#WTW: The Prisoner

(#WhatThomWatched Number Fifteen....)

The Prisoner

(1967-1968, Don Chaffey/Pat Jackson/Patrick McGoohan/David Tomblin; A&E Home Video disc set)

This singular television program ran on BBC competitor channel ITV (the “I” is for “independent”) for 17 episodes. It set a bar for how challenging a show can be that has rarely been passed since. It’s not fully successful, but it’s never less than provocative and far-reaching. Unlike most television, it is the creative vision of a single person — Patrick McGoohan, its creator and star, author or co-author of some episodes, credited or uncredited director of others. Some of the episodes still rank with the finest television shows ever broadcast; some fail now only because their tricks or themes have been copied so many times since then; and still others fail because they represent such a huge conceptual reach that audiences then (and still now) can’t find its wavelength. But it’s always, at any point, thoroughly entertaining.

The Prisoner has a simple conceit: In the opening credits (with no audible dialogue, over a driving theme from Ron Grainer, also the composer of the iconic Doctor Who theme), the protagonist steers his mod convertible into a London parking garage, storms into a secure office with a letter of resignation, and causes a desk-pounding, teacup-spilling scene. He then speeds home with the proverbial smile-playing-about-his-lips, too focused on his upcoming island vacation to note the black hearse and top-hatted men following him. After being gassed and abducted, he wakes up in a posh apartment to discover that, along with hundreds of other (presumably) former spies and intelligence assets of unspecified nations and political orientations, he is a prisoner of the Village. This is apparently some sort of organized retirement for folks who served god-and-country and are too dangerous (or are too tempting as targets) to live freely, but our man chafes at the forced anonymity — each resident is known only by an assigned code number — and at the authority figures’ one repeated question for him: Why did he decide to resign? Now known only as Number Six, he explores the comfortable confines of the genteel (and escape-resistant) Village while being subjected to a series of complex mind games designed to wrest the answer from him, unsure at any moment who he can trust but always bedeviled by his lead jailor/torturer/inquisitor, Number Two. It’s a nigh-perfect hook for an episodic show, although its creators were wise to limit it to 17 installments — the hero can stay ahead of the captors, but he still has to lose every week — he cannot escape.

Over this premise McGoohan and co-creators George Markstein and David Tomblin layered an almost absurd (and often absurdist) amount of surrealistic detail, often choosing the boldest and least-expected visual over a more conventional one even at the expense of the narrative. This includes Village residents in incongruous costumes essaying incongruous leisure activities, a silent cadre of efficient henchmen-and-women who appear to arrange things behind the scenes, surveillance footage viewable by the leadership which can include any location and shots from improbable camera angles, a bevy of mysterious instrument panels and sinister contraptions, endless syringes and shots forcibly given which convey any magical outcome (up to and including switching two persons’ selves into the other bodies), and so on.

And typical to the show’s tone, lead antagonist Number Two is played by a different actor each week; as time goes on it becomes clear that each leader’s failure to break Number Six is resulting in them being replaced by some impenetrable management structure (Number One, possibly?), but for the first several episodes this is just another in a pile-up of disorienting detail which keeps us just as confused as Six. 

It's a feast, visually, and one that continually rewards careful watching. Signs and posters in the background feature Orwellian slogans, all rendered in the Victorian font used throughout the Village. Costumes are opulent and colorful and often dress residents in contrast to their actual functions. And many scenes are blocked and framed to emphasize confusion, mysterious purpose, and layers of reality; the shot below, taken from the key location of Number Two's control room, is a good example of this: facilitated communication via multiple devices; machinery with mysterious purpose, often (as here) outscaling its human operators; and reality interacting with mitigated reality on giant screens:

Watching the documentary that comes with the A&E 40th anniversary disc set (Don’t Knock Yourself Out, from 1997), it’s clear that not everyone associated with the show is on the same page about McGoohan (who does not participate). The series is indelible because of where it goes in the last several episodes, which were completely taken over by McGoohan; some of his colleagues think he was a genius who knew exactly what he was doing, and others speculate that he deliberately took the series off the rails because he was stuck — but there’s no doubt that what he did is unique, compelling, and an honest attempt to say something (and be) different. The last two episodes are still bracing and unexpected when viewed today. The Prisoner was clearly highly influential in many ways, and yet the ending doesn’t resemble anything else on television then or now — it’s closer to a highly intellectualized theater piece.

Reminds me of:

Stylish British 1960’s secret-agent shows, at least at first — obviously I’m reminded of my childhood public television discovery of The Avengers and all those kinky John Steed and Emma Peel costumes (even the Catherine Gale years had an indelible impact on impressionable minds). Those shows were flashier and less ideological but they still seemed to push the limits of television. 

That’s superficial, though: It’s more interesting to consider which other dramatic series have been so much a product of an auteur with a singular vision. David Lynch’s 1990-1991 run of Twin Peaks not only held a similar cachet but was also very peculiar (almost beyond reason) and also let down a large percentage of its fan base when it could not bring all of its story threads and themes to a satisfyingly neat conclusion. The last few episodes of Prisoner at least manage to say exactly what its auteur McGoohan wanted to say: some of the passages are nonsensical, but others have undeniable power, with imagery as fine as any the series has to offer — and all of them would be unthinkable as a conventional product of television-by-committee.

When The Prisoner was originally airing in Britain, it would inevitably have played on the public’s fervor for and familiarity with the previous Danger Man series, in which McGoohan played secret agent John Drake. McGoohan can certainly play other roles and could have created a distinct agent character, but instead he seems to be deliberately and cannily connecting his previous project to this one. Many actors from Danger Man show up again here; the deeply researched Danger Man fansite identifies fifty-six such crossovers, though in no case can an actor be definitively said to be playing the same character in each show. Of course that didn’t stop the theorist-fans from finding connections that “prove” Danger Man’s John Drake is Number Six — after all, any former colleagues or opponents that Drake might have known would be similarly under alias or assigned a number in the Village of The Prisoner. Even without considering the earlier show, the heavy reuse of actors and very few recurring roles (with just a couple of exceptions) adds to the sense of disorientation.

But then — the guilt!

I’d never seen Danger Man and my experience of watching The Prisoner really made me fall for McGoohan. I’m now eager to see it and fortunately for me Shout! Factory did a new DVD set a few months ago which includes all of the earlier shows — literally, two different but tightly related British series (39 half-hour episodes between 1960-1962 and then 47 hour-long episodes in a revamped format from 1964-1967; confusingly called Secret Agent in their U.S. runs). I understand that it’s frothier and more conventional, but even the possibility that his character John Drake is destined to become Number Six makes me want to see it. Though note: At 17 discs, it’ll be a while before the #WTW comes out.

I’d also like to start seeking out some of McGoohan’s film performances. Silver Streak (where he plays the big bad) was one of my favorite films as a kid, but I don’t remember him over the Pryor and Wilder shenanigans. I also noticed the other day that The Quare Fellow, one of those items in my Netflix streaming queue which appeared there at some point in the past (so long ago that I can’t remember why — I’m sure you have yours too) is a starring role for McGoohan from 1962 — I will bump it just a smidge upward in my eventual inevitability index. (And yes, I realize he’s in Scanners. Which has a new Criterion edition, spine #712.)

Pitch:

It takes a bit to warm up to McGoohan here — he’s prickly, self-righteous and uncompromising. But you can’t take your eyes off him. Give him an episode and a half and you’ll be hooked. The middle eight or so stand with the best television episodes in existence, and even with the problems that start to crop up, you’ll want to stay tuned through the sometimes bitter end.

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#WTW: Do Not Adjust Your Set

(Hoorah, it's an even #WhatThomWatched dozen . . .)

Do Not Adjust Your Set

(1967-1969, Daphne Shadwell; Tango Entertainment disc set)

Monty Python fanatics know the origin story well (not to mention the exact dialogue from 515 separate sketches in the canonical series): among several other writing and acting gigs on British television, the six young Pythons had almost-assembled into two predecessor shows in the years immediately before the Flying Circus — John Cleese and Graham Chapman were part of the ensemble on At Last the 1948 Show, while Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin (and Terry Gilliam as writer/animator) were on Do Not Adjust Your Set along with fellow comedians Denise Coffey and David Jason. As these series ended, networks offered slots for new shows to these two pre-Python groups separately, and the Cleese/Chapman BBC project called Palin away from the ITV project to join them, who in turn brought the other three Pythons along. From a rich set of 1960’s performers, all working under the influence of the stage show Beyond the Fringe, this single show and these six comedians became the representatives for the whole of innovative British comedy for Americans (and, even then, only the ones who watched public television in the early 1970’s. In fact, American public television is largely responsible for Americans’ exposure to 1970’s British television culture, including Python, Doctor Who, The Two Ronnies, Are You Being Served, and (later) All Creatures Great and Small.)

But few of those fanatics have actually seen these origin shows, and with good reason: as with so much of television history, the original videotapes and/or kinescopes of shows from that era were routinely wiped and reused or destroyed. In the case of Do Not Adjust Your Set, that meant that all the bits were wiped from two series of 13 episodes each, plus three specials — except for the nine episodes from series 1 which were subsequently found to have survived on kinescope (series 1; episodes 1 and 2, 5 and 6, and 9 through 13, to be precise). Their sound and picture quality is, of course, abysmal. But as historical artifacts for comedy archaeologists, they are significant. And not just for their connection to Python: Do Not Adjust was also the showcase for a very important musical comedy predecessor, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, also known as the Bonzo Dog Band. These young men had started as college friends doing a post-modern riff on traditional jazz, both reproducing comic music hall standards from the 1920’s and also creating musical riffs on modern art concepts; by 1967 they’d already made a splash with several recordings and appearances on other television shows (including the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour). They were asked to become a kind of house band for Do Not Adjust, generally performing a number for each episode as well as appearing as utility actors in the sketches. Members of the group, particularly singer/songwriter Neil Innes, continued to have a heavy influence on Monty Python; most notably, Innes appears as the Minstrel to Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For people who remain fans of the Bonzos — and there are many — the true significance of the extant Do Not Adjust episodes is that they contain some of the only surviving performance footage of the band, in a very early pre-music-video kind of style.

But back to the sketch comedy: The show takes a traditional form of disconnected scenes with varied tempos ranging from very short, one-line “blackout sketches,” through longer two-person joke-punchline setups, to a couple of still longer multi-person sketches per episode. There’s also the aforementioned musical number in the form of a faux-live performance enhanced with silly business and costumes, and finally a single pre-filmed piece aping an old-fashioned silent serial about the adventures of a superhero (called “Captain Fantastic.”) The overall format is familiar from many other British and American “variety shows”; the only element missing is a host/live audience introductory piece (a staple of programs like The Carol Burnett Show but still extant today in a program like Comedy Central’s Key & Peele). As fun as any particular bit might be, the whole thing is completely standard — there’s barely a hint of the innovations then brewing in other shows which would culminate in Python’s free-association approach to linking sketches together into a whole. (There does seem to be a bit of this spirit in the very last sketch of the 13th show, which marks the end of series 1; the episode has a linking theme in which the entire cast plus the Bonzos is gathered in the television studio to bring the show to a close, devolving into an anarchic melee which ends with the studio being destroyed.) Along the way there are some quite good sketches and jokes, including one or two that seem like early drafts of Python material — but many are tedious and dated. David Jason is often the bright spot on the show; Denise Coffey is wonderful but is also often used as the stooge — the focus of mockery and abuse from the four men — which quickly sours for a modern viewer. She fares much better as the evil villainess in the “Captain Fantastic” pieces — and these were much-loved by the original audience, enough so that the BBC considered spinning it off as its own show — but these serial sketches now seem to be almost completely formless, as if they weren’t scripted but just improvised for the camera. Which is likely true — the other three pre-Pythons are the credited head writers for every episode, and the “Captain Fantastic” sequences were designed specifically to allow Coffey and Jason to produce a segment each week while the others had time to themselves in the writers’ room.

So in summary: The sketches are serviceable. A good example of a visual-pun sketch: A man is being carried in an old-timey carriage by four uniformed bearers; one man trips and hurts himself; the rider gets down out of the carriage, opens the carriage’s boot (trunk for us Yanks), takes out a fifth uniformed man, and “changes the flat” to swap the new bearer in. An example of a longer-form sketch is a secret-hideout meeting of five baddies planning a bank job, with one as a very obvious undercover policeman who can help but act like a policeman and arouse the suspicions of the others . . . . who in the punch line turn out to all be undercover policemen. Some of this is good; none of it is particularly surprising today. (That is in stark contrast to the 45 original Monty Python’s Flying Circus episodes from 1969-1974, which still shock and startle with their barely-followable logical leaps when viewed today.)

The real treasures here are the Bonzo Dog Band performances. These songs have the funny themes, crazy logic and random-seeming staging that would go on to inspire Python. But here there’s a different problem, and one that’s difficult to get past today: In the second episode, performing their album cut “Look Out, There’s a Monster Coming,” the Bonzos decided that the song’s comedy would be enhanced by blackface. The whole nine yards — white lips, wide eyes, fright wigs . . . . it’s almost impossible to watch (or at least not without being reminded of more recent tone-deaf incidents, such as “blackface parties” at fraternities). The bad taste and judgement on display ruin a great song. There’s a potentially mitigating factor specifically for Neil Innes; alone among the band, he is the only performer not in blackface, and he wears a look throughout the number that could be interpreted as disapproval. Further (possible) evidence: a few episodes later, during “Hunting Tigers (Out in India),” the Bonzos are dressed as English game-hunter types, except for one member who rides a tricycle through the number with a cardboard sign on his back reading “I Refuse To Dress Up This Week” — a possible internal band dig at Innes. But apart from the one terrible choice, the songs are wonderful and by far the loosest part of the show. They also most clearly belie the supposed “kids show” setup; adults certainly tuned in from the beginning, and the Bonzos seem to represent both the most puerile and most intellectual sides of the show.

Reminds me of:

I’m a long-time fan of the Bonzo Dog Band, discovering them through the post-Python Eric Idle and Neil Innes Beatles parody band The Rutles and the Lorne Michaels-produced 1978 fake Rutles documentary All You Need is Cash. After finding a Rhino Records CD re-release of The Rutles and then their Best of the Bonzo Dog Band, both in 1990, I became well-nigh obsessed with the 24 Bonzo tracks on that disc. (The 3-disc set Cornology came later, containing every Bonzo and Bonzo-side-project track recorded to that point, but it’s the 24 Best of tracks that I know backwards and forwards). It’s an amazing experience to see them semi-live and in action. I know this awe is not going to translate to most viewers, and especially folks who expect some polish in their musical production; I have a perverse love of the polar opposite: unpolished music, not to mention a thing for “modern art” analogue approaches to rock music, a la The Flying Lizards or Andy Warhol-sponsored Velvet Underground. The Bonzo’s “The Bride Stripped Bare (By ‘Bachelors’)” (from their 1969 album Keynsham), a musical analog to the similarly-titled Marcel Duchamp artwork (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), is, to me, an amazing thing. The Bonzos seem so careless and yet so self-assured in everything they do, which is something that I find very appealing in any art. (I really must note here that while I feel about 1% qualified to be writing about movies and television, I feel even less so about music. Moving on . . . .)

I just recently watched the hour-plus “work print” of Orson Welles’s abandoned film-theater-combo project from 1938, Too Much Johnson (it’s curated online by the National Film Preservation Foundation, but here’s a version that includes a live recorded backing soundtrack from an October 2014 film festival in Istanbul). From Welles’s few pre-cinema years as the Great White Hope of Broadway, this project was intended to be a mash-up stage performance of William Gillette’s 1890’s farce with each act bookended by projections of filmed scenes in the style of silent slapstick comedy. (The actual performance never happened; when the old footage was discovered in 2008, it was restored and turned into both a 30-minute short and a 65-minute full print, which started a festival run in 2013.) Where’s the Reminds me of connection? The Welles footage stars esteemed film actor Joseph Cotten, and it’s certainly interesting to see him as a young man simulating a then-relatively-recent style of film comedy. But in both Cotten’s case and in the case of David Jason as “Captain Fantastic,” the actors are clearly just imitating the slapstick stars from the 1920’s, most notably Buster Keaton; they cannot match the athleticism or technique of the real thing. This is most obvious in extended “Captain Fantastic”/Too Much Johnson sequences where our heroes totter around on rooftops; in each case, as the actor pretends to come close to falling, it really feels like an amateur (and slowly paced) version of Keaton and his cohorts. Actual silent comedies are some of the tightest-scripted films to be found; Keaton controls every second of his gags, a far cry from the meandering imitations. (As a long-time owner of Kino’s Art of Buster Keaton box set, with all of the 30 Keaton films from that decade, I’ll be getting back to him in detail at some point here at #WTW.)

But then — the guilt!

I’ve also got the other Python antecedent released by Tango Entertainment, the surviving episodes of At Last the 1948 Show, and I’ll watch it at some point soon. But that’s nothing, nothing, a drop in the bucket, a grain of sand on the beach, a teensy cliché in a much bigger cliché of great British television comedy, the vast majority of which I’ll never get to watch. I won’t turn this into a big slush list of titles because that’s easy enough to find somewhere online, but most of these great predecessor shows only exist in the memories of a few aging Brits. Not Only But Also. That Was the Week That Was. To the degree these things turn up, I’ll try to grab them.

That said, my watch ratio picks up starting in the early 1980’s. I’m about due to re-watch my complete set of The Young Ones, for instance. (And in honor of the recently deceased Rik Mayall, I should do that soon. Oi, now I’m feeling guilty again.)

Pitch:

I’m not sure these discs will be of interest to any but the most determined fans, but of the skits and songs here I’m most fond of the Bonzo’s music-hall-throwback “Hello Mabel.” (“Look Out, There’s a Monster Coming” might have bested it if not for the horrid get-ups. Boo!)

*Note: In an effort to goad The Internet into finally commenting on my blog, I have carefully made at least two factual errors about British television in the article above.

If you can spot one or more of them — and comment in detail on the whatthomwatched.blogspot.com page — you will win absolutely nothing but my love and respect.

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