Saturday evenings in the summer of 1968 The Jackie Gleason Show on CBS was replaced in its early Saturday evening slot by a weird British TV series. It starred Patrick McGoohan, who was familiar to audiences as spy John Drake in Secret Agent, the American title for British TV series Danger Man. McGoohan, it later turned out, had supposedly twice turned down the role of James Bond, because of that character's immorality. (Drake never even so much as kissed a girl during the entire run of the TV series.)
The new show, The Prisoner, had one of the most striking openings ever seen, before or since, for a TV series: its arresting music, the cool Lotus Seven (KAR120C), the deft editing. The first part, which never varied, told what happened to McGoohan's character after he resigned from what we presume is MI6. The second part, after McGoohan wakes up, only varied from week to week in the title information and the voice and image of the actor playing Number 2. Here's the opening of the second episode, with the sorely missed Leo McKern as Number 2:
Number 6 awakens from his drugged sleep to find himself in The Village, an isolated place only accessible by helicopter and water, the latter barred as an escape route by the balloon-like watchdogs, aptly called "Rovers." Each week a new Number 2 tries to find out from Number 6 why he resigned. We don't know who runs The Village--East, Far East, or West--or maybe all three at once. Number 6 struggles to keep his intellectual freedom, while always attempting to escape. The 17-episode series (only 16 of which were aired here initially) did conclude before the end of the summer.
I'd claim it was the greatest television show I've ever seen, but will settle for saying it's my favorite.
Its strengths were, first, its writing. The show began in the quotidian and swiftly moved into the symbolic. Is this saga just the struggle of a spy to preserve his identity? Perhaps. Although it is never said that Number 6 is John Drake, one of the themes of the earlier series was Drake's integrity and his reluctance to perform morally questionable assignments. Move out one circle. Is The Village a trope for modern society, or at least a kind of society that many see as utopian? The second strength was the locale, the Welsh seaside resort of Portmeirion, the arabesque dream of an architect who tried to recreate a Mediterranean town on the west coast of England. Its out-of-kilter solidity unsettled as it delighted. The third was the casting, with a wide variety of English character and TV actors, such as McKern, in roles large and small (for instance, Finlay Currie, the large, craggy Magwitch of David Lean's Great Expectations, or Patrick Cargill, the urbane police detective from Help!).
The series was not without its weaknesses. Not all the scripts are strong, and the ending episodes fall considerably short of their symbolic reach. A love for The Prisoner used to mean you were condemned to be part of a coterie, but the show's fame has grown gradually, until it is alluded to on Michael Penn's album Resigned and even on The Simpsons (although that show has been on so long, it has become a kind of Encyclopedia Popculturis in its references.)
However, any increase in "popularity" means rumors and stories about a Prisoner movie or new TV show. Ugh. If that happens, gas my room and ship me out.
Be seeing you.
(Note: Herman Melville fans might be interested in this role early in McGoohan's career. Unfortunately, Simon Callow's multi-volume biography of Welles has not reached this point in his career yet, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the linked article. But what a cast!)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment