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..."

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 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.”

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

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 McGoohan 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 ! 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 – Where am I? – I know there are places where these people are kept. Not voluntarily, and in absolute luxury. There are three in this country

PART ONE

In June 1968, five months after The Prisoner had completed it’s first run in Britain, it was to commence it’s much-anticipated first showing in the USA. It was billed as front-page news on the USA TV Guide: “Patrick McGoohan’s puzzling, intriguing new summer series … Page 22” and the four page interview with Joan Barthel included the equally intriguing claim by McGoohan that his new series, although billed as enigmatic, had at its base a premise that was not all that far-fetched. The country he was referring to, in this interview was, of course, the US. Which three places did he mean? Nobody asked and so nobody answered.

One of the enjoyable things I’ve been doing recently is taking a break from pontificating in my own Blog, and instead reading other people’s Blogs, with related interests to my own. Often the other Blogs have come at a subject from a totally different direction to mine, yet they correspond at a particular point, before zooming off again on their own subjective trajectory. One such was about the famous Peanuts cartoons, enormously popular throughout the Sixties and Seventies especially. What possible connection could there be between Schulz and McGoohan? This one?:

The blogger explains what this was all about:
The numerically-named siblings were Charles Schulz’s commentary on the ever-increasing use of numbers to identify individuals, from Social Security to zip codes to expanded phone numbers. http://tglob.blogspot.com/2007/10/peanuts-mystery-solved.html
I have no particular reason to think that Patrick McGoohan ever saw this cartoon, but his own feelings about numeralisation were evidentially not only his. Schulz was of the same generation and lived through the same times. McGoohan once commented modestly that his prisoner show was a mere speck of sand in the desert, and we neatly see another speck here, cast by an American man who could draw and make up stories.

Another Blogger I coincided with, had a much more direct linkage with my subject matter. In fact, when I recently came across this particular Blog, I found I was actually rediscovering it, because I had added a small comment back in November last year!!– And promptly forgotten about it again. However, my recent active interest in “places where these people are kept” has led me back and I found the Blog had been exploring much of the same territory I had, with Man on A String;

Via Colony Three - to the Villagehttp://spywise.blogspot.com/2009_06_28_archive.html
For very different reasons, the author has found himself in a similar place to that of myself. I’ll let you read his own blog for yourself, but one conclusion he comes to is moot: “….. a historian at the CIA…… wrote me there are no records of any such training towns”
By this statement, the Blogger indicates that there was no real-life inspiration behind either Colony 3 or the Village. However, the Blogger was really looking for the wrong sources. The idea that scriptwriters or Script Editors would have access to hot or cold war secrets is fairly absurd anyway, especially considering the political conditions of the mid-1960’s. However, scriptwriters would naturally be avid readers, and actors avid watchers. McGoohan would inevitably have carried ideas from the newspapers, of which he was also known to be an avid reader, so whether spy training camps really existed is immaterial to their existence in dramatic fiction because they were as plain as day in the press. This article is from 1961.


There is of course more than one type of camp. The Butlins Holiday Camp was a post-war phenomenon in Britain. There are a few 1960's postcards of just one within the weblink.
http://www.postcardnostalgia.co.uk/north_wales/pwllheli/butlins.htm
Aspects of McGoohan's village inherently echo the organised bonhomie of this British institution, but was it mere irony and coincidence that the Village announcements were made through those ubiquitous loud-speakers, advising villagers of 'todays activities? Just as at Butlins? Whereas Patrick Mcgoohan never went to Inverlair there is proof that he was personally familiar with the Butlins camp at Pwllheli. just a few miles from Portmeirion.

This production-still from The Prisoner always makes me think that these three strangely garbed ladies were on day-release from the Star Trek studio. In fact their presence has a special intrigue.
They were in fact a little cabaret act called The Candy Sisters. They were known for doing an act where they sang songs in German, French, Italian and Danish... (maybe others for all I know - Polish and Czech would be cool). I thought this was intriguing, given the cosmopolitan ethos that the Village is given right from the taxi-driver upwards. I'm guessing those odd outfits are their own costumes from their Act.

Even more intriguing is the fact that they were appearing at Butlins Pwllehi and were personally asked to come over for filming by Patrick McGoohan himself. The Candy Sisters were apparently chauffered from Pwellhi to Portmeirion by Everyman car each day they were involved in filming and returned to Butlins each evening, in good time to perform their 40-minute spots for the 1966 season's happy campers. When this turn of events was reported it was mentioned that the girls excitedly recalled having *close-ups* with the star.

Holiday Camps were of course primarily a family place and there's a nice nostalgic glance at the British Holiday Camp phenomenon in its 1966 heyday here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/sites/pwllheli/pages/butlins_archive.shtml

You'll perhaps spot a few village tropes amongst the footage. In the Holiday Camp it was all about the group having fun - no place for the isolated individual!

These are just some of the influences that are easy to see within the growing format of The Prisoner but these are hardly the three places Patrick McGoohan could have been referring to, to his American interviewer. When he said "I know there are places where these people are kept. Not voluntarily, and in absolute luxury." one of the places he was referring to was assuredly relating back to one of the most famous incidents of the Cold War - an incident that began in 1960, as McGoohan first found fame as a secret agent, and the repercussions of which were still resounding in the later Sixties, as he completed his time with World Travel before resigning himself to life in the village. Remarkably that most famous event reverberates through several scripts of The Prisoner too, with their inclusions of downed espionage pilots.


The U2 Incident occurred in 1960 but perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the case was exposed two years later, when a prisoner was released, only to be immediately placed into luxurious imprisonment.

Powers had cooperated with his Soviet captors to the point of revealing the name of the unit commander who had given him his orders; he admitted making previous flights along the Russian border, and acknowledged at his Moscow trial that as an aerial agent he had performed "very ill service." Had Powers been brainwashed? Why had he not fired the charges that would have destroyed his plane? How high was he flying when hit—and what had hit him? Was it, as Khrushchev claimed, a Russian rocket at 68,000 ft.? Or did he have a flameout?

To confront Powers with these questions, the press staged a manhunt of its own. The trail was picked up near Easton, Md., by an Associated Press stringer named Mary Swain, who had a hunch that Powers might be in a nearby estate called Ashford Farms that the Government had bought some years ago and used for mysterious purposes. Armed with binoculars, she set up a vigil in a lane adjoining the farm, noted a great coming and going of cars. One night, a blue station wagon carrying six men sped out of the gate and down the road toward Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Mary Swain gamely followed for a few miles, but lost sight of the car. Later, the Department of State said that Powers had been at Ashford Farms but had been spirited away.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,895886,00.html#ixzz0vCvptJb0
Everyone knows that when an aeroplane passes through the sound barrier , as the U2 would, that there is a sonic boom - the sound of a thunderclap !
PART TWO soon, with the American twin of Inverlair but this time unambigous and in the newspapers of 1962. Plus the mystery that is, or was, Graczyna - a Spy training Town in the newspapers of 1965 and maybe even a reminder that X marked the spot for Ian Fleming himself. Be seeing you.

McGoohan and the Rehearsed Mind from Moby Dick: It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men- has no substantive deformity- and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so? - Herman Melvillle - Chapter 42 - Moby Dick

In my last Blog I mentioned the observations of the first academic *students* of The Prisoner and their bemusement about how so much of the series seemed to have occurred *by accident* or *by chance*. The story of the genesis of Rover seemed so absurd to the Cult Society that arose in Britain, that they declined to believe the story McGoohan told. However the coincidences of Rover are both mundane and elucidatory in equal measure. Perhaps most intriguing is the fact that the original plan was to have a domed wheeled machine (British fans for some years maintained this machine never existed and was just another tall tale by McGoohan). The drift from an egg-shaped machine to an amorphous egg that in turn lent itself to a mimickry of the bubbles from a then very fashionable lava-lamp is a progression that happened by chance, yet on the other hand it is easy to see the *train of thought* by imaginative minds. The allegorical ideas McGoohan was keen to employ are in some form perhaps first demonstrated by this happenstance. Was he also carrying the notions of Moby Dick's baffling chapter, "The Whiteness of the Whale", from which my prefacing quote stems ? These comments by a fellow of the Blogosphere might strike a coincidental chord in anyone who has read some analyses of the nature of Rover, from The Prisoner :
http://ladderonwheels.blogspot.com/2009/11/whiteness-of-whale.html
If you ever read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for a class and want to make your teacher very, very angry, try to steer every conversation around to the “meaning” of the white whale itself. Your teacher won’t appreciate it, but you’ll just be following the early trends of Melville critics, for whom the whale absolutely must have represented some huge secret to the meaning of life. Is it God? Evil? Purity? Humanity? Sin? Sexuality? You name it, and someone’s proffered it as the secret meaning of the novel.

Mere coincidence? The story-book from The Girl Who was Death has another....

Anyhow, the mechanical Rover was seemingly abandoned by the owner of Everyman without a second glance - the *new* Rover gave him far more allegorical scope and he grasped the chance. Many years later Patrick McGoohan would explain to an interviewer:
I don't know how to plan. For The Prisoner, for example.....When we discussed a design, I told him what I had in mind and he translated it onto paper.......... 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.

At least one memoir from one of the colleagues of McGoohan's recalls McGoohan being enamoured of the book The Outsider, by Albert Camus. However, McGoohan himself, when questioned about books such as The Glass Bead Game responded that he didn't read "that sort of stuff". Is it mere coincidence that a book called The Outsider by Colin Wilson - classed as one of the original Angry Young Men of 1950's British Theatre - had been a best-selling book in England, and was something of a potted biographical study about the "men in isolation" throughout history? McGoohan did admit to liking biographies. Was the title on the spine of a book misunderstood by this coincidence of titles? If you have never heard of this other Outsider, one of my earlier blogs deals with it here: http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/10/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-episode-18-angry.html

The Glass Bead Game is the source of another cult myth. Prisoner writers have claimed that the *hero* of this book was named Joesph Serf, but in fact he wasn't. The character was actually named Josef Knecht. They often just make stuff up.

The name Joseph Serf is evidently a play on the self-mockery of McGoohan himself. Growing up as the eldest brother of several younger sisters one can imagine the adolescent sighing wearily to his mother (who he remarked liked to call him Patrick-Joseph), "It's okay Ma, Joe Serf will do it...", when yet another heavy chore needed to be done by one of the children.

Another coincidence has become muddled in the interpretations of John Drake transmogrifying into Number Six. In America, the title-song famously reads:
Secret Agent Man.
Secret Agent Man.
They've given you a number.
And taken away your name.
Some observers have since wondered if this ditty even was part of the inspiration for McGoohan's later use of the idea of a man with no name. It's quite possible this coincidence fed into his train of thought - he was certainly aware of the song, as recorded in the article about he and Peter Falk from 1965, in my previous Blog to this one.

So why did PF Sloan write such a line for Johnny Rivers to sing? Another coincidence might explain it. In 1965, when the hour-long adventures of John Drake were sold to CBS, the pilot episode was to be Battle of the Cameras. It would make sense that in order to help Sloan to figure out a theme-song, CBS would give him a preview of the show itself to watch, to get a sense of the style and characters. In the opening scene of this US debut episode an agent is introduced to his superior and identifies himself as Agent 1056. One can imagine this numeralisation adding to the resonances already of Agent 007 and sticking in the song-writers mind - the agents in Danger Man were normally spoken of by name, so this is a striking coincidence, and an interesting example of how effect and cause can sometimes be very difficult to unravel. Was the number 7 also deliberately made absent in The Prisoner by McGoohan as some small injoke about the most famous secret agent's number? It made it ironic that Number Six drove a Lotus 7 of course, too.

Was it mere coincidence that the first character Number Six speaks to in the village was Ralph Smart's sister, Patsy? http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/06/secret-agents-ducks-drakes-smart-people.html I can imagine the blog reader is beginning to find all these questions are a burden, but perhaps by asking the questions I also supply an occasional answer that makes more sense than the cult stories about McGoohan, Royalties and the Smarts.

One of the principal cult leaders released a careerography of Patrick McGoohan a year or two ago. He touches here and there on some of the contested elements of the genesis of The Prisoner. Privy to the unpublished but widely whispered sayings of George Markstein, this writer [sic] quotes the Script Editor on page 110: "I decided to call him Number Six because it's high enough to make him important and low enough for him to get pushed around" A reasonable enough comment, and possibly one I could have made up myself, but from the man who claimed to have researched a mysterious Scottish location from WW2, it seems curiously bland and inconsequential in view of recently published WW2 history. "One answer was to be found at the eighteenth century Inverlair Lodge, nicknamed 'Number 6 Special Workshop School' in Scotland" http://europeanhistory.about.com/b/2008/09/12/britains-failed-ww2-spies.htm

It seems curious that if Markstein had indeed secretly researched Inverlair, as he claimed many years later, that he had not noticed the curious coincidence of the number allocated to the prisoner himself and the name of the establishment. It is of course my contention that Markstein made these decade-later post-hoc claims merely to accumulate kudos amongst gullible prisoner fans, who applied very little, if any, study to the facts behind his stories. I had to grin at another passage on that same page where that writer writes: "[Markstein] insisted that he came up with the concept of The Prisoner at 6.21pm one evening, while travelling on a London train between Waterloo and Shepperton Studios." No researcher can claim to be able to read the mind of a man but like the fictional Sherlock Holmes, a mere browsing of Bradshaws would reveal that as George Markstein lived in Bayswater, why would he be travelling from Waterloo ? Perhaps simple ABC provides the answer: B=Shepperton, C=Bayswater and A=Waterloo. I daresay sooner or later we might need a D.

You may think I'm making a bit of a conspiracy here. Why should a man not have a reason to travel from Waterloo to Shepperton one day, instead of from his home in Bayswater? An earlier quote from the mid-1980's Prisoner article, 'Inside Out" however carries a curiously coincident resonance: "George Markstein first heard about the project's acceptance on the railway journey between Shepperton to Waterloo" so there is certainly a pattern in the story-telling, if not the route logic. My next Blog will be about Inverlair because this establishment is often quoted nowadays in references to the origins of The Prisoner, but it really does seem to have become something of a Scottish red Herring.

The mysteries of the origins of Number Six and the coincidences thereof could even go back to Patrick McGoohan's schooldays. The careerography quoted above mentions that the young McGoohan joined the wartime ATC at Ratcliffe Aerodrome, which was next-door to the school. Remarkably, however it failed to notice the curious coincidence that: ....Ratcliffe started a new career as No 6 Ferry Pool for the ATA........ http://www.airclark.plus.com/RatAerodrome/Rataero.htm

Enough already !! I can feel my blog readers head spinning with the happenstance of numbers. I will return to the theme of how things cannot always be purely coincidental however, in my next Blog, but in the meanwhile it might be worth mulling over the notion that, "There are no coincidences Delia, only the illusion of coincidence.” and the coincidence that the line comes from a movie called, V for Vendetta.

Mcgoohan: It's all in the Mind: from what you've been saying so far, they all seem to have been accidents. And it's, you know, incredibly lucky.

Ten years after The Prisoner had been first shown, Patrick McGoohan was interviewed in Canada, where his old show had prompted an academic study to be made of it by TV Ontario, designed for courses in Broadcasting - perhaps Media Studies, as we would now call it. McGoohan was no doubt billed as the man with all the answers, but it was clear his audience found his answers infuriatingly vague. They were of course pursuing their academic study and as he was the named creative force they had read about, then they seemed to expect him to also be their teacher. Instead, at times he seemed to tease rather than teach, prompting this exchange:

Boy: What interested me was the style in which it was done and the whimsy and the hundreds of little touches, but from what you've been saying so far, they all seem to have been accidents. You know, the white balloon was a accident and you happened upon the Village...
McGoohan: Oh, yeah...
Boy: And it's, you know, incredibly lucky.
McGoohan: Yeah, but you...no, no, no, no...There were these pages, don't forget, at the very beginning, which laid out the whole concept; these forty-odd pages laid out the whole concept. That was no accident.
Boy: No, but the little touches...
McGoohan: Those things come anyway.
Boy: But I haven't seen them come very often in any other series.
McGoohan: But they come because you're looking for them, you see. I was fortunate to have two or three creative people working with me, like my friend that I said saw the meteorological balloon. And wherever one could find these little touches, one put them in. But the design of the "Prisoner" thing, that was all clearly laid out from the outset.
Boy: And the style of the way...
McGoohan: And the style was also clearly laid out and the designs of the sets, those were all clearly laid out from the inception of it. There was no accident in that area, you know, the blazers, and the numbers and all that stuff, and the stupid little bicycles and all that.

He also did little to ingratiate himself with his putative fans with such comments as: "stupid little bicycles" !

The more one learns about The Prisoner the more one is drawn to realise that it was very much a flow of his own consciousness. A constant refrain from interviewed cast and crew over the decades since is the comment to the effect that "nobody knew what was going on!" and even some who added that they didn't think McGoohan knew what it was all about either. In my earlier blogs I have explained some of the possible backgrounds to how the show came to be made in the way that it was. However the role of coincidence and chance should not be under-estimated. I was reminded of this when I came across this newspaper-clipping from 1965.

Newspapers often get things wrong and in 1965 the journalist felt that Patrick McGoohan and Peter Falk would not make good bookends...... well, forty years later we know the truth about that particular conundrum:

This article, from a newspaper dating from December 1965 coincidentally also tells another truth, but a truth that has been largely dismissed by most *Official* Prisoner writers over the years of analysis since:

McGoohan's future plans include "four feature pictures in hand and another TV series. I won't be in it, but produce it instead"

To read most *Official* accounts of the planning and making of The Prisoner, the reader may conclude that Patrick McGoohan resigned *on a whim* from Danger Man one day and lurched desperately into another TV show that he hoped would continue for several seasons. McGoohan himself contradicted this view in its entirety in almost every interview he gave over the ensuing decades. However any self-respecting cultist must have a conspiracy to pursue and so his protestations largely fell on deafened ears within the cult of The Prisoner. Not that he could care less. As he remarked laughingly to his French Prisonographers in 1990,

"I had the chance to do something nutty so I did"

National pride is also invoked amongst many of the opinionated explanations of The Prisoner and its genesis, production and conclusion. British fans largely discount the influence of the American market and yet it is clear from this clipping that the American TV market was instrumental in the ending of Danger Man/Secret Agent:

The continuation of our series is really very dependent on the American market," said McGoohan, "We sold CBS 22 episodes and would like to sell the network 22 more."

But by 1966, the Secret Agent craze had led to home-grown American series' and the adventures of John Drake had in truth run their course anyhow - casual viewing of the final two episodes made (in colour) reveal an increasing paucity of ideas and ITC production values cruelly exposed by colour film. McGoohan used his commercial muscle to launch something new. He was deternmined that not only would his new show be full of fresh ideas but also that they would be made in a style and manner that colour film would enhance, rather than betray.

Danger Man suffered the Blow of Oblivion and a new hero was born from the mind of the old one. Boredom was how it started, Patrick McGoohan once said. Watching the death throes of John Drake, one can see what he meant. Watching the power and vehemence Number Six now possessed as he stalked angrily along his resignation corridor, one can see how Patrick McGoohan's next, and last, British TV show became his creative tour-de-force and why he was determined that his new show would not scrape the bottom of the barrel, but remain 17 dollops of TV Cream. He was a very practical professional too. Whilst he may have planned to only produce his new series, back in December 1965, by April of 1966 he recognised that only by adding his personal and considerable Box-Office appeal to the show could he even get Lew Grade to listen to him explain his new concept. Even the most principled men must compromise sometimes. Few of us can be wholly Number One.


I thought he concept of the thing would sustain for only 7, but then Lew Grade wanted to make his sale to CBS, I believe he said he couldn't make a deal unless he had more, and he wanted 26, and I couldn't conceive of 26 stories, because it would be spreading it very thin, but we did manage, over a week-end, with my writers, to cook up ten more outlines, and eventually we did 17.

As I have mentioned in earlier Blogs on this arcane matter - in February 1967, Mike Dann was reported in the American press as having agreed to accept at least 17 episodes of the new series being made by Patrick McGoohan on the strength of reading the first script: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYe5hgcCfS__6gASAG8JK0FTk_oyRCaqvwZCqbEUSR9KL9p62ZOAzitnnYr5nt1-0RxxamCaQVRRwwf8Rq4umNbMv_f6_5Ht6kyDEJhsZQ2gOl0mLjG6A3yIb52T8dfYb1Ru3eXEm7sRZ0/s320/P1060539.JPG

Be seeing You with moor coincidences next time.

McGoohan and other Peoples Minds - UnMutual Americans and The Prisoners Who Were Free

In 1991 a magazine called The Box interviewed Patrick McGoohan extensively about The Prisoner and his creation and management of that show. Almost no fan site or book seems to refer to this interview. The byline to my Blog is taken from that interview. The interviewer was admirably meticulous in his transcription. One exchange may give some clue why this generous and fulsome interview with the creator of the show has almost been completely ignored and forgotten.

You are quite happy to have people appreciating The Prisoner?
Oh, of course. yes. And I think that they've done, and that they still do, some terrific things. they are a very talented group of people. I don't know if you've seen any of their publications that they put out, but it's professional stuff.
You do see it then?
Well, they send it to me.
You do look at it?
Sure!
Do you get a buzz out of reading about the programme?
Not really, no.

It's a great interview, but because of his refusal to court popularity McGoohan's words have been read by seemingly very few. The line of the fan clubs seems to have always been that their Number Six is a taciturn hero and therefore McGoohan had to be so portrayed too. Anyhow, my Blog this time isn't really meant to go on too much about this, but rather to complement my previous Blog. In that Blog I referred to contemporary echoes of The Prisoner since the programme was made. In this Blog I would refer the reader to the echoes from the even earlier past, that perhaps informed McGoohan, as he created The Prisoner with his collaborators. However, before I move onto those echoes specifically, I'd just like to reference a couple more exchanges from The Box interview.

Is there anything in literature, perhaps..... that influenced you?
No, not really.
..... in the work of carl Jung, for instance, or John Fowles......
Well, they may be there, but I wouldn't know....
And there's Franz Kafka....
Well again, I wouldn't know.....

Did you read any Herman Hesse?
No, I don't read that much really, of that sort of stuff. I read biographies......

The Glass Bead Game
Ah, The Glass Bead game... I've heard of it but I haven't read it.
You ought to read it - it's full of The Prisoner
Is it? well, I'll be darned..............

Jung? I haven't read a word, not one word.

I don't want you to get the impression I am mocking this interview; it's criminally ignored by the prisoner classes, but there we are, people read what they want to read I guess, or what they get the chance to read. The purpose of this Blog is the clue Patrick McGoohan gave to something he would possibly have waxed far more eloquently about.... Biographies.... Himself for instance. If the Prisoner fan took more interest in him, the Prisoner fan might find he had something far more intriguing to reflect back at them.

My last Blog utilised the recent work of Adam Curtis to reflect how The Prisoner had resonated in real life over the forty years since it's realisation. The thirty years before The Prisoner had been resonating their own real life and Patrick McGoohan had been there to soak it up. The McCarthy campaign, and the HUAC hearings that had preceeded them by a few years, are often referenced as a resonance in the mind games of the show. Here are a few characters who knew more than most about the perils of being unmutual in the global village of the 1950's.

The men are from left to right (the annotations are from wikipedia unless otherwise web-referenced)

Alexander Knox
In 1944, he was chosen by Darryl F. Zanuck to star in Wilson, the biographical film about Woodrow Wilson, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. However, during the McCarthy Era, he was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses and he returned to England. In 1952 Patrick McGoohan spent two weeks in a theatre tour with Knox and of course was a support to Knox's star in High Tide at Noon.

Joseph Losey
During the McCarthy Era, Losey was investigated for his supposed ties with the Communist Party and was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses. His career in shambles, he moved to London, where he continued working as a director. Even in the UK, he experienced problems: his first British film, The Sleeping Tiger, a 1954 film noir crime thriller, bore the pseudonym Victor Hanbury, rather than his own name, in the credits as director. Joseph Losey was the director of McGoohans third Rank film, in 1958.

Cy Endfield
In 1951 Endfield was named as a Communist at a HUAC hearing. Blacklisted by the movie studio bosses, he was unable to get work in Hollywood and moved to Britain where he wrote and directed films under various pseudonyms, often starring fellow blacklistees. In 1958, Endfield was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay for Hell Drivers. Enough said, probably.

Sam Wanamaker
In 1951, Wanamaker made a speech welcoming the return of two of the Hollywood Ten. In 1952 at the height of the McCarthy "Red Scare" period, despite his distinguished service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Wanamaker learned that he had become blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC), which he discovered while filming Mr. Denning Drives North in the UK. Wanamaker consequently decided not to return to the United States. Instead, he re-established his career in England, as actor on stage and screen, director and producer. Sam Wanamaker was the theatre director of one of of Joan McGoohan's main West End stage roles and of course later worked with Patrick McGoohan himself on Danger Man.

Albert Dekker
Left-leaning box-office stars such as Edward G Robinson, James Cagney and Gregory Peck benefited from studio protection, while character players such as Anne Revere and Albert Dekker, among many others, had to take long holidays. In Hollywood as everywhere else, rank has its privileges. http://www.productmagazine.co.uk/index.php/film/P1/
Patrick McGoohan worked with Albert Dekker in one of his formative TV roles from 1955, All My Sons.

The woman in the group is Betsy Blair
After work in the theatre, Blair began her film career playing supporting roles in films such as A Double Life (1947) and Another Part of the Forest (1948). Her interest in Marxism led to an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Blair was blacklisted for some time, but resumed her career with a critically acclaimed performance in Marty (1955), winning a BAFTA Award and a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Betsy Blair played the wife of Patrick McGoohan's character in his 1962 movie, All Night Long.

Biographies? Did Patrick McGoohan need to read them in these cases? Not really, he knew and associated with these people, who were caught up in exactly the sort of subtle attacks on individual thinking that The Prisoner railed against in its meanderingly allegorical way. Patrick McGoohan once said that the Prisoner was associated with something that had been in his own head, all his life. As I've said before in these Blogs, to guess what might be in a man's head, it always pays to take the time and trouble to find out what has gone into that head as it lived a life - a life that segued from the real life of intranational Cold war politics as they affected actors in the free West to the fictional life of a secret agent battling the forces of oppression in the East - on behalf of the Internationalist NATO.

Was Patrick McGoohan personally interested in Politics - with a capital P - ? His 1990 interview suggests not, "People who jump on those bandwagons have got to have a bandwagon to jump on to, so they'll do it anyway. If its not Ban the Bomb, it'll be something else." As an actor at that time however, he would have naturally been a keen observer of people and the under-currents of those people and what made them who they were, and as he remarked later in that 1991 interview:

I like reading biographies of the big guys from way back..............

McGoohan's on Everybody's Mind: Contemporary Echoes of the Struggle of Number Six

Patrick McGoohan's 1967 show is often spoken of as both visionary and as evocative of something about Today as Yesterday. There are all sorts of reasons a person might believe that to be the case, but an impressive series of TV documentaries from a couple of years ago not only reflects some of the elements of Western Society that helped to inspire McGoohan and his collaborators, but also amplifies why his programme's concerns still seem so relevant to the recent past and the present-day, and why life can never be just a dream. These documentaries were made by Adam Curtis and broadcast by the BBC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)
In deference to the man who has made this Blog so easy for me, I should quote Adam Curtis, as he prefaces his own programmes:

"Politicians from both the right and the left came to believe in a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic creatures. Out of this came a new and simplified idea of Politics. No longer did politicians set out to change the world. Instead they saw their job as being nothing more than to deliver what these free individuals wanted and at the same time we too came to think of ourselves as simplified beings whose behaviour and even feelings could be analysed objectively by scientific systems which told us what was the normal way to feel. And both we and our leaders have come to believe that this is the true definition of Freedom. There is no other. But there is.............. "

Or as Patrick McGoohan expressed himself once: "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."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4917227518812346524&ei=5GVfS-zLCdyf-AaS9OzmCQ&q=+numbers+bbc+documentary&hl=en&view=3#docid=-5376212150896990926 The Trap: - 1 -
What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom
This opening episode is the most directly 'prisoner-related' as it deals with exactly the zeitgeist that Patrick McGoohan developed his own ideas within. In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought, with particular reference to the work of John Nash who believed that all humans were inherently suspicious and selfish creatures that strategised constantly. A separate strand in the documentary is the work of RD Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish, shrewd, and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counterculture during the 1960s.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4917227518812346524&ei=5GVfS-zLCdyf-AaS9OzmCQ&q=+numbers+bbc+documentary&hl=en&view=3#docid=-1087742888040457650 The Trap - 2 -
The Lonely Robot
This programme moves past the years that created The Prisoner but the echoes are clear. Indeed, if The Prisoner is viewed as *visionary*, then here is part of the vision! The second episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first, but developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines. This is presented as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis. People with standard mood fluctuations diagnosed themselves as abnormal. They then presented themselves at psychiatrist's offices, fulfilled the diagnostic criteria without offering personal histories, and were medicated. The alleged result was that vast numbers of Western people have had their behaviour and mentation modified by drugs without any strict medical necessity. Archive clips spanning two decades emphasise how the severely reductionist ideas of programmed behaviour have been absorbed by mainstream culture. This brings Curtis back to the game theories of Cold War. Curtis explains how, with the "robotic" description of humankind apparently validated by geneticists, the game theory systems gained even more hold over society

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4917227518812346524&ei=5GVfS-zLCdyf-AaS9OzmCQ&q=+numbers+bbc+documentary&hl=en&view=3#docid=1288912696314255142
The Trap - 3 -
We Will Force You To Be Free
This final episode segues more into 21st Century politics and perhaps becomes irrelevant to what inspired elements of The Prisoner but the final program focused on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis then points out how many political groups who sought their vision of freedom ended up using violence to achieve it. For example the French revolutionaries wished to overthrow a monarchical system which they viewed as antithetical to freedom, but in so doing ended up with the so-called Reign of Terror. Similarly, the Communist revolutionaries in Russia, who sought to overthrow the old order and replace it with a society in which everyone was equal, ended up creating a totalitarian regime which used violence to achieve its ends. Using violence, not simply as a means to achieve one's goals, but also as an expression of freedom from Western bourgeois norms developed from the Existentialist ideology of Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that terrorism was a "terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others."

I am a Blogger, and this has been a blog........ and yes, I giggled at the fact that the man's name is Curtis too............

Be seeing You