Rebels and Devils Part 1: Be Seeing You

When I was a mere stripling amongst Ghosts, my mother would sit and read to me.  Her choices were slightly unusual; there was a lot of Heinlein, happily, before he went all fascist on us.  Some Andre Norton.  Diana Wynne Jones, the only author to have told me that I couldn't blame my madness on her, thank you very much.

 I love DWJ.  We only spoke once, by email, a memory that I will treasure forever.  However, I digress. 

Mother also used to read me Enid Blyton, 'cause, y'know, I was about five and there's only so many scientific discussions on ballistic theory a five year old can deal with.  In the front of the books, there was a little map of Toytown and it made my mother smile; she said it reminded her of 'The Village' and left it at that, to my puzzlement.

Years went by, and I suddenly found that you could buy VHS tapes of old TV shows; one jumped out at me and the cover made such an impression that I asked for it as a birthday present without even ever having seen a minute of the series.  It was, of course, The Prisoner.

This is the best scene in anything, ever.  Prove me wrong.

Millions of words have been spent dissecting The Prisoner and I'm not sure that I can add anything to what has already been said.  For those unfamiliar still: unknown man resigns unknown job and suddenly awakens in a toyland style village by the sea.  No-one has a name.  You can live happily, you might even be allowed to leave, if you want.  The only thing the authorities there want is...well, a simple thing.  You have to prove that you like them.  You have to tell them something.  No matter if it's the biggest, most personal secret of your life, you have to tell them, have to prove you love the Village.  If you don't...well, it's a nice place to live.  And you might live for years.

So it starts.  Ah, Patrick McGoohan!  He created the show, the character, wrote and directed several episodes and was clearly having a great time, in a demented, stressed out, psychedelic way.  McGoohan was massive in those days.  He kept turning down the part of James Bond because he found the violence and the womanising misogyny morally repugnant.  The audience went mad for the show because it refused to give answers straight away.  We all know that TV gives us answers eventually, right?

If you're wondering what's happening in this picture, a killer balloon has rendered a great British actor unconscious.

The events at the end of the show, both on and off camera have been exhaustively chronicled, and you don't need me to break it all down for you or go over old ground.  Suffice to say that no easy answers were ever forthcoming, that realism was no-longer required and that the last thirty minutes of the series are the most deranged thing ever to go out at prime time on ITV.  McGoohan effectively killed his career in that final episode; certainly, he killed the myth of the ultra-cool secret agent so well that I'm not sure how they carried on making Bond films afterwards.  Even the end credits seem to be trying to tell us something, something that remains both ambiguous and haunted with levels of meaning to this day.

But this is a personal exploration.  What did the Prisoner mean to me?  By which I mean the character, not the show as such.

Intense gaze.  I tried for ages to get this right.

I was fifteen years old.  I hated my school.  I hated the inexplicable regulations, both those passed down from above and the equally arbitrary ones enforced by my peers.  I hated the fashion, the buildings, the lessons which were dull and working to some random educational agenda lost to history.  I hated that some staff and pupils used sexuality and ethnicity as a weapon against each other.  I hated that the kids who should have been cool were filled with a vicious inverted snobbery that killed all joy in music and art stone dead.  I needed a way out.

I needed escape.  So, ironically enough, I started dressing like the Prisoner. Started imitating his intense, sardonic manner, his purposeful stride, his occasional manic grin.  His declaimed, largely random statements. In short, I wrote myself into the storyline, as a fellow detainee, unable to break the boundaries of a malicious and invisible bureaucracy.

Triangle/square/binary opposition.  It makes sense when you - well, no it doesn't actually.

Except I did.  Somehow, I managed what the Prisoner doesn't seem to; I escaped.  Left the Village.  Made my point.  But, and here's the rub; the worst thing about the Village is that you carry it with you. You build the bars in your head and by the time you escape the physical imprisonment, you've constructed a beautifully elaborate trap inside your own mind, a much more perfected cage than anything that a dodgy late 80s comprehensive school could devise.

It's taken me years to deconstruct that prison.


Queen: Do you think they'll ever release us? 
Prisoner: Let me know. I shan't be around.



There's a little monument to McGoohan in the pavement outside Sheffield Town Hall.  I don't ever walk past it without a smile of acknowledgement.  Ironic that I learned something about my rights by studying the behaviour of my fellow Prisoners.