Cult film-maker and former Moviedrome presenter Alex Cox has written a book about The Prisoner presenting a unique take on who Number 6 really was and why he resigned. He recently had a clandestine liaison with our man Nick Joy, his brief to get information… information…

Alex, I thoroughly enjoyed your book, not least because it’s not just another episode guide on The Prisoner and has its very own agenda.

Thank you. Nearly ten years ago the distributor of the American Blu-ray release of The Prisoner gave me the boxset, but I only got round to finding a funky old player that would plug into my screen about a year ago. In the intervening years I’d watched the odd episode or two as they popped up, but the last time I’d seen the series in full was on its first transmission in 1967-8 when I was 12 to 13. So, I’d watched it in the sequence of the British broadcast transmission but was also aware that this wasn’t the order in which it was shot.

The production order was very different to the ultimate transmission order.

Yes. Deliberately so. And so I wondered how it would be to watch the films in the order in which they were made. That was eye-opening, because certain things started to make sense – if it’s possible for any of it to make sense! Certain things like the Village is replicating people, creating clones or surgically altering people. They have doubles; there’s three instances of that in the first three episodes. It’s very intentional. McGoohan sees an electrician and then goes out to see the same man as a gardener. It’s not accidental, and it pays off in The Schizoid Man where they’ve either cloned McGoohan or surgically altered someone else to look like him.

And what did this new viewing order reveal to you? 

If you see them in the order in which they were made, you realise that initially they didn’t know what the point of the series was, or perhaps even who No. 6 was. I’m sure that George Markstein and Patrick McGoohan fundamentally disagreed at the outset, but their disagreement grew stronger as the series went on. McGoohan was taking it in one direction, towards Once Upon a Time and Fallout, while Markstein was telling the writers something else – that he’s Danger Man. And I’m sure Lew Grade wanted him to be Danger Man too.

In what way did rearranging the episodes mix things up?

A good example is The Chimes of Big Ben being brought forwards as episode two. It really needs to be later in the run because you can’t have the Prisoner escape and think he’s back in London so soon – you need to establish the Village first. But the reason they did that is because it features the actor who played his boss in Danger Man, and by bringing that episode up to the front they could emphasise the Danger Man connection, even though it wasn’t really a connection. [Richard Wattis played Drake’s superior (Hardy) in Danger Man, and then the similar role of Fotheringay in The Chimes of Big Ben.]

Christopher Benjamin appeared in Danger Man as a character called Potter, the same name as his character in The Prisoner’s The Girl Who Was Death. But following your logic, his appearance in Arrival and The Chimes of Big Ben was an attempt to cement that Danger Man connection.

McGoohan was a big star at the time, but I think the broadcaster was worried that the series was quite strange, and so by reordering the episodes they could create a sense of familiarity and continuity.

When did you get that ‘Eureka!’ moment, having worked out what was going on in the show?

If you watch the series in the order in which it was produced, it becomes apparent that the Village is kidnapping scientists. It’s not exactly what Markstein had in mind – that Scottish internment camp for defunct spies or double agents – McGoohan has got something else going on in those tunnels and caves below the Village. There’s a kidnapped scientist in Free for All, another in Checkmate, and The General is about a kidnapped scientist who is creating the ‘Speed Learn’ process. All the people in the series who say they are spies are actually double agents working against the Prisoner, whereas the scientists are all kidnapped scientists. It seemed pretty obvious to me that there aren’t any spies in the Village, except for those working for the administration to break No. 6. The Village is a prison for scientists.

It’s a fascinating theory, though I guess not everyone is going to agree with you.

For sure, I’m out on a limb here. I was at the Unmutual event the other night and the interviewer, Dave, said he agreed with every one of my chapter analyses but disagreed entirely with my conclusions.

Yes, and that made you happy.

And that’s the way that McGoohan would have wanted it. If the series had lent itself to easy explanations then I don’t think it would have had such a long life.

There’s a line by No. 6 where he says he wants to be the first man on the moon. Was that the point where you formed your hypothesis about who he really is?

I took it as my brief that everything that is said or shown in The Prisoner should be taken as on the level. In other words, it’s not a dream and it’s not a Kafkaesque nightmare, although the Prisoner is certainly ironic or cynical in his interactions with the No. 2 characters. If he says he wants to be the first man on the moon, you can take it three ways: he’s either joking, you can say that it’s a reference to the fact that he was in this TV drama where he played the first man on the moon, or you can just take it as gospel – he would like to be the first man on the moon. That was what he was working towards when they kidnapped him. Any one of those three could be true.

Initially I thought that everything revolves around No. 6, the Village is there purely to observe him – like in The Truman Show – but your theory is that he’s just one of many kidnapped scientists.

Yes, there’s projects going on underground, including ‘Speed Learn’, the rocket ship and the ‘Mind Learn’ project. The Village is a technology park, but you aren’t allowed to leave.

Did you deliberately choose to write the book in the anniversary year, or was it good timing?

It was just coincidence. After I’d watched the episodes in this new order I thought ‘I’ve got to write about this’ and I contacted the head of Oldcastle Books and its imprint Kamera Books. I asked if they’d like a short book about The Prisoner and he said ‘Yes, but you’ve got to do this really quickly because this is the 50th anniversary year’ – and I hadn’t realised that. So I jumped on it, watched them all again and then wrote the book, episode by episode.

Did you watch the entire run again in sequence or each episode over and again? 

First of all I watched them in broadcast order, then production order, then production order again, and finally each episode in turn before writing about it.

McGoohan famously said ‘It is what it is’ when asked what the show was about. Is that your response if someone was to, say, ask what your movie Straight to Hell means?

A film, or TV programme, should contain all the information needed to understand it. If it requires explanation in addition to that then it has failed. That’s what McGoohan was saying – he would not explain the series because if he had to it would have failed. If William Friedkin has to show up at the end of Sorcerer and explain what it’s all about, then it’s not a good film.

And by that same token it’s perfectly acceptable to share an opinion about an added layer that wasn’t even intended?

Yes, or share a layer that was entirely intended. We don’t know what the filmmaker, creative artist or executive producer was necessarily thinking, and they should be able to refuse to answer what their intentions were. The irony is that filmmakers are expected to go and do press about their work, to talk to journalists, and this adds the difficulty that they are expected to create publicity for their work without giving it away.

I’m very jealous that you were able to see The Prisoner so fresh – on first transmission. By the time I saw it in the 1980s the ending was well-known. Were you initially watching it because you liked Danger Man?

No, I’d never watched Danger Man; I wasn’t interested in it, though I don’t why, because I watched The Man from UNCLE. For some reason, there was a buzz about it from the promotion they were doing on ITV and I tuned into the first episode – I was totally hooked, and you couldn’t stop me for watching the others. I can’t even remember what night of the week it was on – I think it was Sunday. I was there for every single episode, in black and white on a small square box television. I couldn’t get it enough of it, even though I didn’t understand the ending. I felt very sad at the end.

Sad in what way? Because it was all over, or because it wasn’t the ending you’d wanted?

Sad because it didn’t give us a James Bond super-villain at the end to explain it all. No. 1 wasn’t a guy in a cave with an eye-patch, stroking a cat. No. 1 was this strange construct of a machine with an ape-man in a suit. It was hard to work out on first viewing what that meant.

And if you wanted to watch it again there was no easy way to do so. No iPlayer or videos.

Yes, there was no immediate replay – you had to wait for the repeats one day.

I can’t imagine watching The Prisoner in anything other than in glorious, gaudy colour. Watching it for the first time in colour must have been a whole new experience for you.

That was the genius of Lew Grade. He was the one who insisted it be in colour to future-proof it. It’s nice in black and white but much better in colour; it was intended to be seen in colour.

The Blu-ray remastering has made the picture even more gorgeous.

They’ve done a very good job on making it look even nicer on the Blu-rays. The fact that it was shot on 35mm film was another way it was future-proofed. On British television at the time they generally shot interiors on video and exteriors on film – the viewer could always tell the difference between that old clunky video and something shot outside on 16mm film. With The Prisoner there was a visual consistency throughout. It cost £75,000 per episode and was a quality production.

In some of the episodes you reference the look as being Bunuelian; can you elaborate?

Yes, it’s really the reference to Diary of a Chambermaid with Jeanne Moreau. She’s always in one of those outfits that the sexy maids wear in The Prisoner. You know, the series gets all these words thrown at it – Orwellian, Kafkaesque, surrealist – all of which diminish it because it’s not any one of those things, although there are elements.

In the book, you say that modern TV is made in bulk – the aim is to get 100 episodes – but back then McGoohan was pitching a 6-7 episode idea.

Well, strictly speaking he never pitched a 6-7 episode series, he said later that he thought 7 would have been the perfect length, but for a series to be sold to the American market it had to be 13 episodes, unless it was a summer series. There were four seasons for shows in the US, the least significant and prioritised of which was the summer season, which ran a little longer. So, if you were going for a summer release in the US they wanted 17 episodes. Grade made this deal with CBS that there would be at least 17 episodes so that it could be played in the summer, or reduced to 13.

A lot of the crew thought there’d be a full second season

Nobody really knew how long it would run for. Ian Rakoff [credited co-writer of Living in Harmony] said in his book [Inside The Prisoner] that they didn’t know if there was going to be one season or two. McGoohan told him that it could have been cancelled after 13, while McGoohan’s best buddy Frank Maher, who was his stuntman, thought there was going to be 26 episodes. Maher believed they had been hired for another 13 episodes, so it all came as a bit of a shock when ITC shut it down and said they were only going to do four more to take it to 17.

Ian Rakoff told me he got a rough deal with the show, and is very aggrieved with having to share that story credit with producer David Tomblin on Living in Harmony. 

It sounds a little bit like Tomblin made off with his royalties. Tomblin just paid him out of his back pocket and said ‘I’ll take care of the rest’. When asked about royalties he was told there wouldn’t be any. Tomblin sounds like a bit of a bastard – I can say that now that he’s dead!

For someone who in their body of work has revisited existing films and stories, I’m surprised we never got a Prisoner 2.0 from you. Was that ever one of your aspirations? 

I’m blacklisted by the studios and major television studios so there’s no way I’m going to get offered a job to direct The Prisoner, but at the same time I wouldn’t want to. When they started talking about the remake with Christopher Eccleston and Ian McKellen, it seemed like they weren’t very original in the casting. The Prisoner has to be a super-intelligent individual, someone who radiates intelligence, which Eccleston doesn’t. I know he didn’t end up playing it, but he was in the frame for a while. They went for the guy who played Jesus [Jim Caviezel, The Passion of the Christ]. And No. 2 should be Derek Jacobi or Anna Quick – the greatest actors of the British theatre, pitted against the greatest intellectual protagonist. Who would that be?

Would the themes of The Prisoner still be relevant today? 

We’re exactly in the same position, aren’t we? The new Cold War – Russia is supposedly our enemy, for reasons I can’t understand. All these mad stories are told and all this stuff gets made up – fake news. We’re probably more lied to now by our media than we were back then, if that’s even possible.

Did you ever had reason to meet Patrick McGoohan, or did you even want to?

Apart from a couple of people, I’ve never met anyone who acted in that series. I briefly met (the late) Peter Wyngarde, who played No. 2 in one episode, and he was a very charming man. McGoohan might have been an interesting man to meet… or he might have been intolerable!

Have you watched Chris Rodley’s documentary In My Mind which follows his disastrous interviews with McGoohan in the 1980s?

I was astonished that Channel 4 sent him out there with an incompetent crew who didn’t know how to make the camera work. That’s going to annoy any professional film or television person. That’s not Chris Rodley’s fault, because he was assigned this crew, but it’s disgraceful that they were so incompetent. But it’s also really entertaining in retrospect as you see McGoohan getting more and more impatient with these fools and Rodley is desperately trying to stop him from leaving! I’m sure that McGoohan was already conflicted about doing the interview and that the incompetent crew was just an additional burden. I don’t really understand why he agreed to do it in the first place.

It’s a great film by Rodley. You really feel for him.

Yes, I love the drone footage in the film too, but the Standard 8 footage that’s been found [shot by a holidaymaker on location at Portmeirion] of the filming is fascinating. They were shooting at a working holiday resort full of tourists. They’re filming Arrival with hundreds of lollygaggers taking pictures of McGoohan – his patience to put up with that is outstanding. No star would put up with that now – they throw a hissy fit if there’s a cross-eyed extra looking at them in a funny way. The concentration he must have had.

Also, back in the 1960s there was no fear that this content was going to be shared. There were no platforms like YouTube where someone could spoil what they’d recorded – the exposure would be limited to friends and family. Have you been to Portmeirion?

Yes, years ago, in my late teens or early twenties. It feels very much like a film set, and that’s because ultimately it is an artificial construct. Clough Williams-Ellis made his money as an architect elsewhere but ploughed it all into this project of his to create this Italianate village on the Welsh coast.

On a technical basis is there anything you’ve taken into your own work from The Prisoner?

Into my own work, not very much, but into my own life, the whole shebang. The reason I am so paranoid and cynical, distrustful of authority, have difficulty with instructions – I blame entirely on The Prisoner. I took it all on board, and I think that’s what the show does – it doesn’t leave you. My aesthetic isn’t the kitschy, twee look that you get in The Prisoner, which is charming and just right for the series. My own aesthetic is much more grungy, decayed and broken, but boy I took that show’s philosophy on board. We didn’t have drugs – there was no pot – so The Prisoner was my drug, and I became totally addicted.

Has it been cathartic writing this book, and is it your final word on the subject? 

I think it’s the best thing I’ve written in terms of books and I definitely can now let it go. All the information poured out of my head onto the printed page and now I can forget it, I can erase that drive! Already I’m starting to forget some of the detail because more information is coming in and my brain is dumping what it doesn’t need.

Thanks for talking to us Alex. Be seeing you!

 

 

With thanks to Frances Teehan at Oldcastle Books for arranging this interview.