this segment we meet Number 100 – a warder purporting to be a prisoner. He is the inside man. A Kosho match, serving only to give an opportunity to ensure Number Six eventually visits the village watchmaker, then follows these scenes. Thence Number Six meets the young woman again and is convinced that the assassination plot is a real one after all. The key to Number Six’s motivations for his further actions is then profiled;

Assassination!

Call it what you like, the important matter is that the entire village will be punished

Maybe that is what they need to wake them up.

To shake them out of this lethargy. To make them angry enough to fight!

That’s assuming they survive the punishment!

It’s simply his belief that innocent people might be hurt. Political assassinations were often followed by revenge killings. The CIA was implicated in a particularly famous one, in 1961, but in fact it was carried out by local political groupings. However McGoohan's generation would have been more conscious in those days of the vicious SS activities of WWII, when French villagers would be shot as reprisal for the 'assassination' of occupying Nazi forces. Number Six’s own aggressive willingness to kill is evidenced near the end of the episode when he is quite prepared to blow the chest out of the insidious blond Number Two. He is no pacifist prisoner, but he evidently accepts his own limitations as much as he does his power..

The motivations of the Number Two’s is perhaps the most confusing thing about the episode. Derren Nesbitt’s blond Number Two is evidently following instructions from above – although he is a willing participant in this intranecine murder and treachery. When the old Number Two appears, the viewers preconceptions are blown apart. Up until this point we, like Number Six, have been under the impression that the village has attempted to persuade Number Six of a non-existent plot, so that he will betray the plot and reveal himself to the rest of the village as a collaborator. Suddenly this plot becomes even more complicated as we realise that in fact there is no plot from the outside but in fact it is an plot being planned by Number One himself! A secondary reason for all the intrigue has also been to ensure Number Six’s warnings to the intended target will not be believed by the old Number Two. Even then the twists are not at an end. Number Six is wily enough to even break this trap but by then the targeted Number Two has simply given up, and prepares himself to die, despite the warning. As he remarks despairingly, if not exactly existentially,

Preventing is just postponing

No wonder poor old Derren Nesbitt was confused! Anyhow, it’s probably best to watch the show for yourself. `While you do that I’ll talk about some other interesting stuff – that way you don’t have to listen – unless you particularly want to.

One small element of this episode that I quite enjoy is the incorporation of Jammers. The suggestion of a group of villagers who set out to confuse and block the village operation is a direct feedback from a feature of the Cold war that was especially relevant in Berlin – the archetype of a cold war village that I featured a while back…

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/07/mcgoohan-where-am-i-i-know-there-are.html

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/08/mcgoohan-where-am-i-i-know-of-one-in.html

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/08/mcgoohan-in-his-own-words-ultimately.html

The jammers in this episode are associated with an “Escape Committee”. This illustrates an interesting example of the exercise of McGoohan’s editorial and proprietorial authority. Michael Cramoy was the credited writer of It’s Your Funeral but the inclusion of the notion of Number Six becoming embroiled with an Escape Committee is also found in an unused script written by Gerald Kelsey. This script was tentatively entitled Don’t get Yourself Killed. Furthermore, within that episode a sequence involves a Judo (as opposed to Kosho) set-piece, although in this unmade episode the judo involves Number Two rather than Number Six. Plainly neither writer would have plagiarised the other so there seems to have been an overriding editorial influence at work. A strong suggestion of where that editorial influence was coming from lies in another aspect of It’s Your Funeral. The blond Number Two utilises recordings of Number Six giving him a warning about the assassination plot to construct an impression of Number Six repeatedly making this warning to a number of other interim Number Two’s. This small, though crucial piece of plotting significantly mirrors a key element of All Night Long, a 1962 movie McGoohan had made, where his character re-edits a series of audio recordings to make an artifice that convinces a man of his wife’s adultery. There are other gadgets worthy of many an episode of McGoohan’s old Danger Man show that appear too.

Another old film role of McGoohan’s possibly informed a screen fight that seems to have terrified Mark Eden, who played Number 100. He is often quoted gleefully by prisoner fans, and most recently Mr. Eden’s very old memoir has even reached the pages of a 2011 ‘biography’ of Patrick McGoohan.

Eden’s experience of McGoohan’s violence was terrifying.
“There was a bit where he had to get on top of me and strangle me and I had to push him off… and he was really strangling me. I looked up and I could see these mad eyes looking down at me and I thought, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone…’ and his face was contorted with rage… and he’s a big man.”

It is fascinating to note that the TV viewer can judge this scariness for themselves!!

Perhaps Mr Eden had never come across McGoohan’s 'method' psychopath from Hell Drivers before, but it seems strange for a professional actor to have taken such on-set activity so seriously. Blame it on the pink jacket maybe, or maybe, like any actor should, this one enjoyed playing to the gallery; and when telling his tale to the prisoner fan gallery he had a very receptive audience! Judging from their most recent biographical project that audience remains just as receptive to their favourite tales today, as they were yesterday.

On the positive side however, whatever my misgivings about Mark Eden's memoir in terms of his ability to measure the mood of a man rather than a performance, his reminiscences do also recall that Patrick McGoohan would personally issue hand-written script amendments each morning prior to shooting, on the set of It's Your Funeral. It is of course one of the main purposes of my blog-roll to make the same point that is made by this experienced actor. That Patrick McGoohan was intimately involved with the detail of writing this show, as well as producing, directing and acting in it. Oddly, a small but influential group of fans of the show prefer to kick that particular fact into the long grass of their story. Fortunately it remains part of his story - no matter how the history is spun.

As Number Six remarked to the blond Number two at the conclusion of It's Your Funeral:

Be seeing you.

Won't I?

McGoohan in his own words: "The people in this village are supported by the government and given everything necessary except one thing – freedom."

2011-05-02T21:10:00.008+01:00

In my two earlier blogs in this trilogy, of which this blog is the third and final:

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2011/03/mcgoohan-in-his-own-words-i-had-chance.html

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2011/03/mcgoohans-show-in-other-peoples-words.html

I illustrated how the layout, treatment and behaviour of the village and it's villagers resembled a traditional British Insane Asylum of those days. This also fitted with the village being a place of imprisonment but not a place of punishment. I also pointed out how the Asylum system was a ubiquitous feature of the British social society by the 1960's, with at least one in every county and each Asylum was always well-known in the locality it served - and yet at the same scarcely anyone knew what went on inside them, or who was inside. However, I would not want my reader to assume I am predicating that Patrick McGoohan was making a TV show allegorising the Insane Asylum system of Great Britain in 1966. Rather that he was necessarily aware of the Insane Asylums and would naturally incline to use them as an allegory of society - it was a common dramatic device at the time (and throughout history as we shall see later), as my earlier blogs also served to illustrate.

The prevalence of elements of psychiatry in episodes of the show carry direct relevance from the Cold War / Secret Agent milieu that McGoohan set his fable within. As I have mentioned earlier, Soviet Russia had long banned the use of lobotomy (used in Change of Mind) and sought to highlight this fact to demonstrate how it’s enlightened socialism was more humanitarian than the capitalist democracies it constantly denounced (from behind it’s protective Iron Curtain). However, it was also becoming clear that the science of psychiatry was being fully embraced for more subtly nefarious ends, by that same governance, which claimed to eschew psychiatry's more physically brutal aspects. This article stems from 1954.

The treatment of Nadia in Chimes of Big Ben were referred to as Pavlovian, as was the treatment of the Rook in Checkmate. As the 1960’s had progressed the references to the actual use by the authoritarian regimes behind the iron Curtain of Insane Asylums to detain and imprison dissident citizens became even more focussed. This article is from 1963

That story explained how Khruschev had eschewed the gulags of Stalin, but Khruschev had merely replaced them by the more subtle approach of declaring dissidents to be insane and in need of treatment and therefore isolation from society. Khruschev had learned there was more than one way to crack a nut. In fact, stories linking the use of Insane Asylums by the Soviet governance to control and silence it’s troublesome citizens were nothing new.

Many of these various stories often emanated from Europe and especially the UK. They were not part of some ‘Red Scare’ campaign waged from the USA, as is popularly imagined nowadays by revisionist history. These stories were routinely being reported and discussed by the media in Europe and frequently featured first in that continent's newspapers and magazines, and from an American perspective it was often the reports in British newspapers that would be syndicated, because of the common language: English.

By 1965, the gloves were off completely; and the picture was being drawn large and plain of what had been going on - with the fuller background that had by then emerged from defectors and elements of the same Cold War tales that were inspiring Danger Man stories themselves. As a TIME magazine of that year explained:

When Nikita Khrushchev opened the gates of Stalin's concentration camps and set free hordes of political prisoners, he proudly boasted that "only lunatics" could object to life in Russia. So it seemed only logical for Nikita to deal with the intellectual critics of his own regime by locking them up not in harsh prisons—but in lunatic asylums. As men in white coats largely replaced the policemen, hundreds of writers, artists and other outspoken objectors to Communism vanished from the Moscow scene, to reappear in psychiatric hospitals as "mental cases."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901695,00.html#ixzz1LC0RH7bO

And daily newspapers were just uncomplicated in their clarity

All of this Cold War rhetoric and intrigue are endemic within the episodes of The Prisoner. Almost every episode contains elements of village medics attempting to use various psychological techniques to affect, influence and bend their prisoner to their will. McGoohan himself was driving this line of the narrative as is exemplified by the very first script he wrote (and almost certainly the very first script to be written). Free for All is replete and riddled with overtones of psychiatric breakdown and enforced treatments, especially notable in the red tunnel sequence, after No6 has been taken to explain himself before the Committee.

Whilst in 1965, the Cold War was producing the real-life evidence of the misuse of psychiatry in the Communist bloc, the real-life evidence of the errors of the British Mental Hospital system were also in the news at the same time, as my two earlier blogs dwell upon. Which side was worse? Was there in fact a side to be on any more? McGoohan’s own drama career had impinged directly into this background in 1963 when he played the Interrogator in a TV version of The Prisoner - a play by Brigid Boland that had become a 1955 film starring Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins. This play was clearly very influential upon McGoohan’s own creation:
In form, this is a psychological drama—a picture of the conflict of two minds, that of the cardinal and that of his interrogator, whom Mr. Hawkins plays. And it is in the marking of the slow deterioration of the cardinal's spirit and will under the relentless and calculated pressure of questions and physical distress that the cold, almost morbid fascination and tension of the drama reside……………... And when the interrogator rips his secret from him, with the skill of a psychoanalyst………… much is hinted about mental and spiritual things.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1739E273BC4A52DFB467838E649EDE

However, Patrick McGoohan was not just replicating some prior performance, any more than he was making a sequel to his popular Danger Man series. He was seeking to make something of his own, something original that he formed for himself and the Cold War intrigues were just one side of the story. He had lived through the ‘Angry Young Man’ theatrical period and just as that movement had raised many questions about traditional normalcy so another outsider was raising questions about the nature of insanity. One particular psychiatrist, RD Laing had become a media darling around 1963, just as the tales of Soviet duplicity were becoming publicised. I’ll leave any reader of this blog to investigate Laing for themselves but one of his key tenets was the view that people’s mental health was in big part the result of a tussle between their own individuality and the demands of their family members upon their behaviour. In this way he ran very counter to the traditional notion that mentally ill people were somehow faulty, but rather promoted the idea that they were unreconciled to their environment in some way. During a time of global Cold war his opinions had an especial resonance to many in western society. In 1969 (long after McGoohan's Prisoner show) Laing wrote a phrase that in many ways illustrates the parallel lines upon which those challenging minds were meeting, in those years of changing attitudes, of the mid-1960’s:

“As long as we cannot up-level our thinking beyond US and THEM, the goodies and the baddies. It will go on and on. The only possible end will be when all the goodies have killed all the baddies…… which does not seem so difficult……since to us…. WE are the goodies.”

I often like to imagine it was something like this that No6 was explaining to the policeman in the closing moments of Fall Out, much good that it did him, in the end.

One of the most intriguing cases of the misdeeds of the Soviets from any study of The Prisoner and the internal thinking of the man "who thought it up" however, might have been this one (mentioned in both a cutting above and TIME magazine):

Ward 7 was entitled such by Tarsis, the author - a modern Russian writer, because he was paying literary tribute to the classiccal 19th century Russian writer, Anton Tchekhov. Tchekhov’s plays were a staple of 1950’s theatre in Britain and whilst Patrick McGoohan confessed in interviews to never having read Kafka, he certainly knew his Tchekhov. Tchekhov was not just a playwright however, he was also a short story writer.

The story is a short one, but as is often the case, the best things come in small parcels:

But Ward No.6 is more than a setting for moral conversion, it is also a microcosm of Russian society. The porter monitors his inmates like a prison warden; ……………. It thus comes as no surprise to see the author challenging society's dehumanization of criminals and lunatics in Ward No. 6. In particular, he questions the abuses committed by officials whose authority is upheld by the state. However, Chekhov does not use his story to force a personal or political philosophy onto his readers. Ultimately, we are left to make up our own minds on the issue of state control and institutional corruption. Ward No.6 is a work that raises important issues regarding the relationships between citizens and state, and between people in positions of power and those whom they incapacitate.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/chekhov/section11.rhtml

It might of course be that I getting myself into sixes and sevens over just another coincidence of numbers. Perhaps I’m mad and should be given asylum. But as always in, my polemical state, I'm just trying to establish who are the writers and who are the authors. I am the blogger and you are the reader. Think for yourself and be free. Be seeing you.

Catherine McGoohan

2011-04-11T23:27:00.002+01:00

I would just like to interrupt my Lunatic trilogy with something very special. Catherine McGoohan discussing her father, his career and the origins of the Prisoner as well as many other projects. A radio show made specially on her father's birth date this year.

http://www.thisisnextgen.com/profiles/blogs/catherine-mcgoohan

More Moor ramblings next time but this is a rare break for sanity.

Be Seeing You

McGoohan's show, in other peoples words: "..some people had found the obsession with medical experiments on Number Six verged on the sick or sadistic..."

2011-03-23T21:51:00.008Z

In 1963 Kirk Douglas attempted to mount a Broadway run of a play based upon what is now a very famous work of fiction. It was to be another twelve years before this work of fiction became famous throughout the world. In 1963, Kirk Douglas was interviewed about the play he had returned to the stage after 17 years to appear in – so committed was he to the project. He remarked:

The conviction is that man must show that he can struggle for his own individual freedom, that he can reach the full dignity of man………. A man must be free to be himself against the pressures of society, the torments of his environment, the fates of his life. The moment he no longer will fight for that, that moment he is a walking dead man.”

Kirk’s production folded after a few weeks. However, over a decade later his son, Michael Douglas was to bring his father’s vision of a Ken Kesey creation to the silver screen, in the movie, One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest. In 1966. just like Kirk Douglas, Patrick McGoohan was to use some of the social politics of the lunatic asylum of those times to illustrate his own allegorical series: The Prisoner.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a direct product of Kesey's time working as an orderly at a mental health facility. The novel constantly refers to different authorities that control individuals through subtle and coercive methods. The authority of Nurse Ratched controls the inhabitants through a combination of rewards and subtle shame. Although she does not normally resort to conventionally harsh discipline, her actions are portrayed as more insidious because the subtlety of her actions prevents her prisoners from understanding that they are being controlled at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo's_Nest_(novel)

The Lunatic Asylum has long been a staple of theatre and movies and TV. Bedlam, the name of the first formal hospital for insane people, in London, has become a synonym in the English language for chaos, confusion and noise. Nonetheless, as industrialised society became concentrated into cities the need to remove people from those societies led to a nationwide government requirement in 1845 for every county to maintain an asylum. This centralisation of function led to huge establishments becoming the norm and they became self-contained communities. They would be laid out in neat little maps:

Ironically, the redeveloped site of an old County Asylum outside Sheffield is now called: Wadsley Park Village. These old establishments were villages all along. Only the status of the residents has changed. McGoohan’s project was rife with direct and allegorical references to the internal politics of the Lunatic Asylum. Here are some examples from the first six episodes to enter production:

ARRIVAL
Around the halfway point of the first episode, Number Six is subdued by Rover and wakes suddenly (for the second time in this episode). This time he finds himself to be in a hospital, but when approached by an attendant he says, as any self-respecting madman would,
There’s nothing the matter with me
Perhaps not. But I’d like a check-up to make sure
I’m alright. I want to leave
There’s nothing to worry about…….
The attendant leads Number Six past a room full of passive patients, remarking,
Group Therapy. Counteracts obsessional guilt complexes producing neurosis
Then, Number Six sees a patient walk past him. The patient doesn’t look the way people look, outside the village.

FREE FOR ALL
The second episode produced has a curiously similar structure to the first, and likewise has a schizoid break about halfway through, as Number Six is propelled into the Labour Exchange, where he is subjected to a mind test of squares and circles and after another failed escape, he once again wakes in a hospital and soon is undergoing care in the community, at Home.

CHECKMATE
The third episode to enter production has psychiatrists firstly performing corrective treatment on the Rook character, by performing Pavlovian experiments upon him.

Later on, the Village psychiatrists become involved in conditioning the Queen character. It is described thus:
A development on research carried out on dolphins… Of course we haven’t got that far with humans.
The viewer is left sensing it is only a matter of time.

DANCE OF THE DEAD
The fourth episode to enter production begins with men in white coats and a clearly unbalanced Psychiatrist who enjoys his experiments a little more than seems healthy in a clinician.

Later in the episode, the new Number Two meets Number Six at a high viewpoint and is clearly concerned about his mental health. After some bickering she warns,
Don’t force me to take steps……. We indulge…… for a time. Then we take steps
Yes I know. I’ve been to the hospital. I’ve seen.
You’re not thinking of jumping?
It's become noticeable that "the hospital" is appearing in every single episode but nobody in the wards seems to be suffering from any physical ailment.

CHIMES OF BIG BEN
Subsection 6, paragraph 4. Add, on the other hand, persecution complex amounting to mania. Paranoid delusions of grandeur.
So quothes Number Two, after routinely observing and questioning Number Six. Is Number Two a gaoler? Or a diagnostic psychiatrist? The roles seem to be blurred. Later in the episode he also controls some kind of test upon Nadia, the new Number Eight.

What was in your mind? Were you attempting suicide? Suicide? Suicide? Suicide? What was in your mind? Looks like a suicidal tendency, doesn’t it? But one must be sure……..

Like the bespectacled man in the white coat, from Dance of the Dead, Number Two seems to be enjoying the therapy a little too personally.

ONCE UPON A TIME

The sixth episode, and planned penultimate one, evidences the continual importance of issues of mental health in The Prisoner. The “Personal Therapy” of the Degree Absolute is nothing less than a riff on the then relatively new psychiatric concept of Cognitive Therapy

Treatment is based on collaboration between patient and therapist and on testing beliefs. Therapy may consist of testing the assumptions which one makes and identifying how certain of one's usually-unquestioned thoughts are distorted, unrealistic and unhelpful. Once those thoughts have been challenged, one's feelings about the subject matter of those thoughts are more easily subject to change. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy

The Degree Absolute was plainly intended to be an invasive form of this therapy, as Number Two commences: “I’m your father. Do I ever say anything that makes you want to hate me? I always speak well of your mother don’t I?

Like many things at this particular time in history, new ideas were being sparked by one of the icons of the period. A family that had committed their own daughter/sister to the Psychiatric Village was none other than the Kennedys. Rosemary Kennedy had been lobotomised in 1941. In 1963 her brother had tried to make some sense of the madness his family had known so personally, and perpetrated so tragically..

Whilst Cognitive Therapy was relatively new in 1966, there were other changes in the thinking of the people of the western world in the 1960’s. Was the whole world an asylum? A place of safety? Or a place of Imprisonment? Who were the prisoners and who were the warders? Who decided who was mad, and why?

An investigative article in British newspaper, The Guardian, published on 19th March 1965, identified that perhaps one-quarter of the staff in a mental hospital could also be expected to suffer from major psychiatric disorders. Their investigation was soon revealed to be based upon Friern Hospital. Friern Hospital at this time accommodated 899 male and 1037 female patients; 116 male and 113 female nurses IIn July 1965 Lord Strabolgi in the House of Lords criticized 'a psychiatric hospital' concerning the extent to which patients were in the hospital merely because they were old. The hospital was later identified as Friern, and a Committee of Enquiry was held in 1966. http://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/friern.html

Friern Hospital was formerly known as Colney Hatch Asylum. It lay just a few miles across open countryside from where Patrick McGoohan had his home, in Mill Hill, a suburb of London. From Sheffield to Mill Hill, the Asylum system of Britain was ubiquitous. How influenced was Patrick McGoohan by this British tradition? His mind was his own, but every single episode seems to concern itself to one degree or another with the controversial science. It is also worth noting, within the parameters of my overarching polemic in these blogs, that the prevailing presence of Psychiatry in episodes of The Prisoner is some evidence of McGoohan’s editing role on the series. It is plain that whilst each scriptwriter wrote as an individual, they all included similar elements of the control of people’s minds by the medical profession, and indeed a constant suggestion that Scientists, whilst admirable in their knowledge, are also to be feared in their personal motivations. In interview in 1990 McGoohan himself commented,

“When I used to get a script that came in from somebody else, I would make my suggestions as to how it was turning, and always, if something was becoming too pedestrian… as soon as it got like that, and I was reading it, I would say…. Give it a bend somewhere, so there is another slant on it, and there is something else to think about. And DID he mean that? Or he COULD have meant this?

What did he mean? How did he mean it. What does seem remarkable to me is that in all the many *authorised* scribblings I have read I cannot immediately recall any reflections upon the frequent inclusion of the same dramatic device in episode after episode. Moor lunacy next time...
Oh......
Just one more thing.......
Having begun with Kirk Douglas, may I close with him too, in a reference from 1957.
I Am Spartacus!

It takes a man of true will, to change history.

McGoohan in his own words: "I had the chance to do something nutty, so I did."

2011-03-09T14:15:00.027Z

The twelfth episode of The Prisoner to be broadcast was Change of Mind, although it was the ninth to be started in the production schedule – after It’s Your Funeral. The credited scriptwriter was Roger Parkes, and in common with some of the individual episode writers, this was one of his earliest significant jobs. He recalled being paid a one-off fee of £1,000. This would be equivalent to over £12,000 nowadays. In interview in 2007, he recalled that his initial script was passed back via Patrick McGoohan on the basis that it was too gory and too confusing, and that it was “a creaky old script”. Not withstanding that commentary, Mr. Parkes recalled that “otherwise he changed the script very little”, also adding that as “it was my first-ever script” that, “obviously I was hyper-sensitive”. Another interview had him recalling a script meeting at which David Tomblin demanded a lot of changes. As always with these recounted, often third-party memoirs about this show, you reads your interviews and takes your choices.

It seems fair to assume however that the gory comment referred to would have been the lobotomy sequence, which occupies considerable screen-time and special effects in the finished episode. The episode Change of Mind is often referenced to the Sixties chiller, The Manchurian Candidate or viewed as an allegory of McCarthyite America, or even Red China's Cultural Revolution; but in truth - watching the episode seems to reveal it to have little in common with book, film or politics. In fact, Change of Mind resembles nothing more than a cynical study of the the science of Psychiatry as sometimes practised. This science had been increasingly impinging upon the world since Freud became a worldwide figure. He had died in 1939 and his science had become somewhat perverted by some in the Forties and after WW2. The most disreputable activity undertaken was the Lobotomy. This methodology had been largely discarded after 1955 and the use of it by the Village was evidently intended to show how brutal the regime was. Roger Parkes said that his brother was a psychiatrist, but it can only be hoped that the brother was no fan of Lobotomy by 1967! Hypersonic lobotomy was actually experimented with in 1962/63, so it certainly was still around. Whereas The Manchurian Candidate was all about “Brain-washing” and programming a man’s mind to a certain function, Change of Mind is simply designed to remove the aggressive qualities in Number Six’s psyche. Lobotomies were well known to leave their subjects listless and easy to manage within Institutions. Remarkably, the Soviet Union had outlawed lobotomy whilst the procedure still remained permissible in the freedom-claiming Western democracies. The Soviets were a little devious in that they had actually found other ways to crack their nuts open, of which more in my next Blog.

Patrick McGoohan seems to have recognised that this episode would be used to picture the Village, not just as a prison of itself, but also as containing it's own Lunatic Asylum – an Institution within which people who would not obey the norms of Society would be made to toe the line. The Village is of course a pretty mad place at any time, but it is Change of Mind that most emphasises the allegory of an establishment that is focussed on controlling the minds of it’s ........ patients?

This episode is dismissed in some analyses of the show and that dismissal often seems simply to be due to the later production scheduling of the episode at number 9. There is an implicit assumption in Cult-fan lore that says all the important episodes were the earliest in the production process (except for the final one naturally), as if the series was a tadpole with a huge head of ideas and then a diminishing tail. One key reason not to dismiss this episode is the identity of the Director.

In potted histories of the production of The Prisoner, a favourite story of the researchers is that Patrick McGoohan fired the originally-planned director of this episode at lunch-time on the first day of shooting. For years there was confusion over who this director even was, but it seems confirmed now that he was, like Roger Parkes, getting one of his first big breaks in the 'business'. Sadly for this guy, things did not work out. Often, the only reason ascribed for McGoohan taking over direction of this episode under his Joeserf alias is a short temper and an over-weening ego. If it was indeed his ego, it seems surprising that Patrick McGoohan did not label the episode as Directed by Patrick McGoohan. A moments thought demonstrates that ego had little to do with it, but Cult fans are often revealed as thinking too little.

A more reasoned explanation is that Patrick McGoohan, as Executive Producer viewed this episode as a very important one and his own instinct, added to his broad career experience, led him to quickly realise that the young Director he had initially tried to give a chance to, was simply not up to the job. Bear in mind that McGoohan had had to make some tough decisions at the time of the episode made immediately prior to this one, as I explained in this Blog: http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/10/mcgoohan-in-his-own-mind-i-know-what.html
Change of Mind certainly contains many elements that seem close to McGoohan's thematic heart; the removal of the aggressive determination within Number Six would have led to a very different man and this is the whole point of the 'plot' in this episode. The story arcs on an incident when Number Six beats up two would-be thugs, who then complain about his violent behaviour to the Authorities. When called to account for his actions, Number Six is as uncompromising as always. He is sent to appear before what resembles a mental health board, rather than a McCarthyite Committee. Number Six continues to defy them and employs his most fearsome weapon: Sarcasm. Offered a further chance to comply with the demands of his village society, he witheringly demonstrates the same contempt for the Poetry group. He is declared Incorrigible and sent to the courthouse. Involuntary commitment into British asylums required an appearance before a legal court. The individuals at the courthouse all seem a little mad or is the purpose of the court to drive them mad ? It seems it might be six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Number Six is even introduced to the ultimate village solution, but he still refuses to join in.

Number Six is clearly in need of treatment and treatment is what his village society will make sure he has. All the treatment he needs. The delivery of Number Six to the mental ward is no coincidence. People in the Heathcare State of post-war Britain were not picked out of society at random to be placed into Insane Asylums. Their own families and associates often were instrumental in having them committed to the local asylum. By the mid-Sixties it was being recognised that many people in these institutions were as sane as the next individual. In Number Six’s case, there was an authority at the back of things, but Number Two was constantly telling Number Six that he did not control the Committee or the mutually minded villagers. Number Two even warned Number Six that if he did not comply with his Village Society he would be subject to their declaring him Unmutual and there would be nothing Number Two could do about it. The bureaucrat was in bondage to his own Bureaucracy. By the end of the episode, the lunatics would take over the asylum as Number two found to his consternation, but were they any less mad than they were before? Less Mutual?

The most salient point about the psychiatry overtones of this episode however is that of course Number Six is NOT lobotomised. His tissue is too valuable. Instead his whole terrorising treatment is simply designed to persuade him of the fact that he has been altered. This takes the treatment to a deeper level – perhaps touching upon the brain-washing idea that Roger Parkes felt he was dealing with. If a man believes something to be true, then for him, it becomes true.

Whilst Lobotomy was widely regarded as barbaric by 1967, it’s chemical successor was considered acceptable. The principal drug of this new technology was Thorazine. This drug was described in 1958, in Modern Clinical Psychiatry: "If the patient responds well to the drug, he develops an attitude of indifference both to his surroundings and to his symptoms". Mitol was the version adopted in the Village.

Drugs have become the standard treatment method to this day of managing mental health. Even the strange journey of Number 86 is a small comment on the growing drugs culture of 20th century drug democracies, “I’m higher! I’m higher than Number Two!” Indeed she was very high. In her own mind, she evidently felt like Number One. Whilst Change of Mind is explicit, it was by no means the first episode to suggest that the village was neither a prison nor a holiday camp for resigned spies. It was in fact, a place to crack nuts open – a Lunatic Asylum. The institutionalised nature of these places led to them at the time being termed colloquially in Britain as Looney Bins. Dustbins for people indeed. Another common phrase was that the men in white coats would come to take you away. This is exactly what happens to Number Six. At what point does a person become so not normal that they become deemed to be abnormal enough to be locked up? How individual can you be, before you stand out too much and frighten others? How many cuckoos can fly out of the nest? Can you get by without a little help from your friends?

Moor next time on the state-run Lunatic Asylums of Britain and their possible inspirational place in the mind of McGoohan; and their prevailing presence throughout many of The Prisoner episodes.

McGoohan in his own words: "You can't do a thing like that on your own"

2011-02-16T22:00:00.003Z

Some years ago I became fascinated by a particular photograph I had come across in a 1960 book about TV. At that particular time I had been curious about Ralph Smart - whose name was so well-known and yet who seemed to be little-known otherwise. The confident looking guy, leaning on the camera being operated by Patrick McGoohan might be him I reasoned. I showed the photo to various *experts* at the time, but other than identifying Jack Lowin as the man with the moustache, nobody had any idea who the other man might be.

It was only a year or so ago, when I was browsing the cache of photographs of the 1967 Prisoner production at the AMC site, that I suddenly saw my man again. Once more - he was leaning nonchalantly on a camera. Who on earth could he be? Somebody important... somebody forgotten somehow by all the experts and all their burrowing research.

There were a number of key film-crew who worked with Patrick McGoohan on both his TV series, Danger Man and The Prisoner. Most of them had been interviewed unto death at the various prisoner conventions, but evidently not this guy. There really was only one candidate, who would had the clout to be casually standing about, leaning on cameras and generally getting in the face of both Patrick McGoohan and Don Chaffey.

http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/tvtimes/Dec1967/pdf.pdf

Strangely enough, I had not so long before had a web conversation in which the very same man had cropped up, as described by Ignis Fatuus: Brendan Stafford was more significant to the production than individual directors. As director of photography he worked on every episode. ITC productions relied heavily on the use of 'stock footage' to establish location and atmosphere for (largely) studio-bound productions. He would be responsible for assembling this material, and matching it to specific productions so that it 'blended' with the overall visual style of the studio work. Ignis was talking about Brendan's involvement on Danger Man, but his opinion must be just as valid for the making The Prisoner.

Brendan Stafford, an Irishman from Belfast who has over 500 series' segments to his credit as well as many feature movies. Among the best-known series on which he has worked have been "The Adventures of William Tell", "The Invisible Man", "Danger Man" (both the original half-hour programmes and the one-hour productions seen in America as "Secret Agent"), "Rendezvous", "One Step Beyond", "Sir Francis Drake", "Man of the World", "Sentimental Agent", "The Prisoner", "The Man Who Never Was", and many of "The Saint" segments. As a member of the Irish Film Society, Brendan made 16mm films which he showed to producer Michael Powell, who suggested that he should go to London. So Brendan gave up the portrait studio he was running and plunged into feature films, directing documentaries and then photographing several productions. For a time, he concentrated on direction of such films as "Stranger At My Door", "Proud Canvas" and "Men Against the Sun", but then returned to camerawork and decided to keep to this. Feature film photography took him into television films for Douglas Fairbanks Jnr., and then one series after another. He occasionally returns to feature filming (latest, "Crossplot", starring Roger Moore), but cannot resist the infinite variety offered by series.
http://ufoseries.com/marketing/pressBook.txt

As McGoohan frequently commented, he did not - indeed could not - create The Prisoner on his own. The phrase that prefaced this particular Blog was something he commented in an interview in 1990, continuing:

I had fellows who came in it with me.

In another interview in the early 1990's he mentioned two others:
David was the assistant director on the hour long episodes. We have grown to be very good friends, when I was making The prisoner I found it necessary several times to leave him in total charge because I was working all day as an actor and often as writer and director. I found it necessary to have someone to trust, that was David, since then he has done a lot of work as assistant director. If there is a problem he is the best in the world !

For The Prisoner, for example, I had a terrific artistic director. When we discussed a design, I told him what I had in mind and he translated it onto paper. In the process he added his own ideas, certainly. His name was Jack Shampan. A terrific guy. Unfortunately, he's gone now. We understood each other marvellously. And that's the best way to work. If there's enthusiasm and the team feels it's being directed by someone who knows what he wants, then all that enthusiasm goes into good work. If you feel that the director or the producer is only doing it for the money, then nobody gives a damn.

Whilst my Blogs are somewhat polemical about the over-arching influence of Patrick McGoohan himself, he was seemingly the first to acknowledge that he did not create in isolation. Indeed, in that 1967 TV Times, McGoohan co-operated with the journalist in making sure many of the key people in his operation were all identified by name.
http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/tvtimes/Dec1967/pdf.pdf

All credit to where credit is due. Brendan J Stafford

McGoohan in his own words: Noone ever asked me, and they're not going to ask me, because they know there is no lost episode! But somebody made a lot of money out of it - because it sold!

2011-02-13T14:04:00.003Z

The McGoohan quote that prefaces this particular blog is from the little-published interview Patrick McGoohan granted to Howard Foy around 1990, published in Primetime magazine. He was discussing the *Alternative* version of the episode Chimes of Big Ben. This different cut of the episode was found by an American researcher checking into the archives at Canadian Television. Famously it includes a scene entirely absent from the version that was made available in the British and American broadcasts, as well as some other differences.

http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/prisoner/chimes2.html

The Canadians began broadcasting The Prisoner before anywhere else in the world, but they also stopped earlier than anywhere else and in that 1967 season only ever broadcast 13 episodes. It was not the only country to only use 13 episodes: Germany was another. However the reasons for this decision in Germany were quite different to those in Canada. It remains a little bit mysterious as to why Canadian TV was so precipitate in broadcasting The Prisoner - perhaps they thought there might be further series of it and so showing the first 13 only would allow them to end season one. That could be one interpretation. However, they broadcast the episodes in such a different order to the one that became the intention of the production company that I am left convinced that, for whatever reason of their own, they decided to only use the episodes that would be available to them by the end of November 1967.

Some while ago, my fellow researcher, whom I refer to as The Sheriff, co-operated with me to elucidate the actual broadcast order that took place in this very first showing of The Prisoner. It had struck us as curious that in all the weighty and not-so-weighty tomes on the subject, it seemed nobody had ever have looked at the Number One version of the show. It seemed also rather remiss that the very first academic study of the show, which actually took place in Canada seemed completely oblivious to the manner in which their show had first been broadcast into the world consciousness.

Their lack of study of that history is perhaps forgiveable because in 1977, the Ontario group were not first and foremost interested in the making of the show, but more interested in the meaning of it. However, in the intervening four decades since then, nobody else in the world of prisoner fandom seems to have been interested enough in actual documented history to find all this out. They have filled books up with piffle and paffle, but of their Number One? They know nothing. Number Six would no doubt smile sardonically at this point.

Anyhow....... the order is.... for the record...............

05/09/67 - "Arrival"
12/09/67 - "A, B and C"
19/09/67 - "Free For All"
26/09/67 - "The Schizoid Man"
03/10/67 - "The General"
10/10/67 - "Hammer into Anvil"
17/10/67 - "It's Your Funeral"
24/10/67 - "Many Happy Returns"
31/10/67 - "Change of Mind"
07/11/67 - "Checkmate"
14/11/67 - "Dance of the Dead"
21/11/67 - "Once Upon a Time"
28/11/67 - "The Chimes of Big Ben"

What does this all mean? I expect it means what it is - a different order, but perhaps not one that many lovers of watching this show in different orders might have thought of. That the Canadians took their own, very unique line on the show is evident from some of their choices; and it must have been a selecting process to some degree as the order seems to follow no pattern of episodes simply becoming avaialable from the producers - Many Happy Returns for instance was the very last episode of these thirteen to enter production, but is shown at number 8 - whilst A,B&C remains very close to the start, as it does in the *real* broadcast order.

The fact that Once Upon A Time remains used as a penultimate episode is however no coincidence I think- given that McGoohan had always pre-destined it as his penultimate episode. That this episode least encourages the use of Chimes of Big Ben as the final one is emphasised by the fact that Leo McKern's Number Two had died at the end of Once Upon A Time ! However, the appealingly poignant and inconclusive ending of Chimes of Big Ben makes it an excellent choice as the series closer of course. Quite how these two final episodes segued for the original Canadian audience is not clear but the show certainly intrigued them as witnessed by some news comment the following year.

The impression given is that the show was *abruptly* cancelled. However, the story looks to be a little more complicated than that because the order of episodes shown by Canadian TV is both so radically different from the norm, yet still retains the significant elements of using Once Upon A Time as the penultimate one; whilst the thought-provoking notion of making Chimes of Big Ben the finale, rather than the more obvious choice of Many Happy Returns, which was the 13th episode put into production, seems to suggest a guiding hand by somebody.

As always with The Prisoner, things are rarely as simple as they might seem.

Be seeing you - or do I mean...... POP!

McGoohan in his own words: I've always been obsessed with the idea of prison in a liberal democratic society.

2011-01-19T12:30:00.003Z

The comment that prefaces this particular Blog was made by Patrick McGoohan in 1968, whilst discussing his then newest show, with Joan Barthel of the American TV Guide. Having completed his Prisoner project earlier that year in England, and with its first broadcast now safely part of history, McGoohan was noticeably more relaxed about himself as he made the rounds of the American publicity machine. He had no more secrets to keep and his own motivations could be expressed without the worry that he might inadvertently let something about his show slip. That The Prisoner was very much grown from his own psyche is witnessed most obviously by the frequent reliance upon utilising his personal experiences and ideas to inform the structure of some aspects of his Number Six. That is not to say Number Six resembled a complete personality – in fact McGoohan once commented that Number Six took an idea so far in one direction that it became almost absurd.

The simplest examples of his using his own biography or experience to inform the creative process is witnessed by the birth dates of Number Six and Patrick McGoohan being identical. The fact that Number Six became a secret agent rather than a scientist or diplomat was informed by the simple fact that McGoohan could riff upon the personality of his previous acting creation, John Drake. By focussing on a limited number of mannerisms, sayings and moods of Drake, McGoohan could jumpstart himself straight into a playable, consistent characterisation. It gave him somewhere to start. But where did the initial ideas come from… the ideas to place a man in an unknown place – a prison with no bars that was yet inescapable and to kidnap him there for the mere crime of choosing to resign from his job.

Prisons and the characters imprisoned unjustifiably, are an age-old and frequent setting for drama of course. McGoohan himself had featured in such prison-based productions as Disturbance a TV play from 1958, The Quare Fellow – a movie from 1962, and of course his eponymous The Prisoner – a TV play from 1963. The Bird Man of Alcatraz from 1962 had been a recent and hugely influential movie, and I’m sure the reader can think of more such examples in the popular culture of those times. Concurrent with The Prisoner was the hugely popular TV show The Fugitive – an American show where the prisoner who had avoided prison was continually escaping recapture. Patrick McGoohan and David Tomblin tweaked a somewhat inverted idea where the prisoner has been kidnapped into captivity, but held within a prison that was quite luxurious rather than punishing.

Tight self-contained communities that did not necessarily seek to punish were however something quite familiar in McGoohan’s real life. His time at Ratcliffe College is fairly well known nowadays, although his passing through that school seemed unremarked at the time. As a poor Scholarship boy from an industrial Sheffield working-class family his own personal isolation in a prominent fee-paying British public school was not necessarily likely to be the happiest time of his life. With his usual self-deprecation he offered a flavour of his predicament in his 1965 autobiography:

http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/woman/09-Oct1965/pdf.pdf

It is merely stating the obvious that the educational but confining precincts of Ratcliffe informs much of the episode Once Upon A Time, where early scenes in the Embryo Room feature an overbearing school-master who seeks to unravel the mysteries of a growing boys mind.

The fact that McGoohan garbed his inmates in the typical piped blazer of British schools could easily be an implication that just as he had been plunged into a place he didn’t understand as a boy, so had his Number Six, in his own mind.

McGoohan was not alone at that time in visualising the traditional British public school as a strange and threatening place. Around the same time as The Prisoner, Lindsay Anderson produced If , a movie polemic that like The Prisoner features a hail of bullets as part of its climax.

Whilst elements of McGoohan’s school-day experiences might have influenced his trains of thought there are two prime examples of actual unusual prisons within just a few miles of where McGoohan lived and spent his working life until the age of 25 or so. The first one was of national significance in Britain and lay just 20 miles from Sheffield, outside the neighbouring Yorkshire town of Wakefield. Open Prisons remain controversial to this day and having such a pioneering establishment not so very far away must have made it quite a talking point in the Sheffield of the 1940’s.

http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors26.pdf

Another prison however that existed not to punish anyone, but merely to detain them, existed just three miles from where Patrick McGoohan lived with his parental family in the years between 1944 and 1952. Lodge Moor POW Camp was on the edge of the moorland, to the south-west of Sheffield, but was in fact only about six miles from the city centre itself and just three miles west from the suburb of Fulwood where the McGoohans’ lived by then.

Prisoner of War camps were governed by the Geneva Convention and the Italian and German military prisoners held at Lodge Moor were imprisoned but they were not necessarily locked up. Various residents from the area have placed their memoirs on the worldwide web about Camp 17 – Lodge Moor POW Camp, Sheffield.

During WW2 as a kid, I used to go walking with my parents past the POW camp. It wasn't just used by Italian POWs but by Germans too. Toward the end of the war, they began letting prisoners come into town quite freely, where they would spend whatever money they got from working the fields in the market. My cousin Jean got very friendly with a German prisoner and since I spoke German I used to translate their love letters. A lot of fun for a teenage kid!!.

My late Grandparents who lived in Walkley had some German P.O.W.s for tea, these were from the Lodge Moor POW camp. I think that this was rather nice of them as my Grandparents had been blitzed out of Bolsover Street.

One of the marriages we have transcribed from St Mary's, Walkley has a groom with a German name whose address is listed in the register as: No.17 Prisoner of War Camp Lodge Moor Sheffield. This was in 1948. This man was 21 and a shoe maker by trade.

Would most of these prisoners have even wanted to escape? During the war of course, some did make various attempts, but many continued to live at the camp some three or four years after the end of war until finally repatriated or resettled (some are known to have stayed in Sheffild). In those years of 1945 to 1949 it is evident that if Patrick McGoohan had always been obsessed with the idea of prison in a liberal democratic society. he could not fail to have been aware of this strange prison that wasn't a prison just down the road. He may even have become aware via local gossip that:

When prisoners arrived at the camp they were interrogated by the Prisoner-of-War Interrogation Section, which categorised prisoners according to the strength of their belief in National Socialism. Fervent believers were deemed 'black', non believers 'white' ………..

http://www.thestar.co.uk/features/How-Sheffield-was-home-to.6255140.jp

One never-explained aspect of The Prisoner is that some of the villagers wear white badges and a few wore black ones. Explanations by Prisoner fans over the years have ranged from intricately devised theories of Arcanity, to the other extreme of dismissive notions of mistakes and sloppy production standards. Perhaps the truth indeed lies in some chatter Patrick McGoohan had once heard about those prisoners who lived up the road and this was one of his initial ideas that than became swallowed up in the Everyman/ITC/CBS process of commissioning the actual programmes. Simple as black and white perhaps when a little background research is carried out.

Which is which?

How many of each?
Who's standing beside you now?
I intend to discover who are the prisoners and who are the warders.

Be seeing you behind bars.
Mine’s a pint of the best.
I'm Obliged.

McGoohan introduces himself to his Fans: "I suppose I did a fair amount of things. I was executive producer, I wrote a number of them, I directed a number of them, and thought it up."

2010-12-21T23:29:00.007Z

This series of blogs is intended to celebrate the professional life and artistic achievements of Patrick McGoohan utilising particular reference to his show, The Prisoner, I also use it to regularly prod at my Bête Noire: the peculiarity of the cult following that developed a decade after the show was first made, and their reinvention of the history surrounding the production of that show. A key aspect of their revisionism is predicated upon their promotion of the sometime script editor, a relatively minor player in the creation and production of the series into some kind of seminal figure. The fans have made many wild claims about his background in order to bolster the dubious veracity of their claims of his importance to this production. Their accordingly systematic denigration of McGoohan's importance has followed like night to the setting of the sun. Several of my blogs have pointed up the facts in relation this strange construction of error and evident misdirections:

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/12/mcgoohan-on-peoples-minds-not-so-great.html

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/03/mcgoohan-and-rehearsed-mind-it-was.html

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/08/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-ladies-and.html

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/06/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-clubs-cults-heroes.html

http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/04/mcgoohan-in-his-own-words-it-is-another.html

The short version of this constructed myth is that The Prisoner began its artistic life as a mere sequel to McGoohan’s previous show, Danger Man. Against all logic the notion assigned credence is that McGoohan peremptorily resigned from playing the part of John Drake because he was fed up with the series, and then promptly leapt upon the idea that he should play John Drake again! The incongruity of this theory is obvious and yet a whole sub-cult has grown up around it, influencing authors writing on the subject. In the 2007 book accompanying the Network dvd release, on page 13, there is this quotation from a prisoner club magazine titled “Escape”. This old in-Clubhouse magazine evidently quoted an interview that had been carried out with their favourite I-Witness: “… my idea was that John Drake had resigned, as Pat had resigned, as Danger man had resigned.... McGoohan loved the idea. Then he screamed, My God! John Drake! That means we will have to pay Ralph Smart Royalties! I'm not sure which part of this story is most preposterous, probably the McGoohan screaming bit, but it's all a bit of joke when you actually think it through.

Perhaps because of all the historical facts militating against the Club’s pet theory, they developed a whole Creation Theory to justify the otherwise inexplicable. To give their cult story a superficial credibility they depended upon the initially straightforward nature of the first few episodes. In Arrival, the scenario of the Village is explicated, Chimes of Big Ben is a clever, but relatively simple escape plot, A,B&C is another immensely subtle, but still clear story. The Club Theory then leaps forward to the bizarre machinations of The Girl Who Was Death and the unusualness of the final two episodes, for a “primetime” series. The contrast between these first three episodes and the final three is held up as evidence of how the series began as a simple extension of Danger Man and was only later tweaked into an allegorical conundrum. This simplistic idea was of course blown apart by the same cult fans later discovering that the episodes were not made in the order in which they were broadcast. However, they had by then written up their opinion and the (often contradictory) stories told them by peripheral members of the cast and crew and to retreat from their statements would make a nonsense of their whole history as an organisation; and so they naturally refused to do this and instead simply ignored the very facts they had discovered themselves and stuck with their original idea that Markstein created a simple secret agent show, which McGoohan then increasingly took over and moulded it into cryptic puzzles.

This idea is even promoted in a recent attempted biography, written in 2007, of Patrick McGoohan. On page 109, the mildly insulting sentence reads,

…in the early days, there was no indication –and probably no plan on the part of the star or his team – to create as popular television material something as cryptic as The Prisoner.

Naturally, any of us can make a mistake and any of us might prefer not to admit we are hopelessly wrong. That is just human nature. However, if we return ourselves to 1980, when these fans were beginning their musings that were to hopelessly confuse future writers on the subject, what seems less forgivable is their blatant inability to notice the huge clues that the show itself carries about the creative influences behind it, and from who those influences were coming from. The fourth episode broadcast was Free For All. This episode was written by Patrick McGoohan but although broadcast first, it was scripted simultaneously with Arrival.

Free For All is far from being as straightforward as Arrival, clearly indicating that not only was McGoohan’s new show cryptic, but it was also planned that way from the very beginning, because Free For All was not only written by the actual creator of the show but also was written at the same time as Arrival. The history of the writing of Arrival is written about quite widely and it seems often suggested that this episode was fully formed before any other work commenced, and then subsequent scripts cascaded from the vision that Arrival had created. The genesis and roots of Free For All seem shrouded in obscurity by comparison. Other than that Patrick McGoohan wrote it, there seems very little written about it's importance to the forming of the whole series. One thing that is clear from watching this episode is that all the original tropes of the series are included. The men in top hats and black mourning coats are as prevalent in Free For All as they are in Arrival.

Another very clear detail is the under-current within the show of McGoohan’s uneasiness about the futile speed of progress and the new world that seemed to be being created by an unthinking societal machine.

Read this commentary from a 1965 TV Times interview with Patrick McGoohan:

Then compare it to the speech he wrote for Number Six’s candidature in Free For All:

SIX: Far be it for me to carp, but what do you do in your spare time?
TWO: I cannot afford spare time!
SIX (to crowd): Do you hear that? He’s working to his limit! Can’t afford spare time! We’re all entitled to spare time! Leisure is our right!
TWO: In your spare time, if you get it, what will you do?
SIX: Less work… And more play !

It is very clear from the very beginning of The Prisoner that McGoohan was making his own social commentary, utilising this secret agent/prisoner allegory as his popular vehicle. The real history of the making of the show itself demonstrates this beyond any doubt and so does the content of the show too. How could any serious fan of this series imagine that it began somehow as a sequel to Danger Man and then only later morphed into what it actually was? When you further consider that Dance of the Dead, perhaps the most wilfully odd episode (outside of Fall-Out) was the fourth episode to be produced and that Once Upon A Time, containing the most wilfully odd half an hour of primetime TV ever produced, was in fact the sixth episode commisioned, then any lingering notions of George Markstein somehow initially crafting a Danger Man sequel only to be usurped by an obscurantist Actor/Producer become irrefutably absurd.

The actual structure of Free for All itself also belies any simplistic origins. The idea of a prisoner standing for election is quirky but the story quickly moves on from that initial puzzle, which seems sufficient plot for the episode, into a situation where the prisoner is bafflingly forced before a committee to justify himself. One of the principal tropes of The Prisoner is the battle of the individual against duty-bound bureaucrats and nowhere in the series is the side that McGoohan himself is on, in this battle, made any clearer than it is in Free For All. From the very beginning of the screenplay it is clear that there is no intention to write this show as some kind of inverted British version of The Fugitive. The Un-reality of the opening scene sets out the writer's stall, when Number Six is talking by telephone to Number Two, he puts the phone down and then Number Two walks immediately into the cottage. This is inexplicable by any normality and Number Six makes no attempt to resolve his evident bafflement, entitling the audience to join him in this acceptance. The ensuing conversations between the two prime numbers about the accompanying woman/maid, Number Fifty-Eight holds a mirror to the series' initial obsession with “Information”.

TWO: … She may be a mere number.... but she used to work in the records. She has a great variety of Information

The continuing breakfast discussion about international cuisine coupled with Number Fifty-Eight’s cosmopolitan language also shows that McGoohan’s script is dealing with all the same gimmicks as Arrival does, in that episode using the taxi-driver instead. The script even dares to give the viewer the solution to the “Who is Number One” question although as always, McGoohan ensured nobody would notice at the time:

TWO: Oh, you’re the boss.
SIX: Number One is the boss.
Then, seconds later,

TWO: If you win, Number One will no longer be a mystery to you – if you know what I mean…..

Part of the morphing fan-creation theory propounds that McGoohan had no idea that Number One would turn out to be Number Six until he came to write Fall-Out because he was making it all up as he went along and that at first the series was only about a secret agent in a predicament. This episode, penned at the very beginning by McGoohan himself demonstrates the none sense of such a proposition.

NumberSix makes a long speech about how the individual and society interface and how the individual relates to the demands of their society and the way individuals are persuaded to conform.

It is also fascinating to notice that, as a film Director, McGoohan also use the same film method (in this joint first episode made) that he would use in the final denouement of Fall-Out virtual-subliminal imaging. Just as the laughing face of Number One would be unmasked only momentarily, so does McGoohan use this flash image of a yellow balloon. Watch the episode and see if you can spot it’s appearance - with the dying afternoon sun of a day in 1966 clearly reflected in it - Blink and you’ll miss it.

The scene with the reporters is often reviewed as the media interpreting politicians but in reality McGoohan was evidently poking out his allegorical tongue at the celebrity media he was so familiar with by 1966 because of his world-wide fame as John Drake; he commented in interviews that what he said to journalists was rarely reproduced with the full meaning he intended. A feature of that scene also reveals McGoohan’s use of another basic Prisoner trope – the clone or twin. One of the reporters is signalled as a clone when we see the same man also selling the newspaper. Once again his first script contains a key element of the early plotting of the show, revealing how he was at the roots of all the ideas from the very beginning.

Patrick McGoohan's script also makes the fullest use of Rover (as balloon) which trope was largely his own inspiration after the original machine had failed. Given that this mechanical failure did not happen until the crew were first at Portmeirion it also demonstrates that McGoohan was writing on the spot and under his own inspiration in a place where the sometime company script editor never even set foot. McGoohan’s curious scene towards the end of Free For All when villagers are seen apparently meditating upon the white orb also demonstrates how quickly he was already riffing on his newest idea as he must heave modified his own script after the crew returned to MGM Boerham Wood, in October 1966. His other jokey use of Rover at the start of his second early authored episode, Once Upon A Time, where the balloon has to be ejected from Number Two’s chair also demonstrates his comfort zone about finding humorous ways to play with his new toy, which could never have formed part of the concepts when Rover was imagined as a wheeled vehicle. The original Rover was, it should be remembered not a piloted vehicle, but some kind of impossible technology that probably would never have been explained, any more than the balloon version was. In several other episodes commissioned to be written by standard writers, Rover plays very little part in events.

The complexity of Free For All also lends credence to McGoohan’s comments about only originally wanting to make seven programmes. Being written so early, Free For All must represent one of McGoohan's core episodes - perhaps the only one that survived the process of getting the funding from Lew Grade. McGoohan seems to cram in so many plot-lines that perhaps he was still working at a tempo of ideas intended to sustain only seven episodes. Interestingly too, the episode duplicates thematic ideas that appear in other episodes, suggesting how his initial ideas for seven episodes were expanded into another ten or so (as he explained in his first retrospective interview on the subject, in 1977).

The episode begins with the election plot, then the prisoner is delivered to the committee and thence to the “Labour Exchange”, mirroring his journey in Arrival. In between he is shadowed by Number Fifty-Eight much as the Queen would shadow Number Six in Checkmate. The way the Labour Exchange manager has the file on Number Six’s private past life is the same trope that was being written into Arrival. The scene with the Labour Exchange manager also reveals the perfect lie of one of the cult Club stories supposedly told to them by George Markstein. When the researching fans discovered one of the *unused* scripts (by Morrias Fahri) they asked Markstein why this script was rejected. Fatuously, the script editor made up some nonsense about McGoohan disliking it because the script had Number Six sweating under pressure and Markstein’s famous quote was that McGoohan complained, “Heroes don’t sweat”. However, the Labour Exchange mind control scene in Free For All leaves Number Six at the end of it, sweating profusely, and wiping his face with his handkerchief, revealing the comment to be as baseless as it was fatuous.

It was one thing for George Markstein to say what he liked; he was after all a free man. But how stupid are the writers who unchallengly and gleefully quote this and simultaneously fail to note the evidence from the show itself that so far as McGoohan was concerned heroes did sweat and Number Six was no different to any other hero.

The episode continues to grow in complexity as Number Six attempts one of his episodic escapes – in a boat this time – He is foiled by Rover and is returned mind-conditioned (as in Change of Mind) after being enveloped by the balloon. As if enough hasn’t happened in this episode already, there is one of the few occasions when the Cat & Mouse pub concept is used in the whole series, and then, just as in Dance of the Dead, the prisoner finds himself in a beach cave, this time with an apparently drunken Number Two. The cave also holds a scientist – Science and the appliance of it was always one of McGoohan themes and the show is replete with this clash of cultures. McGoohan clearly believed in science but was also aware of how science had unexpected consequences. In this particular sequence of the prisoner he has his scientist being fooled into giving his secrets away to the nefarious village masters.

Finally drugged into compliance (as in Change of Mind), Number Six completes his election win. Oddly, there is a tiny moment when McGoohan’s jokey reason given to fans once about why he chose the number six is reflected briefly. Six becomes nine. It is the only number that when turned upside-down becomes another number...... other than Number One of course.

The brutal ending of the episode, when Number Six is heavily, deliberately and repeatedly slapped by Number Fifty-Eight and then beaten like a Christ, with arms outstretched, by her hoodlums, also demonstrates McGoohan’s deep intentions for this show. There was nothing in his script to suggest that here we had a heroic secret agent who was about to win battles with his captors in any conventional way. This episode was written side by side with Arrival and the darkness is clearer in Free For All. Perhaps it was this element of deeper darkness that Arrival originally lacked, when McGoohan rewrote it to a greater or lesser degree.

The extreme and unforgiving violence in the script written by McGoohan also belies another cliché of the prisoner club – that McGoohan was somehow almost childishly puritanical about violence. In fact the beating scene was cennsored by the British IBA watchdog. This British TV censor excised those moments in the broadcast of 1967. There is also an intriguing line in Free For All which also rubbishes the same clubbish clichés about McGoohan and sex. When Number Two is explaining about how Number Fifty Eight will assist Number Six in his electioneering, he says, in words written in McGoohan's own script:

The, err… buggy transport, the lady driver, will be at your disposal for the election period. And anything else you may desire – within reason...........

So far as I recall, Eric Portman gives McGoohan a sly smile as he says the last part – but not a nudge or a wink.

Looking for the real Number Six? He’s not hard to find. You just have watch the programmes.

Be seeing It.

Happy Holidays..

McGoohan in his own words: "I question everything. I don’t accept anything on face value."

2010-11-17T00:12:00.025Z

Anyone briefly scanning web-pages to get an idea of what the 1967 Prisoner is like, before they watch it, is likely to be confused by many things, and many contradictory opinions. Just as McGoohan hoped, when he commented in later years, "I suppose that it is the sort of thing where a thousand people might have a different interpretation of it”. However, I suspect the majority of current opinion about one episode in particular, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling will concur in not thinking that highly of it. It is usually dismissed as a filler episode and the episode is generally regarded as not having much going for it.

In fact, of all episodes of The Prisoner it is Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling that most resembles McGoohan’s earlier vehicle, Danger Man. It’s very structure duplicates the earlier series, opening with a prequel sequence, which then segues into the usual prisoner opening titles, exactly as Danger Man did for six years prior in popular television. The episode even introduces into The Prisoner a character named Potter, the name used for an agent in the latter episodes of Danger Man. This name also gets used within a tongue-in-cheek sequence in the more light-hearted The Girl who was Death. By the time of that episode McGoohan and his writers were clearly having a little fun as well as signalling their demolition of the 'theatrical' fourth wall. http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html

Unlike The girl Who was death however, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling is played very straight and the concluding moments are indeed quite earnest - with references to the splitting of the atom and the laws of unintended scientific consequences, as well as a naively hopeful escape by Professor Seltzman.

Curiously, in recent histories of the show this episode is suggested as having being written at the last minute. The often exemplary book that accompanied the 2007 DVD release suggest, on page 224, that the script was written very late on in the series construction, “Before leaving the series George Markstein had phoned Tilsley to see if the writer had further ideas for the series, but to no avail” However, at first sight, this written history seems to be completely contradicted by Tilsley himself. “They were very pleased with the first one [Chimes of Big Ben] …. And I think I was asked almost immediately, Will you write another?” see about 2 minutes into this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcYxIuvfIBQ
Watching that video snippet is quite odd because the preamble commentary is seeking to present this episode as having been written sometime after the Spring of 1967, when it is made apparent by Mr. Tilsley's opening words that he actually had the script in the Autumn of 1966. The commentary is good Propaganda but poor journalism.

However, if, as my last Blog mentioned, George Markstein effectively left the series after six episodes, as older histories of the show suggested, then perhaps these two conflicting stories are not so contradictory. That might be a subject for a future Blog. The written histories of the production of this show are riddled with many such inconsistencies where the history writers choose to reinterpret what people appear to have actually said.

In a similar way, it is startling to note that the very first fans who began to study this series as more than just a passing piece of TV ephemera actually thought Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling was the richest, most complexly rewarding program in the series. That was the opinion expressed in the viewing notes published to accompany the Ontario Educational Communications Authority study of the show in 1976 – a College/Open Learning course, which involved the series being re-broadcast and this exercise culminated in the well-known Troyer Interview with McGoohan in 1977.

Why, I wondered, has this episode such an opinion dichotomy? One of the reasons I suspect is that very few Prisoner watchers nowadays approach this programme with an open mind. Instead they will have cribbed reviews and accounts of the show, and have speed-learned that this episode was commissioned merely in order to allow for McGoohan’s absence at very short notice from the set of The Prisoner, whilst he filmed Ice Station Zebra in Hollywood. It is evident from the account from Vincent Tilsey’s that this is in fact not the case and the script of Do Not forsake Me Oh My Darling had been commissioned almost immediately after delivery of the fifth script: Chimes of Big Ben, in the midst of the primary location production work. The script was one that McGoohan and Tomblin had evidently held back for some time. Tomblin is quoted in Andrew Pixley’s book, on page 224, “Patrick got an offer to do a film called Ice Station Zebra and it did clash with our programme so I suggested we transplanted his mind into another actor”.

Many *official* published accounts of the making of The Prisoner ramble about an unsubstantiated plan for there to be a second series of the show and that Do Not Forsake me Oh My Darling was commisioned as the opener for this because within the dialogue there are references to the prisoner having been away for a year. The reason for the episode not entering production until the later time was a long-planned deliberate one, as explained by David Tomblin. Cause and effect often become very muddled in the *official* histories as authors seek to pursue their own historical agendas, rather than balancing all the known facts.

Patrick McGoohan’s bodily absence is often advanced as one reason why this episode should not be taken as canon to the show itself. However, actually watching the episode gives a very different impression. The very casting of Nigel Stock has some significance. The vagaries of fame mean that nowadays people see Nigel as just a strangely incongruous replacement. However, Nigel Stock was already an acquaintance of McGoohan. They both featured in the 1954/55 movie, The Dambusters. Stock was a guest-star in the Danger Man episode, Loyalty Always Pays and if they did not know one another before that, they would certainly have found something very much in common to talk about with one another then, because Nigel Stock had portrayed the vicar in the play Serious Charge in 1953, when the play was first written and performed in repertory. The West End version of this play gave Patrick McGoohan his first big London success in the theatre, in 1955 as the vicar. Nigel Stock was also well-recognised in the mid-Sixties as Dr. Watson from BBC adaptations of Sherlock Holmes so he was no makeweight as a TV personality – certainly not a face unknown. At ten years older in real life than Patrick McGoohan however, he carried a little more middle-aged spread and his hair was not so thick upon his pate; a very stodgy-looking Number Six in fact. Current viewers just see this as mildly unappetising, and have lost sight that this was the whole point of the episode – that Number Six found himself in an alien body.

The earlier fans in Canada were not so speed-learned and they realised that one of the underlying themes of this episode was the very important agenda that whilst Number Six found himself free, he was trapped in another man’s body. Using his mind and skills, and having learned lessons from all the tricks the village had played on him in Chimes of Big Ben and Many Happy Returns Number Six might simply have made himself scarce… and escaped. The fact that he did no such thing illustrates that McGoohan was quite concerned to explicate that for an individual, it was not just the mind that mattered; it was an individuals’ whole being - including their body. The inclusion in the plot of a fiancée provides an important mechanism to point up, in a decorous way, one of the key reasons why a person’s body is of as much importance as their mind to their existence as an individual. Number Six would rather return to prison as Himself than be free as someone else. This is at the root of the complexity that the Ontario College evidently saw and makes this episode as important in the prisoner canon as any other. Several episodes explore this especial aspect of what it is that makes a person an individual - Schizoid Man, A, B&C and Change of Mind as well as the final episode itself of course. Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling is part of the exploration of that conundrum of Individuality and adds an important ingredient.

The episode does however share a characteristic with another latterly produced episode, Living In Harmony, in that it seeks directly to place The Prisoner within a well-known story medium. In Living in Harmony the traditional Cowboy format is used, whilst Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling apes the format of Danger Man / Secret Agent itself. In many ways these two episodes took the tale of The Prisoner no further forward but served to entertain the viewer whilst instilling the realisation that The Prisoner was just telling a story exactly as other traditional formats could. It was perhaps in this sense that McGoohan himself referred to filler episodes. He was treading water in terms of the primary tale that he was seeking to tell, but that did not indicate that the producers did not applyjust as much care to making them into pieces of good quality work as any other episode.Indeed, Living in Harmony took longer to shoot than High Noon itself!!

Therefore it would be wrong to suggest that McGoohan was not as involved or did not devote as much care to Do Not Forsake me Oh My Darling as the episodes his own body was actively feaured in. The care taken in the many voice-over scenes where Number Six realises he is no longer who he thought he was demonstrates the co-ordinated approach McGoohan and Tomblin employed and also how cleverly they devised an episode wherein the viewer did not see their hero that much, but nevertheless his presence was ubiquitous via his voice. The episode also features some of the cleverest hints in the entire series about who Number One might be. In the scene when Number Six goes to collect his photographs there is this dialogue as the shop-owner locates the year-old film very quickly:

Six: Oh, that was quick

Photographer: Oh –it’s only one sir
Six: It’s been signed for already
Photographer: Yes, a stupid clerical error I’m afraid. One of our juniors handed over your transparencies, in mistake for this number. Pure carelessness of course – confusing the last figures Oh One and One Oh.

Earlier in the script when Number Six is being prepared for the first mind transference, the disembodied voice of Number Two tells him: Take it easy! Take it easy! It will all be one, in the end.

As with all clues that McGoohan placed throughout the series, these would not be noticed at the time, but only later, when the whole secret of the show had finally been revealed, would their significance become apparent. Quite possibly McGoohan just saw them as little wordplay jokes of his own, not ever expecting the study of his work that occurred later. However their presence in this episode show the care lavished upon it. McGoohan’s other small jokes, such as the Seltzman envelope bearing the address “Portmeirion Road” (reportedly in McGoohan’s own hand-writing) demonstrate his personal interest in the minutiae of this episode, and this notion is backed up by archivist Andrew Pixley who notes on page 233 of his book, “with the return of McGoohan [from America] several re-shoots were called for..” Incidentally the presence of that envelope notation also demonstrates that no second series beginning with this episode was planned. It is a truism that McGoohan had promised the owner of Portmeirion that the resort would not be *publicised* until the end of the whole series. McGoohan would not have been dropping hints about the real village if he had expected his show to be running on television for a further three months after Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling was broadcast.

McGoohan's careful attention to all aspects of his show, is also evident in the continuity between this episode and Fall-Out which both utilised the A20 as a route element of the plot. Beachy Head is mentioned too, linking the episode with The Girl Who was Death and Many Happy Returns. The title is a clear misnomer that cleverly linked the episode directly to Living in Harmony with the resonance of the theme song from the classic Western movie, High Noon. There is even a link back to the other script penned by Vincent Tilsley that emphasises the coherent place of this episode within the series. In Chimes of Big Ben, when Nadia and Number Six are in the crate they have a conversation. Nadia flirts with Number Six, asking "Big Bill" some personal questions, culminating in asking him if he is married. She receives a firm negative in reply. But at that point Number Six also demands that she stop talking. He perhaps feared the obvious next question that a woman might ask would be the one word query “Engaged?” Number Six would not have wanted to risk giving the village information about his fiancee would he, because at that stage he had no idea that his fiancée’s father (his boss) knew all about the village. Do Not Forsake me Oh My Darling becomes the very first time Number Six, discovers beyond doubt that his own side are as complicit as any other side in his imprisonment. The curtains are drawn wide. he sees the stage clearly for perhaps the very first time.

Do Not Forget Me, Oh My Darling

Check out my own reworking of this episode at my alternative storyblog here:
http://numberschizx.blogspot.com/2009/12/boot-is-on-other-foot.html

McGoohan was born free as Caesar: "I know what they’ve been saying behind my back………. But I haven’t lost a friend in the unit.”

2010-10-20T00:30:00.044+01:00

In December, 1967 the TV Times ran a feature on The Prisoner, which was about halfway through it’s first UK broadcast run. By that time, the programme was pretty much in the can and McGoohan was evidently beginning to relax. His work was almost done. However, he commented within that article

http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/tvtimes/Dec1967/pdf.pdf

The tensions that existed on the project seemed to reach some kind of nadir about halfway through the production schedule. Although eventually broadcast as the eleventh episode, It’s Your Funeral was actually the eighth episode to enter production. The current trivia section on wikipedia summarises part of that history:

According to the documentary Don't Knock Yourself Out, produced for the 2007 DVD reissue of The Prisoner in the UK, production of this episode was impacted by behind-the-scenes tension. Interviewed in the documentary, actors Annette Andre and Mark Eden both recall McGoohan and the director entering into a shouting match during filming (Andre strongly criticizes McGoohan for this behaviour). Eden recalls McGoohan losing control and nearly strangling him during a fight scene. Nesbitt, also interviewed for the programme, indicates that he was never given any information regarding what the yet-to-be-broadcast series was about, and thus played New Number Two in a state of confusion. Andre ends her comments by stating she did not enjoy her time on the program, while a crewmember expresses the belief that McGoohan, under creative pressure, experienced a nervous breakdown during filming of this episode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Your_Funeral

As can be seen from the next snippet, from Time Out published in 1982, the story as told in most official sources has not changed in some ways since the fan club first broke out of their closed club and into the mainstream media.

http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/timeout/July1982/pdf.pdf

Once Upon A Time was actually the sixth episode to enter production. One of the persistent tendencies of the closed fan-history seems to be to always seek to glorify the role of almost every collaborator in The Prisoner at the expense of any positive light upon Patrick McGoohan as the evident leading player in the entire project.

It is this bizarre tendency to diminish him that indeed led to the J'Accuse title of my entire blog-roll. The dvd documentary mentioned earlier was re-christened by one reviewer I read as "Let's All Kick Pat". The events told may be true to a greater or lesser degree but why are they *spun* the way they are? The most negatively critical tales often hinge upon the episode It's Your Funeral and remarkably it is study of the context of those events that seem to expose one of the biggest falsities at the heart of *official* fandom.

Its Your Funeral was the first episode to go into production after the two-week break of Christmas, 1966. But the events after It’s Your Funeral lead to a conclusion very different to viewing those events in mere isolation as somehow typical of the whole project. The next several episodes made in the new year of 1967 seem to demonstrate a gradual lifting of the cloud of funereal ire. Certainly McGoohan took over the direction of the very next episode in production, Change of Mind, but unlike the unfortunate Ms Andre, Angela Browne commented how nice Patrick McGoohan was to her while this episode was filmed. The next two episodes in production were the two made with Colin Gordon who commented how proud he was of the roles that took him out of his frequent acting niche of light comedy. At any rate he certainly enjoyed making A,B&C enough to want to stay on and make The General ! Next up was another comedic actor, Patrick Cargill, who like Colin Gordon, spoke later of relishing the opportunity to explore a more sinister character than he usually was offered in Hammer Into Anvil. Finally Many Happy Returns entered production, featuring a second appearance by Georgina Cookson, who had featured in A,B&C and Patrick Cargill again. Like Leo McKern some people seem to have kept coming back for moor. It was now April 1967 and seemingly whatever had ailed the production mood back in early January was resolved. So why had the making of that episode back in January become so fraught and unpleasant in the memory of those actors who were there?

In 1968, Patrick McGoohan made a very interesting comment to a journalist from the British national newspaper, the Daily Mirror, after the project was completed,

“It was a great error to start with only five or six scripts………… I should have had all the scripts before we started”.

McGoohan’s recollection is objectively verified by archivist Andrew Pixley, who in his recent book says, on page 28,

It was the scripts that became the biggest concern for the production teams………..

then on page 31, also referring to the start of location filming in Portmeirion, Pixley notes,

Maher recalled that only two complete scripts were available along with location sequences of others , and during September some exterior sections of a fifth, The Chimes of Big Ben

Incredibly, Markstein has since been lauded over the years by fan faction as some kind of guru behind this seminal series. The truth could barely be any more of a polar opposite. The answer actually becomes obvious by studying the very accounts of the production history of the show that these same fans have collected ! In that 1982 published article I quoted earlier, there is this paraphrase of what presumably George Markstein had told the fans who had interviewed him in the fag-end years of the 1970’s.

Like many things that the official fans came to believe and have faithfully disseminated since, these claims seem to have been proven false by the very same history their various convention interviews have laid bare because almost every script-writer is on record as declaring they received no complex brief - almost the diametric opposite in fact!

Vincent Tilsley was one of the first script-writers other than McGoohan himself. Mr. Tilsley wrote Chimes of Big Ben, the fifth episode to enter production, as mentioned earlier. Tilsey is quoted,

Yes, I gather that there was a writers guide to this series that I’ve heard about. I myself never saw it. I just had George telling me his concept of it……….. I didn’t at that time understand that it was going to be a different Number Two in each episode.

Another of the first writers was Anthony Skene, with Dance of the Dead. A fan-club interview recorded his statement,

The Prisoner was generally a bastard……. I saw not one piece of paper. The show was a cosmic void.

The writer of the seventh episode to enter production (McGoohan having written the sixth for himself) was Terence Feely, with The Schizoid Man. Andrew Pixley’s book records on page 154,

McGoohan sent Markstein around to visit Feely and while the script-editor could not furnish a writers guide he did explain about Portmeirion

Derren Nesbitt was the star of the eighth episode, It’s Your Funeral. Mr. Pixley’s book is once again damning of the nature of the script in it’s recitation of the simple facts recorded by his history,

Receiving the script of It’s Your Funeral Nesbitt was confused, and when discussing the episode with the director found that Asher was confused too……… "Pat asked me why I was acting so puzzled. I replied. Bob Asher doesn’t know what’s going on, I don’t know, nor do the others. Even you don’t understand what’s happening."

As can be seen from the wiki transcript earlier, fan interprettion of the situation on the set of Its Your Funeral is that Mr. Nesbitt was complaining of the whole series, but why should he have been interested? Mr. Nesbitt would only have been concerned with his episode and his SCRIPT.

Was it this scathing, but honest comment to McGoohan from his long-time associate actor the moment of change in McGoohan’s mind about his patience with the script production process ? Whilst nowadays the *official* versions of the prisoner story have George Markstein’s guiding hand applying to the first thirteen episodes to enter production, in 1982, the story was significantly different:

[NB. Markstein became a successful novelist in 1974]

It would make sense that as McGoohan grappled with his need to make an executive decision he became increasingly tense. He was probably not unaware of the very weaknesses Derren Nesbitt had highlighted, and increasingly embarrassed at being the head of what was becoming a failing organisation. The script editor had to go or at least be bypassed, because only then could McGoohan get his project back on track.This notion is corroborated by other interviews. Lewis Greifer, long known to McGoohan but a personal friend of Markstein stated that in his memory George’s contributions to the prisoner scripts pretty much ended around Christmas 1966. John S Smith joined the production team specifically to edit It’s Your Funeral and records that Markstein was largely absent from events during his time around the production environment.

Yet, in 2007 an *unofficial* book republished the same modern *official* none sense:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Prisoner-Handbook-Steven-Paul-Davies/dp/0230530281/ref=pd_sim_b_1

How little seems ever to change in the published tales from the fan-base. How much Information they unearth and how little attention they pay to it. The clues are all there, the statements made by those working on the project at the time all coincide, the pattern of behaviours make sense -- an inward spiral in January 1967 and then a rapid recovery thereafter. McGoohan had made a major recruitment error. In giving the inexperienced Mr. Markstein the crucial role of supervising the production of scripts Patrick McGoohan had made a woeful choice. He was the sort of man who probably did not like to admit when he was wrong, but he was also strong-minded and this was his project and by golly if the wheels were coming off, he accepted the responsibility of getting the thing back on track. George was side-lined and the increasingly happy production sequence of February, March and April bear testament to the wisdom of that decision. Arguably some of the most powerful episodes of the show in Change of Mind, A,B&C, The General and Hammer into Anvil came into being and most importantly the scripts began to become sharp once again, just as that initial burst of creative energy had made the first few (allowing for the fact that McGoohan had written 25% of those himself). There are of course also many suggestions within the histories that Markstein was actively obstructing McGoohan’s progress. His insistence about the character being John Drake possibly confused the recruited writers and his reported refusal to become involved with the script of Once Upon A Time (written by his employer!) are just two major points of issue. What he had made of the balloons when the production team returned from Portmeirion is sadly under-reported, but a gentle flavour of how things were is suggested via a 1991 interview with Patrick McGoohan,

We had a script supervisor, God bless him, God rest his soul, he's gone on now, who always thought, despite any amount of dissuasion that its got to be an extension because he'd worked on the tail end of one and into the other, and its the same guy that's doing it. But I said, "OK, it's an extension of reality, and the other one, Danger Man, was supposed to be related to reality in some way" But I said, "What's this big rubber balloon doing there?" I said, "Come on!" But he wouldn't be convinced!

George refused to be convinced and with his mind of his own he wrote his own war commando spin on some aspects of The Prisoner, seven years later (The Cooler). By that time Patrick McGoohan was resident in the USA and beginning his long association with friend and colleague Peter Falk; but the identity crisis of his putating prisoner fans was still a couple of years in the future. As Nelson Brenner might have quipped with a grin, Be Seeing You....................

McGoohan and his Literature: "I've never read a Kafka" "Jung? I haven't read a word"

2010-09-16T01:03:00.009+01:00

When, in 1991, Patrick McGoohan was quizzed by a member of the prisoner fan clubs he was specifically asked if there was anything in literature that had influenced him. His reply was uncompromisingly short:

No, not really.

The brave interviewer did not give up however and asked him about all the possible influences fans had discerned within their studies of The Prisoner. The list included many of the usual suspects; Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, John Fowles.... My main blog title gives you a flavour of the general tenor of his responses. Anyone reading the many magazines, books or internet articles about The Prisoner will soon come across writers/philosphers as diverse as Ayn Rand, Jeremy Bentham, Michel Foucalt, Marshall McLuhan as being cited as influences upon The Prisoner. I would hazhard a guess that if any of these had also been proposed to McGoohan in that interview, then his response woould have not changed much.

McGoohan's evident disinterest in the philosophical heroes of the youngsters of the 1980's and 1990's seems to have consolidated the line of thought that McGoohan had little to do with the creativeness of the writing within The Prisoner and the consequent and enthusiastic desire they had to transfer credit for this to either the Script Editor or just at random, to individual script-writers. There is no doubt that the script-writers could individually have brought influences of the likes of Kafka to the script table and indeed this was plainly something McGoohan wanted to happen. His global approach to the assembling of the many scripts demonstrates he was open to each of his collaborators making a contribution. However, it is also clear that the entire series is coherent in its style, humour and narrative direction and that much of that coherence is only attributable to Patrick McGoohan. As Jack Lowin (chief cameraman) put it

The whole concept was Pat's. The whole idea was Pat's and only Pat really knew how it was all going to turn out in the end and as the series went on it did tend to get more and more way out as Pat got the bit between his teeth a bit. But they were not all shot in the order in which they were eventually shown; and I think Pat ... did not want to produce any one complete episode really, until the very end. He had a certain amount of trouble with the top brass...... but Pat was quite deliberately making sure that no one episode ever really got finished... I think he wanted to keep them so that they would all be finally put together at the last minute so that nobody could....... criticise...... he would get one partially edited and then it would get left, and he would go onto another one.........

It was 1991 when McGoohan was directly asked by a fan interviewer about his literary influences, but if the fans had actually taken as much interest in him as they did the show he created for them, they would soon have realised that naturally he had literary influences, as any well-educated man of his generation would do. However his influences were not so much the darlings of those educated in the 1970's or 1980's but the literary notables of the earlier part of the 20th century. McGoohan frequently referred to his obsession with Brand and it can be inferred that he would have been a great reader of Henrik Ibsen. Like any repertory actor of his generation he would have been very aware of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw and the many other literary men whose art touched the world of Theatre. In terms of The Prisoner however he himself mentioned the two obvious candidates of a world where the individual counts for nothing. Those two literary works are Brave New World, written in 1932, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1949. McGoohan was an uncomplicated fellow intellectually it seems and naturally it was these two fairly obvious books he himself mentions as being influential upon his mind, when writing The Prisoner.

In 1983 he was quoted,
"I wrote it with 1984 in mind and we're getting closer to the world of those numbers all the time"

However, back in 1969 he was quoted in the American press,
"It's Brave New World stuff. Nobody has a name, everyone wears a number. It's a reflection of the pressure on all of us to be numbered, to give up our individualism."

Margaret Atwood has recently remarked that those two books both cast a shadow over the post-WW2 world. However it was Orwell's vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state that is probably by far the most well-known nowadays. The book has been filmed for TV and the movies several times and so it has been re-ingrained in the modern minds, plus of course for the Western world until 1989 it was descriptive of a world to be feared: the world of Communist despotism. However, whilst some elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four strike chords of consciousness that lie within The Prisoner, the overall tone of the brutalism of the 1949 novel seems miles away from the lighter jollities of McGoohan's village. For this reason perhaps, many admiriers of The Prisoner have seen a disconnect with the darkness of Orwell's 1949 book.

By contrast Brave New World has only been filmed twice, both times only for TV productions in the USA. Whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four has been a common school text, Brave New World rarely features in the curriculum. The reason for the gradual slippage from the modern consciousness of Brave New World is, ironically, probably because of the same angst that often bothered McGoohan himself, in his Sixties years of TV fame. Whereas Nineteen Eighty Four is largely based around the threat of violence as a means of control, Brave New World is centred around the idea that sex and pleasure keeps the population from challenging the status quo.

In fact, a little study of Brave New World reveals it to have many commonalities with The Prisoner and there seems little doubt that it featured greatly in the issues that McGoohan was interested in exploring in his secret agent allegory of the modern world of 1965 and explains why he mentions it specifically nearest that time - in 1969 - whereas perhaps 1984 is only referred to as that portentous year itself drew nearer, in 1983. Aspects of Brave New World pop up in several different episodes. The fabric of the book itself is predicated on there being five grades of persons in Society: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. Each grade is genetically modified and conditioned to perform certain functions and be content with their position in the heirarchy. Epsilons are practical morons.

Speedlearn (from The General) is not dissimilar to the concept of Hypnopaedia, that is a knowledge system in Brave New World where sleeping children have *facts* whispered into their sleeping minds. One passage is mirrored by the sequence in The General when Number Six answers a question ambiguously.
A child called Tommy has been subjected to the hypnopaedic fact that, "The Nile is the longest river in Africa and the second in length of all the rivers of the globe.
"Tommy" someone says, "Do you know which is the longest river in Africa?"
Tommy shakes his head.
Tommy is encouraged to recites his Hypnopaedia and does so, word-perfect.
Tommy is asked again, "Then which river is the longest in Africa?"
Tommy bursts into tears, crying "I don't know... "

In Chimes of Big Ben, Nadia is subjected to a conditioing process involving an electrified floor. In possibly the most disturbingly violent passage of Brave new World, small babies are conditioned to react as their society expects their grade of citizen to react, by electrification on a grid-like metal floor.

One of the main characters is an Alpha named Bernard, who becomes increasingly unhappy with his existence, feeling his life has no meaning, even though he is in the uppermost level of the system. He is by no means a hero, but keeps complaining to Lenina, a willing girlfriend who cannot understand why he is not enjoying his privileged lifestyle. He has a conversation with her not unlike those Number Six would have with one of his maids and at one point says,
"I'd rather be myself. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly!"
Later he complains to her, "Don't you wish you were free Lenina?"
She replies, "I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays."
Bernard laughs and and asks, "But wouldn't you like to be free in some other way Lenina? Your own way, for example, not in everybody elses way."
Lenina responds, "Bernard, I don't know what you mean."

Bernard inevitably comes to the attention of the Directors. These are senior Alphas, who monitor and control their sections of Society. Bernard's Controller says to him at one stage,
"Consider the matter dispassionately and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual - and after all, what is an individual? we can make a new one with the greatest of ease - as many as we like. Unorthodoxy strikes at society itself"
By the end of the book Bernard is exiled to an island where other non-conformist Alphas are sent.

Although written in 1932 when TV was barely invented, Brave New World has televisions at the heart of life and death (dying patients have a TV at the foot of their bed, "left on like a running tap, from morning until night"). The screens monitor the watchers as well as entertaining them. Another gadget found both indoors and outdoors is the Synthetic Music Device from which the Voice of Reason will sometimes speak calmingly, not unlike Fenella Fieldings voice does in The Prisoner.

Another key character in the book is John, who is an outsider to the normal society, having been brought up by a lost Alpha female, in a human reservation where some people have been preserved to live as "savages". John however has had access to Shakespeare so has a foot in both forms of society. Once he has been made part of the brave new world he is infuriated by the conditioned responses of the Deltas in particular and at one point he attempts to make them rise up against the happy, drugged lifestyle they exist within. His speech is redolent of Number Six's speech in Free for All,
"I come to bring you freedom... But do you like being slaves? Do you like being babies? Yes! Babies! Mewling and puking. Don't you want to be free and men? Don't you seem to understand what manhood and freedom are? Very well then! I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to or not !!"
John then destroys the happy pills the deltas are queuing for, and shouts,
"You're free!!"
The Deltas let out a furious scream of anger and attack John.

It may be pure coincidence but one of the most senior Alpha Directors is served by a Gamma butler.

In the book consumerism and waste is encouraged because this stimulates demand for new things. Some comments about this touch themes evident in The Prisoner about progress and the value of newness. One conversation leads to a passage redolent of that between Number Six and the Arts Committee in Chimes of Big Ben. John is debating with one of the Controllers that Othello is far superior to the modern stories that are written to entertain the society and he complains about these shoddy new works,
"But they don't mean anything"
To which the Controller replies,
"They mean themselves".

One of the themes throughout The Prisoner is that of twins or identical people and early episodes of the show include glimpses of identical faces - the gardener/electrician for instance. One of the aspects of Brave New World is that the lower orders are budded from one embryo, resulting in identical people. near the end of the book, John is thinking about the mob of Deltas who had attacked him,
"But need it be quite so bad as those twins? He passed his hand over his eyes... remembered images of those long rows of identical midgets..... those human maggots... the endlessly repeated face of his assailants"

In another conversation, John and the Controller debate:
John: But I like inconveniences
Control: We don't. We prefer to do things comfortably
John: But I don't want comfort. I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.
Control: In fact, you're claiming the right to be unhappy
John: Alright then. I'm claiming the right to be unhappy !
Control: You're welcome.

I mentioned earlier that the discontented Alpha, Bernard is banished to an island for the crime of wanting to be an idividual. So is his friend, Hemholtz Watson, an Alpha writer of meaningless stories, who decides he wants to write books that have some meaning. The Controller explains to him about his fate and says,
"... it's lucky that there are such a lot of islands in the world. I don't know what we should do without them. Put you all in a lethal chamber I suppose. By the way Mr. Watson, would you like a tropical climate? ... Or something more bracing?"

As I read that passage I could only wish Aldous Huxley had added. "in the Baltic off the coast of Lithuania perhaps" But Huxley wrote no such thing. History is never quite that simple. Or, as one of the motto's of the Brave New World recited by Lenina, would have it:

"When the individual feels, the community reels"

McGoohan in his own words: "Ultimately, each of us must live within ourselves, and I’m just an idiot like the rest of the crowd."

2010-08-17T23:56:00.019+01:00

PART THREE - the final part
Just a year or two after he had left The Prisoner behind, Jeanne Sakol went on the trail of Patrick McGoohan and found him in Norway, already on the quest of filming Brand, his lifetime’s McGuffin. In the course of the interview he said to her:

“I have a virile hope for the future. That’s why I did The Prisoner …. an allegory … a fable … a protest against regimentation and loss of individuality. We must not become puppets ………………... Ultimately, each of us must live within ourselves, and I’m just an idiot like the rest of the crowd.”
http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/cosmopolitan/Dec1969/pdf.pdf

An allegory? In these modern times the allegorical nature of The Prisoner is often referred to. Allegories have frequently been used to represent political and historical situations and are popular vehicles for satire. They are often written as fables, wherein particular characters are representative of any one of us, perhaps in differing ways. Their perceived message can often vary between individuals, even though the fable is addressing a universal aspect.

In McGoohan’s own lifetime he had seen the Cold War heat up after WW2, flare into flames in the 1950’s, burn with frightening ferocity at the start of the 1960’s, as the Cuban Missile Crisis made both sides of the conflict realise what this war might lead to – then, in response to that universal fear – cool down. McGoohan’s own career was shaped by that same Cold War. His increasing popularity with the public throughout the world, as Danger Man, had made him a huge asset to Lew Grade and so McGoohan garnered a power. What was he to do with it? Patrick McGoohan used the world of secret agency to describe his own real world. He sought to allegorise the Cold War.

The biggest effect of the Cold War was the increasing fragmentation of the human world. Politics were split: People were Communist or Capitalist. Countries became split by those very politics. The cumulative knowledge of the Cold War far exceeds any notions I may have of it, but this table crops up on one website to neatly sum up some key differences. These are the some of the same issues The Prisoner grapples with. However rather than make a partisan show, McGoohan began to blur which side was which and question whether some of the attributes were in fact mutual ? Was it really so simple as the chart would have us believe?

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/coldwar.htm

The enigma of Twins or Identity is part of many episode plots. In Taiwan, a tiny island of people protested that they were China – the most populous nation on earth. In 1966 the USA still recognised the Taiwan authority as the only legal government of the whole of China. Korea had been split into two by the vicious war of the mid 1950’s. In the 1960’s Vietnam was being brutalised in the same pattern. Countries became twins of one another – one Communist and one Capitalist. All of these patterns had been set at the conclusion of WW2 and of course the people who were made the most schizoid, and the country that was twinned first – was Germany - split literally into two by the ideological conclusion of the war. One small place in particular became the very essence of this strange human struggle for supremacy: Berlin. Formerly the capital city, it had become perhaps the strangest city in the world. The Capitalist island of West Berlin actually lay right in the middle of Communist East Germany – the DDR. Berlin had become an island…. An isolated village – hard to get into, sometimes impossible to escape from.

http://www.altostland.com/sdg.html

Divided into four zones for many years the people who lived in the village of Berlin found themselves subjected to arbitrary and alien authorities. In 1948 all routes in and out of West Berlin were closed. Then in 1961, the strangest thing of all happened, Berlin itself became a twinned city. Within the DDR you could buy a map. But no matter how big the map you bought in East Berlin, it still showed you no more detail of West Berlin, than you could see in the smaller version.

http://njasson.free.fr/Welcome_to_nowhere/Welcome_to_nowhere.html

Maps of West Berlin did exist, but they were no more informative to a resident of the DDR, other than to tell the viewer of the map to be afraid – be very afraid….

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sludgeulper/3888082520/

Berlin’s real-life could be as surreal as any imagined village. When you passed from the sunlit street into the Underground, you encountered the phenomenon of the Ghost Stations:

........there were three lines that ran for the most part through West Berlin but passed through a relatively small stretch of East German territory in the city centre. Trains did not stop at these stations, though for technical reasons they did need to slow down significantly while passing though. The name Geisterbahnhof was soon understandably applied to these dimly lit, heavily guarded stations by the westerners who watched them pass by out the windows. However, the term was never official; West Berlin subway maps of the period simply labelled these stations "Bahnhöfe, auf denen die Züge nicht halten"—"stations at which the trains do not stop." East Berlin subway maps did not depict Western lines or ghost stations at all. http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/ghost-station/

West Berlin became like a velvet prison for its inhabitants. They were free, but how far could they go in any one direction? Less than 20 miles. The East Berliners were perceived by the West as being in a Police State but they could leave their Berlin and travel. There were no walls to keep them in. The paradoxes of Berlin exercised the mind of the whole world and then in 1963 the American President stood in the centre of Berlin, the village in the centre of the DDR and spoke the words that captured the imagination of the whole Western world at the time:

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin,

and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words

"Ich bin ein Berliner".

Five months later John Kennedy was assassinated and the attitudes of the western world began to change. Conspiracy Theories began to escalate. Who was to be trusted? How could you know who to trust? Whose side were “They” really on?

Q ... Was there a feeling of vulnerability living in Berlin then, as it went on?
A…. I think we got quickly used to it, we West Berliners. What I noticed, talking to West Germans - they were paranoiac, you know, they expected that everyone in Berlin was a sort of spy. I remember once going to the theatre, and I was sitting next to a student who came from Stuttgart, and we had a quite nice chat about this play, and suddenly he said to me, "I mustn't talk to you - you might be a spy for the East!" And I just sort of stared at him - I thought, "They are very ignorant." And there was this distinct "them and us". http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-9/hosseni3.html

The initials DDR stood for Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Democratic. It was a world of rigged elections and slogans:

"Looking forward to the XII Party Congress, we meet the challenges of today."

"Where a party member is, there too is the party."

Stories of the true nature of the DDR were always leaking out to those in the west of course, as TIME noted in 1961:
Under a new decree, hundreds of East Germans were being snatched up and "resettled" in small isolated towns in the interior for "work education." Reason: they were suspected of planning to escape to the West or of encouraging others to do so. Hordes of uniformed "Free German Youth" youngsters were sent out to inspect every East German's rooftop television and F.M. aerial, tear down those that were pointed toward the stations of West Berlin or West Germany. "Anyone listening to Western radio or television broadcasts is a traitor!" cried an editorial in Leipzig's Sächsische Zeitung.
Calling for greater factory production last week, the regime announced a new slogan:
"More production in the same time for the same money."
At dinner in a private home, a wife anxiously discussed the letter she got that morning from Communist Party headquarters, inviting her to attend a lecture on world politics. Should she go? The debate occupied the entire meal. "If you do not attend, we'll have a party official here tomorrow morning asking why. and it will get us in trouble'' decided her husband.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,938743,00.html

So, I can feel my reader asking, is Moor Larkin saying that Patrick McGoohan made a show about Berlin? Not exactly is my answer; but he was making a show about the world as he saw it then, the world as he feared it developing. People had made Berlin, just as it was People who were making his country of Britain, just as it was People who had created the Cuban Crisis and People who had assassinated Kennedy.

That’s why I did The Prisoner …. an allegory … a fable …

a protest against regimentation and loss of individuality.

We must not become puppets.

Patrick McGoohan demonstrated a certain contempt for party politics in his first solo script written for The Prisoner (Free for All). Interestingly this episode was one of the four not shown in W. Germany in 1969. It seems obvious that what Patrick McGoohan would take from the strange predicament of Berlin was not the capital-P Politics but instead the small-p politics of the people in the predicament. Was The Prisoner about Berlin? Obviously not, or he would have simply said so. Was Aesop writing about hares and toroises? Obviously not. Like Aesop, Patrick McGoohan was allegorising the way human beings behaved throughout history via a Fable - a Cold war mystery. The notions of Butlins Holiday camps in Wales, Commando war training camps in Scotland, or Spy Towns in Russia all pale into insignificance compared to the predicament of Everyman in Berlin. Nobody in 1960's Britain or America could fail to see the parallels and McGoohan was noted in biographical articles at the time as being an admirer of President Kennedy - as almost every man, and woman, was, in the western world, at the time.

The reductionism of fans picking and choosing about this origin and that origin and claiming that the minutest obscure detail somehow makes the true meaning of the Series clearer, or explained, is to entirely negate and overlook the bigger, over-arching narrative that McGoohan attempted with his story. It was a narrative that only he grasped from the beginning and even unto the end a narrative only he knew how to pursue; a narrative that left the inexperienced or the inept floundering. It was a narrative that was all about the cleverest detail and subtle nuance of double meaning but simultaneously about the epic scale of human folly. It was about how helpless the individual is in the grip of that folly. After all, if the almost super-human Number Six could not alone set himself free, how should any one of us presume to that ambition? His cleverness was to tell us this story in such a way however, that as individuals we are encouraged to believe that if each individual looks to himself, maybe it is possible somehow, if we never give up, if we never give in, if we look ourselves in the eye and rather than despairing of our futility in the face of Authority, we resolve instead to choose never to surrender ourself to it, then, perhaps, we are free after all.

It was 1960’s Berlin, which gave him this epic template for his allegory of Human Society. He lived to see 1990's Berlin prove his implicit faith and optimism in the human spirit. They came together. They escaped. They celebrated.

But also, just as he pointed out at the very end of his own series - the struggle began all over again. However he left us with the abiding image that it is the individual who is in the driving seat !!

Ich bin keine Nummer, ich bin ein freier Mensch!.

Ich bin ein Berliner !

And how apt, that just recently, Germany has been celebrating again:
Für Kiffer, Kalte Krieger und konspirativ Veranlagte: Arte zeigt die britische Spionage-Serie "The Prisoner" aus den Sechzigern. Mit seiner systemkritischen Haltung, seiner verrätselten Story und seinem kompromisslosen Erzählstil gilt das Werk zu Recht als Meilenstein der Fernsehgeschichte.
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/tv/0,1518,707865,00.html

Wir Sehen Uns!