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 on my Mind: Secrets, Agents, Ducks, Drakes and Get Smart

In my first blogjob I made my own arrogant comment about the arrogance of Fans. Nothing demonstrates their 'Day of the Locust' nature more than the conundrum they came up with, when they attempted to link fiction and fact, fed only by stupidity and ignorance.

Like me, many fans may be old enough to remember the character who made Patrick McGoohan so enormously popular with TV viewers in the early to mid 1960's. He was of course John Drake. Despite being enormously popular, by 1966 the writers were running out of stories and the the secret agent boom in America had led to so many competing programmes (such as Man from Uncle) that whilst the writers were struggling to write on their paper, the writing was clearly on the wall, so far as John Drake was concerned. CBS delayed renewing their contract with ITC as more and more American product came on-stream and judging by the final two episodes of 'Danger Man'/'Secret Agent' that were made, both budgets and production values were being sacrificed as ITC sought to find an economic way to continue the series. Ralph Smart left the reins of the show prior to the two colour episodes, and Patrick McGoohan, who by then had some considerable influence over Lew Grade, also abandoned the project. Sidney Cole went on to make 'Man in a Suitcase', the sequel to 'Danger Man'/'Secret Agent' ' in which poor production values were ever more apparent and mayhap contributed to it's failure to penetrate the US market. Meanwhile McGoohan of course (as we all know!) had obtained funding from ITC for the company he owned, along with colleague, David Tomblin, called 'Everyman'. The fact that McGoohan's name could by that time sell pretty much anything from hats to gravy powder, is evidenced by the opening titles to the show that his company Everyman, would produce. This is the first frame we see, after the famous 'resignation' sequence.

It was a guarantee of a significant television audience and 11,000,000 people in Britain and later, 25,000,000 in America duly tuned to watch 'Arrival'. Not surprisingly, many of us watching at the time saw John Drake resigning and being kidnapped and metamorphosing into Number Six. But metamorphose he did. The usually angry, constantly combative and often downright bloody-minded character who raged about the Village was no more like the calm, friendly, sympathetic John Drake, than the cynical, amoral David Jones (from Ice Station Zebra) was like the Danger man. However, as McGoohan once remarked himself, they all did look somewhat alike!! Well aware of the likely confusion and possibly anxious to resolve it, in the viewer's, and the media's minds, Patrick McGoohan's company made the situation very clear right from the beginning, as can be seen in this ITC Press Release from 1967.

In interviews McGoohan admitted that he retained the 'secret agent' milieu as a fundamental part of the plot of The Prisoner, as that was what he was known for at the time, and naturally he wanted to carry his audience with him. Perhaps he could be accused of wanting to have his cake and eat it but certainly he made no attempt to disguise what he was doing. He confronted the fact he was well-recognised as the agent of M9, and then explained, so far as he could without giving away any more of his plot than he had to, that his new character was not John Drake. There are magazine articles declaring "John Drake died in London....". One of them, from New Zealand, is here: http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/tvweekly/Aug1966/pdf.pdf
Fast forward to 1977 and of course, many in the fan society would naturally be ignorant of the history, and so, as they searched for the meanings they saw in the programmes and the allegories and hidden references, they naturally became entranced with the idea that the secret agent who resigned was John Drake. They seemed to know little of the character that was John Drake (a problem now resolved by the issue of the old shows on DVD) but of course they had seen the old press images of Drake, as used in the visuals of The Prisoner.It was obviously the same man. Then, in 1984 they had it confirmed for them by the Script Editor: "

Well, 'Who is No.6?" is no mystery - he was a secret agent called Drake who quit."

and so the fans, hungry for intrigue,mystery and conspiracy were off and running. Plainly, Mcgoohan's denial that Six was Drake was all part of:

"later myths built up about the series built up by McGoohan in his presentations before the North American college students. " see my previous blog

And so a curious amalgam of supposition was constructed. It goes something like this:
McGoohan denies Six was Drake. Six looks and sounds like Drake. There are pictures of Six, that are definitely Drake. Six seems to be a resigned secret agent. Drake was a secret agent. Markstein, who the Fan Dome tout as a creator of the show says Six was Drake. How do we resolve this conundrum? What could the reason be? Ralph Smart was the acknowledged creator of John Drake, so the reason must be that McGoohan would have had to pay Ralph Smart Royalties! Conundrum resolved!
In one fell swoop the Fan Dome label McGoohan as not only a tad deceitful, but mildy plagiaristic too and perhaps a little sneaky......... They seem generally oblivious to this character assassination however and so great is the enthusiasm for this myth/legend that you will find it detailed in many books on many web-sites to this day.

When I first read the *theory*, it caught in my personal craw, but for quite some time I ignored it (as with much else I read in the prisoner world). What did I know? Then, I realised that there was copious evidence from 1966/67, such as the articles I quoted above that demonstrate that McGoohan was totally open about the feasible Drake link and it's possibilities, from the beginning.

Then I began to wonder what the fans knew about Ralph Smart. I discovered that in fact nobody knew anything about Ralph Smart....not even the supposed *historians*. The whole 'Royalties' theory was a house of straw - sheer (uninspired) guess-work. Doing my own research suggests Ralph Smart was probably not the owner of any supposed copyright anyway. The brand 'John Drake' was in use all over the world, and there seems no suggestion that the money for this went anywhere other than ATV/ITC, to be no doubt divided between the likes of McGoohan and Smart as applicable in their contracts. Ralph Smart was directly employed as a Producer by Lew Grade. It is even unclear that the 'brand' was copyright to anyone. McGoohan's face and the John Drake name continued to be used for a pulp magazine in Germany right into the 1970's. I daresay nobody outside German pulp-fiction readers even noticed.

Whilst I had no more access than anyone else to any confidential, arcane, financial contracts, I could see no justification for the McGoohan/Drake/Smart Royalties myth and then I finally found something that linked Ralph Smart and The prisoner very directly, and quite personally........... I discovered the clearest possible evidence from The Prisoner show itself, that the whole legend was a pile of ripe cheese.

The very first person Number Six meets, after his arrival in the Village is the waitress, an actress familiar to McGoohan from his days in Danger Man.

The actress is Patsy Smart......... No coincidence.

Patsy was Ralph Smart's sister, with whom he was on good terms, all her life.

So, to revisit the grand Drake/Smart/Royalties theory: we are supposed to believe that McGoohan machinated to deceive/swindle Ralph Smart and apply deniability to any use of his *copyrighted* *licensing* entitlements

[sarcasm]................. Then, he took Ralph's sister with him for the long Location Shoot, to Portmeirion, where she could socialise with all his and her colleagues, and pick up all the gossip........... Not content with that, Patrick McGoohan was then so cold-blooded, that he deliberately made Ralph Smart's sister the very first character his new Number Six happens to meet ............. [/sarcasm]

Far more likely is that McGoohan was *waving goodbye* to his former mentor, in that quirky in-joke way he utilised throughout The Prisoner, a wave of thanks and appreciation. Thanks for the past, this is my little tribute to you, for the future........... But this last is a myth of my own making............

It does seem to me however to suggest - perhaps quite strongly - that whilst the viewer may enjoy making Six Drake and Drake Six, it is not six of one and half a dozen of the other. It is patently clear that no deception was intended or carried out. It was also patently clear by Patrick McGoohan's constant and strong denial of this *theory* that he was somewhat offended by the notion. The fact that fans come up with such specious and unresearched ideas/theories/myths seems to say more about their characters than the characters of Drake, Six....................or Patrick McGoohan.

Readers of my Blog can of course aver otherwise, in the relevant comments boxes....... If nothing else, it can be a Confessional............. But that would bring us to the supposed religious elements conflated into The Prisoner, from the actor's own fan-alleged opinions. Notwithstanding the Fan Dome insistence that he was *deeply religious* (an opinion expressed in even the most recent tomes) Patrick McGoohan explained in moor than one interview that he was, in fact, no such thing...............

But who was listening? Or reading?

Be seeing you............