Cult viewing

Mar 29 2008 by Darren Devine, Western Mail

With its air of mystery and paranoia that fed into the burgeoning 1960s drugs culture, the broadcasting of The Prisoner was a defining moment in the history of TV. As fans prepare for the 40th anniversary reunion at Portmeirion, Darren Devine examines its enduring appeal

WHO is Number One? Why did Number Six resign? And what does it all mean anyway? It was questions such as these that for four months between October 1967 and February 1968 had the nation enthralled trying to puzzle out the message behind Patrick McGoohan’s TV masterpiece The Prisoner.

The basic plot – one man’s struggle against manipulation by an unseen authority holding him captive – blended science fiction fantasy with fears about the tyranny of an all-powerful state earlier outlined in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Those who regard the show as a TV classic say its 17 episodes not only absorbed and highlighted contemporary concerns like the impact of hallucinogenic drugs, but anticipated future preoccupations such as identity theft.

But besides tackling wider social issues like the student protest movement in the late 1960s, some elements of the plot appear to have been inspired by events closer to home – in McGoohan’s life itself.

As well as drawing on elements of his childhood and schooling, McGoohan used his own biographical details, such as his date of birth, to describe the origins of the character he played – Number Six.

Six of One, a discussion group set up by the show’s fans in 1977, say it remains as relevant today as when it was first broadcast.

Speaking before the 40th anniversary convention in Portmeirion, coordinator Roger Langley said, “In the very first episode he (McGoohan) tells the village leader his own date of birth.

“He tells the village leader he was born on March 19, 1928, and he’s got nothing to say, which is a famous line.

“He goes on to say, ‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered’. So it was kind of a play on the student protests at that time.

“In America they had huge protests involving students defying the establishment. I think a lot of it rubbed off on McGoohan.

“In interviews he always talked about how prisoners in the Vietnamese war looked brainwashed. His own village was meant to signify the sort of places where prisoners with secrets can be held and not be subject to the law.

“In the way that nowadays the rendition flights taking prisoners from America to other countries and stopping off in Britain to refuel are outside the law.

“They’re outside jurisdiction – places like Guantanamo Bay fall into that category. The show’s as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.”

In the show, filmed on the North Wales coast at the Italianate hotel village of Portmeirion, the interrogators of Number Six are desperate to uncover the reasons for his resignation as a spy.

McGoohan himself had resigned abruptly from the role he starred in before The Prisoner when he played the spy John Drake in the long-running Danger Man series.

In interviews McGoohan, who turned 80 earlier this month, has hinted his resignation from Danger Man was initially very much against the wishes of the show’s then financier Lew Grade.

He has said, “I’d made 54 of those (Danger Man) and I thought that was an adequate amount. So I went to the gentleman, Lew Grade, who was the financier, and said that I’d like to cease making it 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?’

“I had a whole format prepared of this ‘Prisoner’ thing, which initially came to me on one of the locations on Danger Man, when we went to this place called Portmeirion, where a great deal of it was shot.

“I thought it was an extraordinary place, architecturally and atmosphere wise, and should be used for something and that was two years before the concept came to me.

“So I prepared it and went in to see Lew. I had photographs of the Village or whatever and a format. He sort of said, ‘Well, what’s it about? Tell me’.

“So I talked for 10 minutes and he stopped me and said, ‘I don’t understand one word you’re talking about, but how much is it going to be?’

“So I had a budget with me, oddly enough, and I told him how much and he says, ‘When can you start?’ I said, ‘Monday, on scripts’.

“And he says, ‘The money will be in your company’s account on Monday morning’. Which it was, and that’s how we started.”

Mr Langley suggests the show, which was planned to run for 26 episodes, was, to some extent, prompted by McGoohan’s turning 40 at the time he made it.

“It’s a double anniversary because the last episode of The Prisoner was shown in March 1968, though in some regions it was shown a little earlier than that, as McGoohan was turning 80.

“And he was 40 when The Prisoner bowed out and I always said perhaps the show was an approaching mid-life crisis.

“The last two episodes were laden with paranoia and hidden symbolism and that’s why we said that maybe the onset of 40 had made him view things differently.

“I say that only in a semi-serious vein. I don’t mean it was literally a mid-life crisis, but the penultimate episode (Once Upon a Time) was autobiographical.

“He was regressed back to childhood in the episode. He was brought through his school years and many of his experiences at school appear in that penultimate episode.

“He was the leader of a boxing team and that appears in it. He was obviously someone who was involved in drama and much of the episode appears underneath a spotlight.

“Also he had just resigned from Danger Man. Immediately in The Prisoner you saw the face of the man he had just been playing – John Drake – on placards and in files.

“It was as though he was saying, ‘Look I’ve resigned from being John Drake. I’m now this unnamed person called The Prisoner’.”

The show’s impact, not only on TV audiences but on McGoohan himself, cannot be overestimated.

TV switchboards were inundated with calls from viewers demanding explanations of its ambiguous plot lines and McGoohan was besieged by fans wanting a first-hand account of what he was driving at.

He was forced into hiding by the show’s popularity and went to Switzerland before moving on to New Mexico, where he produced the film Catch My Soul.

After the series ended, broadcasters ATV sent out a lengthy explanation of its meaning to appease its many restless and bemused viewers.

This included details of not only character and plot lines, but symbols used in the programme, such as the show’s logo of a penny farthing bicycle with a frilled canopy.

McGoohan claimed the bicycle represented progress, while the canopy signified security.

But McGoohan, who grew up in Ireland and the UK, wanted modern technology to be as slow as the penny farthing because he felt we were advancing too quickly.

Mr Langley, a retired solicitor and author of the recent book Patrick McGoohan, Danger Man or Prisoner, said, “The week of the last episode when Number One was unveiled the country was on the edge of its seat waiting to see who it was.

“Some people drove in their cars to other areas with a portable TV and parked in lay-bys in order to pick up the signal from another ITV region because they couldn’t wait.

“Such was the power of the programme because there had been nothing like it before and many say it was the first real TV classic and there’s been nothing like it since.

“It relied upon the audience asking questions about it instead of just sitting back and watching the latest special effects or their favourite actor in some new sit-com or drama.”

Mr Langley believes shows made in almost every decade since The Prisoner was broadcast show signs of its influence, including The Champions, Sapphire and Steel and Twin Peaks.

McGoohan, who now lives in California, has always steered clear of suggesting the show’s themes were inspired by events in his personal or professional lives.

Instead he has explained the show in terms of it being about the individual’s attempts to resist the depersonalising power of the state to reduce us all to a series of digits.

Social security, national insurance, tax and driving licence numbers etc, all fill him with fears summed up by the character’s best-known line, ‘I am not a number, I am a free man!’

McGoohan, who in the 90s starred in films such as Braveheart and A Time to Kill and has been linked with several abortive attempts to make a film version of The Prisoner, has said, “Behind it, of course, was a certain impatience with the numerology of society and the way we’re being made into ciphers.

“It (the village) was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible.

“Trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is Number Six and will live there happily as Number Six forever after. And this is the one rebel that they can’t break.”

The managing director of Portmeirion, Robin Llywelyn, knows all about the impact of the series, currently being repeated on ITV 4.

After it was filmed, visitor numbers to Portmeirion increased by 50% overnight and he believes around 10% of the hotel’s current guests come because of the links to The Prisoner.

The grandson of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who designed the village as a monument to architectural beauty, said, “The show’s been very important for Portmeirion. When it was first shown in 1967 the following year the number of visitors went up from 50,000 to 100,000.

“The number of visitors to Portmeirion doubled overnight. It was re-shown in the 1980s and that brought it to another audience and it still attracts interest to this day. The show gave Portmeirion an identity that it might not otherwise have had.”

Mr Llywelyn, 49, also has fond childhood memories of watching the show being filmed in the autumn of 1966 with his sister Menna.

Robin, then eight, and Menna, nine, were witnesses to the shooting of some of its most famous scenes. These included those featuring the iconic Rover balloon (which would trap or kill would-be escapees), and the mini-mokes – the golf cart-style village taxis.

“My sister Menna and I used to come down and watch them filming at the weekend and after school.

“We used to watch them chasing after the Rover balloons on the estuary and watch the mini-mokes whizzing around.

“There would be all sorts of people dressed up in colourful costumes with penny farthing bicycles. There would also be signs and an information board and all sorts of things from the set that they would leave out and we would play with.

“I remember watching a helicopter scene where they took off from the hotel lawn and a funeral on the beach for one of the inmates.”

A relationship grew up between the Williams-Ellis family, the local community around Portmeirion and the show’s producers as filming developed.

The Williams-Ellises and extras, who were all locals, were invited to watch the show’s first episode in the local Coliseum Cinema.

Mr Llywelyn said, “Patrick McGoohan invited the family, and the local extras who had taken part, to a screening of the first episode in full colour in the nearby Porthmadog cinema.

“The extras were local people working at the telephone exchange and other places because he (McGoohan) recruited most of the cast from the local area and then brought in some fairly famous actors to play Number Two and for some of the main roles. That was quite a memorable occasion.”

Before the series began McGoohan compiled a 40-page account of the history of the village, detailing everything from the sort of telephones used to the sewerage system.

And though much pre-planning went into the show its devotees acknowledge there was also an element of making the episodes up as they went along.

Writer George Markstein, who penned and story edited the early episodes, believed these flights into fantasy were taking the series too far away from its original premise.

Mr Langley added, “In the final episode (Fall Out) there is just general mayhem with a big underground trial of the prisoner and it occupied two huge sound stages at MGM studios and was the most expensive TV production there at the time.

“When it got to about episode 13 the story editor Markstein, who was himself a wartime correspondent, left because he was fed up with McGoohan. He said McGoohan wanted to control everything.

“From that point onwards McGoohan went to America to film Ice Station Zebra and when he came back they decided to cut the planned 26 episodes down to 17 and just made four more.”

Markstein fell out with McGoohan and the extent of the bitterness between the two men was made clear in an interview he gave in 1984 shortly before his death.

He accused McGoohan of ego-mania and suggested the cult that had grown up around the series with university courses studying its meaning was a sad commentary on the times.

Markstein also believed the final episode where Number One was revealed to be the prisoner himself was a farcical indication of the extent to which the series went into meltdown after McGoohan began monopolising control.

Asked when he decided to leave the show’s writing team, he said in his interview for the documentary The Prisoner File, “When egomania took over! You know, when McGoohan was everything! When McGoohan was writing, was conceiving, was directing ... and didn’t know where he was going. My presence was superfluous – and we’ve seen the result after my departure.”

Markstein suggested the fact that a course was set up at a Canadian University to examine the meaning of The Prisoner was a “terrific case of The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

He said, “What a pathetic thing. I mean, one is delighted that it amuses people, and one is delighted that it entertains people and it’s a very satisfying thing to have originated something which has left such a mark and I’m very humble and very pleased about that.

“But having said that, when I hear that some benighted university in Canada is holding some sort of course for its students about the significance of The Prisoner and when I hear people pontificating about its meaning – the thing is a bizarre and unusual television series, no more, no less.

“It had some good things in it. It had some ridiculous things in it. It’s fun! But The Prisoner cult is a terrific case of The Emperor’s New Clothes quite honestly and if it gives people pleasure then so be it... (but) it shows how poverty-stricken people must be to have to cling to this kind of absurdity.”

So if one of the programme’s originators admits the reaction to the show was overblown, isn’t there something faintly ridiculous about groups like Six to One meeting every year to re-enact scenes in costume?

Mr Langley, whose group now has around 1,000 members, said, “What we do is not for everybody and if people want to do something more constructive I would suggest they go and watch 22 men kick a ball around a field.

“That’s a slightly sarcastic comment, because I’m not a football fan and I find the national obsession with football far more puzzling than I do an interest in The Prisoner.”

The 40th anniversary Prisoner reunion takes place at Portmeirion from April 4-6