The Prisoner (1967-1968)

In 1968, New York-born but Irish and British-raised actor Patrick McGoohan was at the very top of his game. His stint in the successful TV spy show Danger Man (1960-1968) for Lord Lew Grade’s ITC had come to an end and McGoohan was the highest paid actor on British television. But during the filming of the severely truncated fourth series of Danger Man (only two episodes were shot, Shinda Shima and Koroshi, the only shows in the series’ history made in colour) McGoohan announced to Grade that he was resigning. Grade, eager to hold onto his star turn, asked if there was anything else that McGoohan wanted to work on. The actor pitched the mogul a concept for a new show about a secret agent who resigns and wakes to find himself in a surreal holiday resort that turns out to be a hi-tech prison where various representatives of authority attempt to crack our man’s resolve and find out the reason why he quit. Thus, over nothing more than a handshake (no contract was ever signed – by this stage McGoohan and Grade were working solely on trust) was born The Prisoner.

McGoohan’s initial plan was for just seven episodes but Grade insisted that there should be more. In a 1977 interview conducted for OntarioTV by Warner Troyer, McGoohan explained how his original vision for the show had been “as a serial as opposed to a series. I thought the concept of the thing would sustain for only seven (episodes), but then Lew Grade wanted to make his sale to CBS, I believe and 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, but it should be 7.”

Production of the new show was entrusted to Everyman Films, the company that McGoohan had set up with David Tomblin, an assistant director on Danger Man and later one of the best and most in-demand ADs in the business. George Markstein, a successful thriller writer and script editor on Danger Man, was drafted in to oversee the scripts for the new show. It was Markstein who came up with the offbeat setting for the new show – he’d been doing his own research into the work of the Special Operations Executive and had unearthed the existence of an establishment in Scotland used to house wayward agents who posed a risk to wartime security.

Together, McGoohan, Tomblin and Markstein set about creating the first episode which would establish the underlying themes of the show and introduce the strange, hostile world in which the prisoner would find himself. Throughout the first episode, Arrival, and indeed throughout the subsequent 16 episodes, the hero – played by McGoohan – would remain nameless, referred to by the ruling authorities of the prison – “The Village” – only as a number, as would be all the characters. Number Six is never referred to by name nor do we ever find out why he resigned and what information he holds that so terrifies his captors. This reluctance to name has led to much speculation over the years as to whether Number Six was meant to be John Drake, the secret agent played by McGoohan in Danger Man. McGoohan has always denied any link between the two.

Each week, Number Six would continue his attempts to escape the confines of The Village, often thwarted by duplicitous fellow prisoners and by The Village’s guardians, the apparently semi-sentient balloon-like creatures known collectively as Rover. Each week he would defy any attempt to break him, standing out as the only individual in a society of brainwashed, subservient prisoners whose wills were more easily snapped. And each week, The Village’s rulers (we never find out who they are nor which ‘side’ they are on) attempt to tame Number Six, sending in a new Number Two each time to execute an increasingly outlandish series of plans and ruses to get to the heart of the Number Six enigma.

Today, in a world concerned with issues of privacy and surveillance, The Prisoner seems less like a cult television show enjoyed by a hardcore coterie of fans, and more like an increasingly accurate work of mad prophecy. Surreal, political and impeccably in tune with its time, The Prisoner was an unlikely television series – more so when one considers it was shown in prime time. It had a good number of British television viewers hooked each week, outraging many of them with its ambiguous ending, baffling many with its allusions and allegories but enthralling many who continue to be intrigued by its many intricacies and subtleties.

It was also a rare example of what might be called “auteur television.” This was McGoohan’s baby from beginning to end, his creation, his vision, and as the bland 2009 remake proved, without him it’s just an odd thriller about a man in a strange prison. It was McGoohan’s all encompassing political vision that informs the show (it takes pot shots at everything from western consumerism to the authoritarianism of communism) and over just 17 episodes, it was a contradictory series, created by a man who was so conservative that he refused to do love scenes yet so in tune with the changing social mores of the day that he had an almost naive faith in the power of the youthful cultural and political revolutions that were sweeping the western world in the late 1960s.

Although much of The Prisoner shot at MGM Studios in Borehamwood in Hertfordshire, The Prisoner is now synonymous with its primary location, the extraordinary Italianate resort village of Portmeirion in Gwynned on the North Wales coast which had featured in the 1959 Danger Man episode View from the Villa and its unique charms had struck McGoohan even then. The resort came to Markstein’s attention again when it was featured in a The Sunday Times supplement and both he and McGoohan agreed that this would be the perfect prison for their new small screen hero.

Designed over almost half a century by Clough Williams-Ellis (although work began in 1925, it was still under construction while The Prisoner was filming there and was fully realised until 1973), the hotel wasn’t credited until the last episode, Fall Out, and has since become one of North Wales’ most popular tourist attractions.

Only two filming blocks occurred at Portmeirion, one in September of 1966 and a second in March of the following year, the rest of the production taking place at Borehamwood where the show’s art director, Jack Shampan (another Danger Man veteran), had constructed his impressive interior sets. Shapman was responsible for many of the iconic images associated with The Prisoner, from the penny farthing symbol used to represent The Village to the impressive, hi-tech sets for the central control room and Number Two’s chambers.

Public and press reaction to The Prisoner was generally very good – but that all changed with the controversial final episode, Fall Out, written and directed by McGoohan himself. After sixteen weeks of Number Six battling to escape his prison and learn the identity of the mysterious Number One, audiences still unused to a show as unashamedly allegorical and surreal as The Prisoner were still expecting some sort of neat and tidy conclusion, some answers to the many questions posed by those previous episodes. As Number Six said every week in the opening titles “You won’t get it!”

Final episode Fall Out (broadcast on 1 February 1968) remains an enigma even now, decades after it was first shown and it provoked a storm of protest from mystified viewers. In his interview with Troyer, McGoohan recalled that “when the last episode came out in England, it had one of the largest viewing audiences, they tell me, ever over there, because everyone wanted to know who No. 1 was, because they thought it would be a “James Bond” type of No. 1. When they did finally see it, there was a near-riot and I was going to be lynched. And I had to go into hiding in the mountains for two weeks, until things calmed down. That’s really true!” but admitted too that he was “delighted. I wanted to have controversy, argument, fights, discussions, people in anger waving first in my face saying, ‘How dare you? Why don’t you do more Secret Agents that we can understand?’ I was delighted with that reaction. I think it’s a very good one. That was the intention of the exercise.”

Not everyone was as enamoured of Fall Out, however: Markstein has dismissed it as “an absurd pantomime… you tell me what it means. I think it was a bit of gross self indulgence by someone who was fed up with the whole thing and wanted to get out of it and wanted to go out in a blaze of… something or other.”

As Markstein’s comment suggests, relations with McGoohan had broken down between the two men (so much so that when Channel 4 came to make it’s documentary Six Into One: The Prisoner File to accompany a repeat screening in 1984, McGoohan is reported to have snapped “If Markstein’s in it, I’m out!”. Throughout filming, McGoohan had been notoriously difficult to work with – Roger Parkes, writer of the episode A Change of Mind, was one of many who found the obsessed and perfectionist star a challenge to work with:

“So far as I’m concerned, Patrick McGoohan was the star from hell. When he received the first draft of the script, he threw it out, complaining that it was much too gory and confusing. Fortunately I was able to go back to my brother, who knew about the latest method for a lobotomy, by using ultra sound to sever the frontal lobes of the brain instead of using a scalpel. Better still, this method involves using a parabolic reflector, what lines – all good visual stuffs – which McGoohan finally accepted. He also insisted on de-sexualising the script, by cutting out the minor romance that I had written between himself and the deceptive neural surgeon – played by the dishy Angela Brown. Finally, on the first day of shooting, he sacked the director and so he would direct it himself.”

The Prisoner has proved to be an enduring favourite on both television and various forms of home video, testament perhaps to the way it lends itself to constant reappraisal and reinterpretation. By refusing to supply easy answers – or indeed any answers – The Prisoner has continued to baffle and engage viewers since it went off our screens on 5 February 1968. Number Six has remained an appealing icon for the stubborn, the free-thinking and the anti-authoritarian, giving it an inbuilt appeal to youthful audiences for over five decades. In retrospect, it’s also been a surprisingly prescient series: it’s vision of a society constantly under surveillance, helpless in the grip of a faceless authority that cares less for the individuals it purports to represent and more for shrouding itself in secrecy resonates as strongly in the early years of the 21st century as it did at the tail end of the 1960s, that most revolutionary of decades. “We all live in a little Village,” McGoohan told Troyer. “Your village may be different from other people’s villages but we are all prisoners.”

Be seeing you…

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