Patrick McGoohan, star of the most brilliantly obscure TV series of all time, The Prisoner, has died at the age of 80.
Growing up in the state-controlled Britain of the 1970s, the series resonated with me. I often felt like I was living in The Village. Nor was I the only one; I remember the comic John Sessions comparing the famous title sequence dialogue to the frustration of dealing with state-controlled directory inquiries (the equivalent of dialing 411):
Operator: What do you want?
You: Information
Operator: You won’t get it.
You: But I dialled 411*
Operator: I am not a number!**
So it is with mixed feelings that I learn that a remake, or rather a re-imagining, is being planned. While the 60s series centered around sinister forces you don’t quite understand controlling your life and frustrating your ambitions at every step of the way, from the report, this one seems as if it will be more about Gitmo and Reality TV (although it is possible that is the writer projecting). If it is, the 60s series will remain essential viewing, and I hope the new series is good enough to inspire more people to watch the old one.
By the way, you can watch the original series for free online at AMC. Time for me to visit Harmony again, and raise a toast to a great actor.
* I can’t remember the old GPO number
** Yes, I am aware that the roles are reversed. This is a very Prisoner idea.
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RIP Secret Agent Man. Indeed.
Though a baby when it came out the show became a favorite of mine in college. The conception of the State as an entity seeking to absorb the individual into the collective – to destroy man's spirit, and so his hope, remains easily accessible thanks to "The Prisoner" . And his acting in Braveheart, a great depiction of the brooding evil of statism, was brilliant beyond words. I'll miss him. He and Hayek must be having a talk now about the road to serfdom. I hope so.
In the U.S., The Prisoner gained a cult following among libertarians. LA Times TV critic Robert Lloyd has a great obit –http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-mcgo….."The Prisoner" was a television show of ideas — the inalienable if inconvenient right to self in a world that demands your cooperation, if not capitulation — which also distinguished it from pretty much every other television show I had ever seen. The fact that I was just then working out that my own junior high school was a kind of jail made its appearance timely and amplified its meaning, as did most everything else about that chaotic summer of the battlements."The Prisoner" was more than an idea, of course: It was an idea personified, and while it's fair to say that its artistic success was the lucky product of the work of many hands, it was McGoohan who made the series work. (That is perhaps why I am not yet more excited about AMC's coming remake, set to premiere sometime this year.) It was, metaphorically, his own story, having quit "Secret Agent" at the height of its success because it no longer suited him to play that role.Nearly 40 at the time (and the father of three), he was heroic in a way that mixed the self-reliance of the classic secret agent with the comedy of the new age's anti-authoritarian tricksters. Good-looking, in an Everyman sort of way, he had a musical voice, a light step, a twinkling eye — he was a bit of a John Lennon, come to think of it — that in itself bespoke a kind of freedom. There was always humor in his contrariness, and if Number 6 was fated corporeally to remain a prisoner — caught at the border by Rover, the bouncing ball from hell, or shown that his imagined escape was merely an illusion — he remained himself. As hard as they tried, they could not wash his brain.
Nice post, Ivan. He was also one of my favorite Coloumbo villians, too.
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