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

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

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 - Where Am I? - "I know of one in the British Isles, another in Germany and one here in the United States. They provided me with just the sort of dramatic gimmick I needed to say something that very much needs saying"

PART TWO

The phrase at the head of my Blog has altered slightly from Part One. McGoohan was quoted during an interview taken whilst he was making The Moonshine War, a couple of years after he had completed all work on The Prisoner. He’d not dropped off the radar in his native Britain, where his shows were regularly being repeated, but he was now busy in the movies in America.

“The series wasn't entirely a figment of my imagination, you know," McGoohan said. "There really are such places, all very secret, of course, where exactly that sort of thing goes on. "I know of one in the British Isles, another in Germany and one here in the United States. They provided me with just the sort of dramatic gimmick I needed to say something that very much needs saying."

In Part One I remarked how diverse blogs could find their parallel lines sometime meeting. Imagine my amusement when a Blog about baseball came into my sphere of interest.

Pete Sivess would become the head of a secret operation in the Chesapeake Bay region called Ashford Farm. The facility would provide diplomatic asylum to defectors and political refugees. Sivess and his staff would debrief such people and instruct them in the fundamentals of American culture and ways of life, and help them to obtain employment and places to live. In some cases, the individuals would be relocated with new identities. Most of the visitors to Ashford Farm were foreign born, but occasionally they'd have an American guest. Ashford's most famed resident likely was pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, and is the basis of the famed "U-2 Incident". United States officials made attempts to cover the real spy story with fake statements about a weather plane crash. The cover didn't work, and upon Powers' return to the United States, following a prisoner exchange with the Soviets, the secret was out about Ashford Farm, and soon the covert operation was shut down. Sivess was then reassigned to a job in Washington DC, until his retirement.
http://misterballz.blogspot.com/2009/04/sunday-school-history-lesson-11.html

Was the Gary Powers case part of McGoohan’s thought process? Who can see into the mind of a man? Not I, but I can read the same newspapers that perhaps he once read himself. It’s probably just coincidence that Gary Powers was released from his Russian imprisonment on February 10, the same date in The Prisoner that Number Six began his Schizoid Man experience. What of course is not coincidental is that despite the best efforts of the American authorities the free press there had blown apart the veil of secrecy over Ashford Farms way back in 1962, and there were hints of other places in this news article…….

This fits more and more with McGoohan’s mentioning to his American interviewers that there are actual places that resemble the village. We should remember that Patrick McGoohan deliberately utilised his fame and popularity as a TV secret agent in order to give his audience a firm base from whence to follow his own new show, so he obviously would have taken an interest in the real-life intrigue of the subject, as well as the fictional world of James Bond or The Man from Uncle – or his own Danger Man. Jack Lowin, a camera-man long associated with McGoohan once referred to him having an American book, which Lowin understood the idea of The Prisoner to have come from. There are various other stories of course about the inspiration of The Prisoner. Lowin’s specifying of an American book has a meaningful ring of truth about it.

George Markstein’s reported claims of stimulating the entire concept of The Prisoner (he never made them himself, publicly) seem to have been not true because the first suggestions of Inverlair only emerged from strict British secrecy rules after The Prisoner began production. but it seems safer to assume that Inverlair may well have been the place in Great Britain that Patrick McGoohan is referring to in  in my header to this blog - if his Script Editor did in fact bring this coincidence of art and life to his employer's attention as the prisoner proceeded it's production path, although given that Markstein did not write his novel based on the place until 1974, I am not entirely convinced that he did. Certainly, when Markstein resigned from ITV himself in 1976 and published a long polemic about the state of British TV at the time, he made no mention of his now claimed contribution to the original concepts of the show. This earlier blog of mine looked at the issue in more detail: http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/08/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-ladies-and.html  Once you look back at what people said nearest the time, rather than self-justifications of many years later, it is often much easier to make the correct conclusions about what they actually did at the time. 

But in the mid-1960’s the generation who had in some ways invented “Spying” were still around. People like Leo Marks, Graham Greene, Paul Dehn (co-writer of “The Spy who came in from the Cold”) and Ian Fleming  gained inspiration from their wartime service in the British SOE. The American twin of SOE was the OSS and the two organisations actually self-fertilised one another at another place reminiscent of a secluded village. Modern day researchers have an excellent web-site about the establishment in the British Dominion (as it was then) of Canada.  http://webhome.idirect.com/~lhodgson/campx.htm

Real-life links between Ian Fleming and his fictional espionage go right back to 1950, before he even wrote his first book

Fans of James Bond will of course know that both SMERSH and SPECTRE boasted departments, bureaucracies and special camps where their villainous spies were trained, detained and liquidated. By 1965 the real-life training camps such as the half a square mile of Camp X had transmogrified in the news media to become self-contained and entire communities. One such was Graczyna [sic]

This extensive article appeared in the American press in the winter of 1965. Patrick McGoohan made a promotional visit to the US around December of 1965. Britain and its notorious D-Notices might have kept the British press quiet on matters of "national security" but in the USA there were no such muffles and McGoohan was very much a free man by 1965 and he could get the Information he wanted.

Notions of such places had been around since 1959 and feature in a movie, filmed in 1959 that was concurrent with the first series of Danger Man. The notion of a secret town is introduced in the movie Man on a String and a brief sighting of it features in the trailer here: http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index.jsp?cid=173350 

An earlier blog of mine goes into this in a little more depth here:

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

Whether or not these vast spy towns ever really existed or were just part of East/West mutual Propaganda is now moot. The CIA, in recently declassified documents seems not to have believed they really existed. However their existence in the news media is unquestionable. Oddly enough they crop up in the 1967 movie, Casino Royale that seems to have had some influence upon the style of The Girl who was Death. One news report that mentions such a place actually dates back to another very famous real-life Spying case, back in 1961. This case occurred in the UK and seemed of lifelong interest to Patrick McGoohan. His Danger Man was embroiled in the secrecy about submarines in two episodes of the 1960 series. In 1961 life imitated his art in what was possibly the biggest spy case in Britain.

Twenty years after he had made The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan played his one and only Broadway theatre role. Pack of Lies was a play all about the human relationships that lay behind the Kroger/Lonsdale spy case of 1961. Strangely enough, those events took place in the years that closed the 1950's and opened the 1960's, not far from the very US Air-Force base in Ruislip where George Markstein was employed, on the staff magazine, the UK Eagle. Strange that he never mentioned this to Prisoner cult fans in 1979, when he allowed them to [mis]understand that he was part of the British Intelligence Services himself ! I daresay he enjoyed a giggle in private about their gullibility.

So much for the Cold War and Secret Agents. These intrigues were all part of the Danger Man life, but The Prisoner seemed much more ambiguous about who were the goodies and who were the baddies… who were the prisoners and who were the warders? The Sixties are now famous for rebellion in the West against the simpler notions of Sides that prevailed in the 1950’s. One organisation had recently been launched that began to ask tough questions of all governments and societies.

When thinkers like Patrick McGoohan read about such numbers – 65,000 people – what did they think? Like every other man he must have wondered himself, “Who are they? Where did they live? Why are they Prisoners”. He began to ask questions. The answers are in some cases still being sought for, nearly half a century later.

Finally in Part Three, I’ll come to the ultimate village. The village that in the 1960’s had two faces. The village that was Schizoid. The luxurious village that you could find it very difficult to leave. The village that was demokratik but had meaningless elections. The village that gloried in Parades. The village that was at the very centre of the horribly balanced world. The village that prompted the words:

“Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved,
no man is free.” 

The location of this *village* also goes some way to explain the third country that McGoohan referred to.

Wir sehen Uns!

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.

From the mind of McGoohan: "John Drake of 'Secret Agent' is gone, but we're not foolish enough to try to change the image we have established with TV"

The title of this Blog is a quote from within an interview given to American Robert Musel by Patrick McGoohan, in 1966, an interview quoted in another context here:
http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/09/mcgoohan-on-my-mind-number-of-beast-or.html

In McGoohan's British homeland, a year or so later this concept was expressed in another way,
"When he went into Danger Man, he did so because he wanted to prove that television thrillers could have integrity. This time, his aim is to demonstrate that they can contain food for thought as well."
http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/tvtimes/Sept1967/pdf.pdf

As any reader of much of my Blog will be well aware, I have rebutted in differing ways, many of the myths and legends propagated by erroneous "fan theory" over the last thirty years. I have utilised documentary evidence from contemporary sources that demonstrate that much of the fan history is post-datal-rationalisations based on almost no verifiable evidence. Instead of good historical study they have often created some kind of strange melange between the nature of the fictional show and the real-life inspirations of the man behind that show, Patrick McGoohan. As McGoohan himself once ruminated in 'The Box' magazine, in 1990,
"... it's a step into cultism. In the end it's got nothing to do with the subject - it's become a sort of entity to itself."

This form of fan fantasy mixing with fact is to be explored artistically in Manchester soon:
http://fictionmaker.blogspot.com/2010/06/everyman-patrick-mcgoohan-story.html
but it is comforting to read that the author is neither kidding himself, nor attempting to confuse anyone else:
“In keeping with McGoohan’s surreal work on ‘The Prisoner’, I shall be playing around with time, as well as the character itself. ‘Patrick McGoohan’ will be a mix of the real man, and ‘No.6’ (from ‘The Prisoner’).”
As mentioned several times throughout my Blogs, one of the more pernicious mixings of fact and fiction in Prisoner fandom has resided in how the series itself became *imagined*. The speculation of origins range from the ridiculous - an obscure hunting lodge in Inverlair, Scotland to the very sublime connectivity of Danger Man.

Patrick McGoohan made it very clear, in 1966, to Robert Musel that he was using the familiar milieu of the Secret Agent in order to craft a thriller that contained much food for thought. In creating this segue from Danger Man to The Prisoner, I once described Patrick McGoohan's creativity as "standing on his own shoulders". However it is also clear from his objective references to his old character that Patrick McGoohan was consciously pursuing no *sequel* to the adventures of John Drake, but continuing to use the allegory of reel life to allow his audience to reimagine their own real life.

Several of my earlier blogs point out the concepts Patrick McGoohan had experienced in Danger Man, as well as his exposure to the location of his dreams: Portmeirion. However, it is evident that other elements of The Prisoner were influenced by other spy shows of that mid-1960's period. As the Danger Man, McGoohan was the first of the TV spy craze, back in 1961, and so he would naturally have been interested in the many concepts that had riffed upon the one he had created, with Ralph Smart, just as theirs had been a riff on that of Ian Fleming. This series of Blogs describes many of the Spy-TV craze shows quite eloquently:
http://mercurie.blogspot.com/2009/01/spy-shows-of-sixties-part-one.html
http://mercurie.blogspot.com/2009/01/spy-shows-of-sixties-part-two.html
http://mercurie.blogspot.com/2009/01/spy-shows-of-sixties-part-three.html
http://mercurie.blogspot.com/2009/01/spy-shows-of-sixties-part-four.html
http://mercurie.blogspot.com/2009/01/spy-shows-of-sixties-part-five.html

I recently watched an absurd video-recording of an ex-cast member of the The Prisoner, spreaking at an event celebrating that programme's 35th Anniversary. The speaker waffled at some length about why the characters in The Prisoner were numbers. As with many such speakers and their long-winded speculations about the inspirations behind The Prisoner, they soon tipped into absurdity - with references to the tragedy of prisoners of war being numbered - this connection being grasped at to try and make further connections in the viewers mind with the embroidery of fan-fantasies about WW2 and Inverlair. These *connections* are all pursued in an increasingly tight spiral of imaginary causal effect that subverts the interested historian from the reality of the past of this television show.

It is an obvious fact that prisoners in jail have always been allocated a number, so the idea of numbers and prisoners hardly requires much thought. However, besides this everyday logic... there is an evidential *TV secret agent* connection with the wearing of numbered badges - now regarded as so typical of The Prisoner. It came from a show that, between 1964 and 1967, was so enormously popular all around the world that it spawned a mass market in toy merchandise.

In the video tagged below, you can see *secret agents* leaving the plain streets of Brooklyn and entering their modernistic underground base and being issued with numerical badges. Napoleon Solo was Number 11, Illya Kuryakin was Number 2 and of course UNCLE had an obvious Number 1. He was Mr. Waverley - from Section One.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3mopq_the-man-from-uncle-intro-segment_shortfilms

Though executive producer Norman Felton and Ian Fleming had developed the character of Napoleon Solo, it was producer Sam Rolfe who created the organization of U.N.C.L.E. Unlike the nationalistic organizations of the CIA and James Bond's MI6, U.N.C.L.E. was a worldwide organization composed of agents from all corners of the globe. The character of Illya Kuryakin was created by Rolfe as a Russian U.N.C.L.E. agent............. Rolfe created a kind of Alice in Wonderland world, where mundane everyday life would intermittently intersect with the looking-glass fantasy of international espionage which lay just beyond............. The series also began to dabble in science fiction-based plots, beginning with "The Double Affair" in which a THRUSH agent, made to look like Solo through plastic surgery, infiltrates a secret U.N.C.L.E. facility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_U.N.C.L.E.
The cross-fertilisation between Danger Man, UNCLE and back to The Prisoner is apparent but has been little recognised due to the vast bulk of Prisoner *research* emanating from the UK by those too young to remember the ubiquitous popularity of The Man from Uncle at the time The Prisoner was made. Strangely, for such an enormously popular show UNCLE was not released into video in the years since, nor re-run on TV very often and so has remained unseen and mostly un-remembered since. The episode of The Prisoner called "The Girl Who Was Death" was not dissimilar to the tone of Uncle (a show which increasingly adopted a *tongue-in-cheek approach in it's later seasons).
How did the interlaced histories of James Bond, John Drake and Napoleon Solo become resolved by Patrick McGoohan into the figure of a Number Six imprisoned in a strange self-contained village? The solution perhaps lies in a comment McGoohan made in 1965:
"You know? I fear by AD2000 we'll all have numbers, no names."
http://www.danger-man.co.uk/docs/magazines/tvtimes/Oct1965/pdf.pdf
Patrick McGoohan left John Drake, Napoleon Solo and all the rest behind, as he stood upon his own creative shoulders to see that little bit further, as he endeavoured to demonstrate that television thrillers could contain food for thought.

I hope my blog gives the reader pause for thought when reading/absorbing the *Official* stories about the origins and possible reasons why The Prisoner took some of the directions it did. Accept no substitutes. A little arrogance is sometimes a healthy thing to have.... so long as you temper it with a little humility.

McGoohan in his own words: It is another adventure series, but a very different sort of character. It promises to be very exciting.

44 Years Ago Today
The formal meeting that began the making of The Prisoner took place
Saturday 16th April, 1966

In 1959, after reaching some kind of pinnacle in British Theatre and already being a well-regarded Television Play actor, Patrick McGoohan had plunged into what was to give him a lasting international status. The 39 episodes of Danger Man he made in 1960 had built him an increasing fan base in several countries around the world. However, as they were being transmitted throughout 1961-1963, Patrick McGoohan himself had been busy making several films, including two for Disney. As 1964 began, he was approached to revive Danger Man in a new, longer format and had agreed. Over the next 18 months he would make over forty more hours of prime TV. However as 1966 approached, he was ready to do something new. He later remarked that he had enjoyed the character so much, he wanted to end it before the standards previously set dropped. The first public hints of this were to emerge by December, 1965. He remarked in one newspaper that he already had plans to direct – and remarkably mentioned a TV series that would be 18 episodes long, as can be seen in this clipping.

Was this some gestating Prisoner? The negotiation of this show has been mired in historical inaccuracy for years, by the very fans who purported to have researched it. Many accounts claim that McGoohan peremptorily resigned from Danger Man but no studio executives could claim to be baffled about McGoohan opting out of Danger Man in April 1966, because he had publicly been talking about it five months before!

By the early months of 1966, the circumstances surrounding the Danger Man project had reached a critical point. Ralph Smart had ended his association with the show and the decision by CBS not to buy any more shows for 1966 left little few options for Danger Man.

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."http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2010/03/mcgoohan-in-mind-from-what-youve-been.html
McGoohan was ready to jump, but the show was being pushed aside anyhow. In April 1966 this report appeared on the front pages of the national press in England. Given that the quotes were hot news, they had evidently been made the day before,so when Lew Grade said, “Mr. McGoohan is coming to see me tomorrow” ….that meeting was actually taking place on 16th April 1966.

The 16th April, 1966 was a Saturday and it is worth recalling Patrick McGoohan’s 1977 explanation of the genesis of The Prisoner, to Warner Troyer:

“I went to the gentleman, Lew Grade, who was the financier, and said that I'd like to cease making "Secret Agent" and do something else. So he didn't like that idea. He'd prefer that I'd gone on forever doing it. But anyway, I said I was going to quit. So he said, "What's the idea?" This is on the telephone initially, so I met him on a Saturday morning at 7 o'clock.”
Although not fully explained, reading between the lines it seems likely that options for any continuation of Danger Man had become very limited. To move into colour would arguably have required more investment whereas without CBS involvement there would be less money available. Any possibility of Danger Man continuing, reliant only on British revenues must have been ruled out as the Winter of 1965 segued into the Spring of 1966. That CBS did cancel was confirmed the following year in more than one newspaper in America. This is one example of it being mentioned – in a letter-to-the-editor column.

By a quirk of coincidence, tomorrow sees the first broadcast in Britain of The Prisoner (2009) starring a younger theatre contemporary of McGoohan, Ian McKellen. The Prisoner (2009) has adapted McGoohan’s Opus albeit with no overt acknowledgment of McGoohan’s creative legacy. Perhaps he wanted it that way; his prisoner was long ago in his own past. On the other hand, there never was a created by credit on the credit-list of The Prisoner, so the determination of creativity has ended up depending upon the legacy and opinion of TV history.

In the 34 years of fan clubs, there has been a gradual and generalised denigration of McGoohan’s pivotal position as originator and director of the 1967 series that provoked their very interest. Supplanting McGoohan with their own creation myth has long been accompanied by many absurd claims. I have of course covered this subject in several of my earlier blogs. The myth that first led me to take a closer look at all the tales of the prisoner production was the one about the fate of Living in Harmony in the US schedules of 1968. http://numbersixwasinnocent.blogspot.com/2009/06/who-controls-past-controls-future-who.html
However there is another equally absurd myth that also exists. It is endlessly repeated and was reported in an official prisoner magazine a few years ago. Here it is in print:
What is remarkable is that just two weeks after The Prisoner had been been formally green-lit, a book was published, written about the British SOE in WW2. It includes this passage:

Given the realities of political and military life of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, S.O.E. ………………. training can be most seriously faulted is that agents ……………. unsuitable nevertheless in some cases slipped through into the field. This was hardly the training staff’s mistake; yet even they were not infallible. ………………………… If at any stage in the training process an agent’s nerve did fail, or it became clear to the staff that it would fail in the field, or any other strong reason against his dispatch appeared, a nice problem in security was posed; for the agent was bound to know by sight at least the people on the course with him………………….. and if he had reached Group B he might know dangerously much about clandestine techniques. ISRB maintained some workshops in the remotest Scottish highlands, at Inverlair; and to this ‘cooler’ refractory or unsuitable agents were sent, till the other agents they had known were out of harm’s way and it was safe to return them to the general man-power pool.
Inverlair, or the cooler and The Prisoner are often referred to by Official prisoner histories, but how grotesque is the suggestion that knowledge of this odd establishment inspired The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan evidentially had the project underway before anyone even knew about Inverlair.

MRD Foot’s book was the sort of book that normally could have passed unnoticed, but a controversy had been raging in Britain since 1958, when rumours surfaced that had implied that the SOE had wasted many Allied lives in France through sheer incompetence. To counter these rumours the British government of the day had commissioned an Official History to be compiled from otherwise secret files within the Ministry of Defence. The eight-year research project was published on April 28, 1966.

Naturally, the US Army newspaper, Stars & Stripes featured a review of the book on the day of publication. It is no coincidence that this newspaper is often linked to George Markstein, with official books claiming that he worked worked for that publication. Real history reveals that he was merely a reader of it, along with thousands of Britons because Foot’s book, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soe-France-Operations-Executive-Government/dp/0714655287 was a best-seller in 1966, even prompting questions about it's content, in Parliament that year.


My next blog will reflect upon a comment that McGoohan himself made when discussing the subject of the prisoner in the subsequent decades:

The series wasn't entirely a figment of my imagination, you know," McGoohan said. "There really are such places, all very secret, of course, where exactly that sort of thing goes on. "I know of one in the British Isles, another in Germany and one here in the United States. They provided me with just the sort of dramatic gimmick I needed to say something that very much needs saying."

More about prisoners and secret places in the early to middle decades of the 20th Century next time………. And how McGoohan’s village was no Inverlair, but did carry resonances of real places and real history and of course, several episodes of Danger Man.