The PRISONER

   UK tv series (1967-8). An Everyman Films prod for ATV. Prod David Tomblin. Created, starring and partly written/dir Patrick McGoohan; other writers included George Anthony Skene, Terence Feely; other dirs included Don Chaffey, Pat Jackson. Script ed George Markstein. 17 50min episodes.Colour.

   In this KAFKA-esque, sf-related series a UK ex-secret agent (McGoohan), who for unknown reasons has resigned from his organization, is gassed in his apartment and wakes to find himself in The Village: a mysterious establishment whose geographical location is ambiguous and whose inhabitants consist of either rebels like himself or stooges of "Them" - the people who run the place. The former spy (McGoohan hadpreviously starred in a spy series called Danger Man) is unable to discover just who "They" are - perhaps the communists, perhaps his own government. His every movement in The Village - externally a cross between a bland Mediterranean holiday camp and an old people's home (in reality the bizarre resort of Portmeirion, Wales, designed by the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978) from 1926 until his death) - is watched by "Number Two" and his staff on video. Various episodes concern his attempts to escape from The Village, his neverending search for the unseen Number One, and the efforts of the different Number Twos (they change witheach episode) to break him and discover why he resigned. The most obvious sf elements are the balloon-shaped ROBOT watchdogs and the complex brainwashing and surveillance equipment, including devices that project thoughts onto a screen.McGoohan is a puritan (no kissing on screen) and an acknowledged political conservative. The many liberal supporters of the series may have misinterpreted its libertarian emphasis on individual strength, especially the power to resist incursions into one's mind, seeing the series instead as a plea for human rights and especially democratic freedoms. The excellent, surrealist last episode interestingly renders the POLITICS of the whole series retrospectively ambiguous by suggesting that our metaphorical prisons may be self-imposed. The Prisoner who continues to resist brainwashing may have brainwashed himself into a prison of the mind. The series' thesis may be that freedom is impossible, as is opting out.TP, not popular at first, soon developed an enthusiastic cult following which has lasted for over two decades, especially for its thought-provoking aspects and its deliberate bafflements, unusual in tv drama. It has been repeated on tv several times in the UK and shown in the USA. Its confident manipulations of Surrealist and sf themes, its literatescripts, its sophisticated understanding of visual metaphor and its enjoyably obsessive evocations of a whole range of fantasies of PARANOIA together created what is in the opinion of many - often those discontented with SPACE OPERA - the finest sf tv series to date. Its strengths in many respects resemble those of the late-1980s tv cult favourite Twin Peaks. Novels based on the series are The Prisoner * (1969) by Thomas M. DISCH,The Prisoner No. 2 * (1969) by David MCDANIEL and The Prisoner 3: A Day in the Life * (1970) by Hank STINE. Two of several books about the series are The Official Prisoner Companion (1988), by Matthew White and Jaffer Ali,and The Prisoner and Danger Man (1989) by Dave Rogers. A comic-book series (4 numbers 1988-9), originally from DC COMICS, served as a sequel to thetv series.

   JB/PN

   See also: GAMES AND TOYS.