A Son of the Rock

– the actor, has died. So it goes.

He was best known for The Prisoner, a deeply surreal TV series which McGoohan was instrumental in bringing about. I didn’t see the first showing in the 60s but caught up with it on a late-night repeat during my first year at University.

Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Elliss’s fantasy village, was a perfect setting for this tale of paranoia and imprisonment, harking back to Orwell’s 1984 and, in a way, forward to TV’s Big Brother today, cleverly adumbrating the suspicion of authority which is now widespread and the way in which (some of) the masses can be kept quiet by diversionary entertainment.

In the programmes McGoohan resigns his (secret service?) job but is drugged, kidnapped and wakes up in “The Village” as Number Six. All together now, “I am not a number. I am a free man.” In each of 16 episodes he tries to escape. He always fails – or is brought back.

While having the trappings of a thriller or spy type story there was more than a hint of Science Fiction in the treatment, not so much Portmeirion itself, though that is a surrealist’s dream, as the famous bouncing white balloon guards and the behind-the-scenes activities of Number Two and his minions. (What was that seesaw thingy with the cameras at either end all about? We already knew the village’s inhabitants were under surveillance.)

I did think the 17th, final, episode – which was apparently made up on the hoof – was a bit bonkers, though. “Them Bones” sung chorally as a background to a kind of trial of Number Two? Eh?

I saw an episode a few months ago and it was striking how 1960s it looked. But the premise behind it held up well.

The whole thing would never see the light of day now. Schedulers would run kicking and screaming at the thought.

I never really watched McGoohan’s earlier success, Danger Man, – but remember him playing the Earl of Moray, Lord James Stewart – Mary Queen of Scots’s illegitimate half brother – with a fine display of impatience towards his feckless sister. McGoohan also made a marvellous Edward Longshanks in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

Patrick McGoohan 1928-2009.

Be seeing you.