UNIQUE BUT SIMILAR: THE PRISONER COMPARED review

FALL OUT 

Andrew K. Shenton’s new book is a delightfully written and well-researched study of how The Prisoner impacted on television fantasy.

There’s been an awful lot written about The Prisoner, actor/writer/producer/director Patrick McGoohan’s rage against modern society and one of my favourite TV shows. I still remember the road to Damascus moment when I first saw it, alone one night in 1983, as part of the Best of British ITV season shown during that year’s Olympics. It was as significant a moment for me as seeing the Sex Pistols’ video of ‘Pretty Vacant’ on Top of the Pops a few years before. To a large extent, that first viewing influenced my wish to become a writer.

For something that only ran for 17 episodes over a few months in the late 1960s, a glance at my bookshelf reveals 14 books on The Prisoner, not counting the 3 I’ve written, as well as the 17 issue magazine collection I co-edited and contributed to with Marcus Hearn. For a series that has been so exhaustively covered, Andrew K. Shenton’s book is a pleasant surprise. Unique But Similar: The Prisoner Compared suggests a simple comparison with other TV series, but it’s more than that. It looks at The Prisoner in relation to the development of the televised fantasy fiction genre as a whole, from the time the series was first transmitted in 1967 up until its network repeat by Channel 4 in the early 1980s.

After an overview of Prisoner related literature and a definition of the series’ main themes, Shenton carries out in an analytical and very readable way a study of other shows. As the book’s title says, he looks at similarities with McGoohan’s series in the overall context of how fantasy fiction was influenced by cultural developments from the 1960s onwards. This is something I’ve always been keen on in my own writing, and Shenton not only knows his source material inside out, but has an enviable knowledge of TV fantasy in general.

For instance, I had completely missed the common ground that The Prisoner shares with the Doctor Who story ‘The Faceless Ones’, shown in the same year. (To be fair, Shelton does notably miss the very obvious similarities with the same series’ story ‘The Macra Terror’, also shown in the 1967, in which the Doctor and friends expose the oppressive forces behind a holiday camp-type Earth colony, complete with parades, slogans, chirpy radio jingles and a corrective hospital).

I’d never heard of the Look and Read schools drama Cloud Burst and Shelton’s appraisal is so good that I really want to see it now. He also highlights intriguing parallels with Gerry Anderson’s paranoid alien invaders drama UFO. Apart from the latter psychedelic episodes produced by The Prisoner’s David Tomblin, he pinpoints the unsympathetic characteristics of both the series’ Commander Straker (Ed Bishop) and McGoohan’s character, as well as common issues of mind control, state secrecy and the influence of the Cold War. His look at Terry Nation’s space opera Blake’s 7 is also enlightening, with both series’ pessimistic view of humanity and apocalyptic final episodes put under the spotlight.

Personally, I’d like to have seen pieces on the films The Wicker Man and Welcome to Blood City, both of which owe an awful lot to The Prisoner, but that’s my only real criticism. Unique But Similar: The Prisoner Compared is an excellent book that breaks new ground in the study of one of the most remarkable TV series ever made.

And I very much look forward to whatever Mr Shenton comes up with next.

The book retails at a very reasonable £8.99 and can be purchased here: www.indepenpress.co.uk

BFI Southbank: Patrick McGoohan

THE OUTSIDER
The BFI's August season on maverick talent Patrick McGoohan is well worth a visit, as it shows there was much more to the man than giant balloons and penny-farthings.

McGoohan as Brand (Image: BBC)

The BFI’s careful selection of McGoohan's films and TV programmes shows how he built a career to the point where, by 1966, he had enough influence with one of the UK’s leading showbiz impresarios to get his pet project The Prisoner made. Funded to the tune of £75,000 an episode, McGoohan had absolutely no editorial constraints from the company financing him. Not only that, but he installed himself as executive producer, writer, director and star – a unique position in television production that’s still to be bettered. 

These highlights show how he got there:

Hell Drivers (1957)

McGoohan was contracted to the Rank film company in the 1950s and Hell Drivers is one of his best outings for them. He plays the bullying Red, the pace setter and foreman for a team of itinerant lorry drivers and his performance shows how well suited he was to slightly larger than life, confrontational figures. What’s also striking, and enjoyable, about this particular film is the ensemble cast. Virtually all the male actors in it when on to become famous in the 1960s – Sean Connery (James Bond), William Hartnell (Dr Who), Sid James (Carry On), Herbert Lom (Inspector Dreyfuss in The Pink Panther films) and David McCallum (The Man from UNCLE). Gordon Jackson’s time would come at the turn of the 1970s, when he was in charge of CI5 in The Professionals. Future star spotting aside, Hell Drivers is a gritty, tense and funny thriller in its own right. The dialogue still sounds contemporary and it’s easy to imagine the film being remade today.

Brand (1959)

Henrik Ibsen’s play about an uncompromising priest made McGoohan famous when it was staged at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. The World Theatre BBC version of the play uses most of the same cast from that production so it’s as close as we’re ever going to get to seeing McGoohan’s iconoclastic stage performance. He was perfect casting as a priest who demands ‘all or nothing’ from those around him, a high price that sees him lose his son, wife and eventually the trust of the villagers he tries to minister. It’s a huge, exhausting part of King Lear proportions, but McGoohan’s power in the role never flags, the fanatical gleam in his eyes totally convincing of the demeanour of a religious zealot. With the benefit of hindsight, from this it’s easy to see how perfect McGoohan was for outsider parts in conflict with the status quo, particularly when one character shouts ‘drive him out of the village!’ On the strength of this role alone, McGoohan really should have been playing Lear for the RSC in his autumnal years.

The Quare Fellow (1963)

An adaptation of Brendan Behan’s first play, about the evils of capital punishment, as practised at an unnamed prison in Dublin. By this time McGoohan had become a skilled film actor, and he was obviously cast for the ability to say a lot through looks alone, as his dialogue as Thomas Crimmin, the new prison officer, is minimal. Witnessing the build-up to an execution, including the antics of a drunken hangman and the distraught behaviour of the condemned man’s wife (Sylvia Sims), McGoohan communicates through remarkably subtle facial expressions the disgust, distress and righteous indignation of a man exposed to a barbaric system.

There are more gems still to come:

Danger Man The film TV series that made McGoohan an international star. Showing on Friday 16 are two examples of the series, ‘The Lonely Chair’ from the 1960 half-hour series and ‘A Date with Doris’ from the show’s hour-long, mid-1960s incarnation.

Ice Station Zebra McGoohan plays another secret agent in a stirring adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s 1968 Cold War thriller, directed by John Sturges. Showing in a new print, it’s worth watching to see McGoohan act Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgnine off the screen.

The Best of Friends A fine late entry in McGoohan’s TV career from 1991 has him playing George Bernard Shaw opposite John Gielgud as Sir Sydney Cockerell and Wendy Hiller as Dame Laurentia MacLachlan, three friends who enjoyed a 25-year correspondence.

Check the BFI website for full details: https://whatson.bfi.org.uk

Peter Capaldi is the Doctor

TWELFTH AMENDMENT

Peter Capaldi's casting as the new Dr Who will hopefully see a return to the principles of the series' golden age.

'Listen to me, you jug-eared, tin-plated, silver cluster c***!'
The 12th man, Peter Capaldi. (Image: BBC)

 











Yesterday afternoon I lay on the sofa watching a tall, beaky nosed, white haired man playing Doctor Who in ‘The Ambassadors of Death’. By 7.30 that evening, I knew that a tall, beaky nosed, white haired man would be playing Doctor Who again.

This is the only time it’s ever happened, but for once the papers were right in forecasting the actor set to take over, in this case veteran Scots actor and director Peter Capaldi. If only ten people knew, as the publicity statements claimed, then somebody had obviously blabbed and presumably made a fortune. I wish I’d had the money to make a bet as I’d now be heading for the Bahamas.

BBC1’s Dr Who Live – The Next Doctor was a bit of a rum beast. This was another first, as a drama series was presented in the context of a format that closely resembled The Voice or The X Factor. I couldn’t help thinking that having the new Doctor walk out to a reception of strobing lasers, symphonic music and cheering fans would have been a bit of a gamble if – and no disrespect to him as he’s a very good actor  – Daniel Rigby had walked out instead. The BBC must have been pretty certain that Capaldi’s casting would have the desired effect.

And he’s a brilliant choice. For all the people who’ve knocked Executive Producer Steven Moffat over the last few years, he’s been brave enough to cast someone in their mid 50s; in fact, Capaldi is the same age as William Hartnell when Doctor Who started in 1963. In this anniversary year, there’s a pleasing symmetry in giving the role back to an actor of senior years and silver hair.

Casting someone older immediately changes the dynamics of the series. Gone will be the tedious flirting between the Doctor and companion – if it isn’t, it’ll look very inappropriate – and perhaps we’ll be back to a trio in the TARDIS with the addition of a younger male lead, akin to Ian Chesterton or Jamie McCrimmon, who's not surplus to requirements as the criminally wasted Arthur Darvill’s Rory was.

As a long term fan, it’s also brilliant to have an actor playing the Doctor who’s older than me again. That hasn’t happened since Paul McGann briefly took the controls of the TARDIS in 1996. Suddenly we’re all children again.

And was it just me, or were there a couple of clips from Troughton stories in Dr Who Live that I’d never seen before?

Maybe in this anniversary year, all our dreams can come true.

THE SEEDS OF DOOM

THE TROUBLE WITH KRYNOIDS

Of course, the finale to Tom Baker’s second year as Dr Who is brilliant. But why exactly, when it’s unashamedly derivative and got a plot you could write on a Post-It note?

Mr Chase and his beautiful plants. (Image: BBC)

‘You know, Doctor, I could play all day in my green cathedral.’

A man turns into an alien in Antarctica, gets blown up, then a man turns into an alien in England and gets blown up. ‘Timelash’ has got more imaginative story development. So has ‘Time and the Rani’. So why does ‘The Seeds of Doom’ have such an unassailable reputation, particularly when Tom Baker himself hated the script?

Watching it again last night, I was struck that, like ‘Terror of the Zygons’ which was made by the same team of writer Robert Banks Stewart and director Douglas Camfield, ‘The Seeds of Doom’ is a triumph of execution over content. In both his scripts, Banks Stewart has clearly set out to put the kids firmly back behind the sofa and with a director as visceral as Camfield in control, he succeeds in this aim admirably. The horrific imagery is partly why ‘Seeds’ is such a success: graphic strangulation in a dark corridor, Sarah (Elisabeth Sladen) tied up near a bomb counting down to zero, the twitchy Keeler (Mark Jones) lashed to a bed and being slowly absorbed by his Krynoid infection, Sarah and company being attacked by plants as Harrison Chase (the magnificent Tony Beckley) sits cross-legged watching… not forgetting Chase’s compost-come-bone grinder. 

'Alright, Chase. YOU'RE NICKED!'
(Image: BBC)

Every one of the supporting cast has decent dialogue and believable character development too. Scorby (John Challis – yes, Boycie from Only Fools and Horses), a mercenary – these soldiers of fortune were in the news a lot in the 1970s – can’t trust anyone and in the end cracks up because of it. Keeler is a weak man out of his depth with violent men like Scorby and pays the price for taking Chase’s money, as does the greedy but ultimately honourable Dunbar (Kenneth Gilbert). Hargreaves (Seymour Green), Chase’s silver haired butler, stays loyal to his employer amid the spiralling chaos and dies as a result of his commitment.

I’ll stick my neck out and say that ‘The Seeds of Doom’ isn’t really a Doctor Who story at all. Unlike ‘The Mind of Evil’, which riffs on everything from A Clockwork Orange to OO7’s nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the story’s influences aren’t at one with Doctor Who’s style. The Doctor is suddenly bad tempered and starts crashing through windows and beating up villains like a cross between The Sweeney’s Jack Regan and The Avengers’ John Steed. The latter series is an overwhelming influence: in its first Diana Rigg season, the story ‘Man-Eater of Surrey Green’ featured a carnivorous alien plant being cultivated on a country house estate, while the eccentric Amelia Ducat (Sylvia Coleridge), man from the ministry Sir Colin Thackeray (Michael Barrington) and army support Major Beresford (John Acheson) are all archetypes straight out of The Avengers. The story even ends with a comedy sketch like the filmed episodes used to. At least the Doctor and Sarah aren’t shown chasing a runaway milk float.

Producer Philip Hinchcliffe was famously so concerned about the level of horror in a scene in ‘The Ark in Space (his first story) that he cut it. Two years on, he seems to have decided that the audience will now accept realistic violence and extremely adult scenes of people being crushed to death in a mechanical grinder – Chase’s dying scream is memorably horrible. Or maybe it’s Douglas Camfield’s influence. For such a cultured man, the director was keen to push the boundaries of what was acceptable on television. He was removed from The Sweeney’s pilot ‘Regan’ for wanting to rewrite the script to include a rape scene and would work with Hinchcliffe again on Target, the BBC’s answer to the ITV Flying Squad. On that series, Camfield would finally go too far, with the Sam Peckinpah-style machine gunning of a young girl and boiling water poured over a naked woman. Even though the 1970s was a very liberal time for television, Target was cancelled because of the complaints about its violence.

So, ‘The Seeds of Doom’ is great, but for an odd mixture of contradictory reasons. These days, more and more I find myself rewatching the Graham Williams produced stories starring Tom Baker. The production values and acting might not be as consistent as that of the Hinchcliffe years, but on the whole the scripts are far more imaginative and original and, it has to be said, Tom looks a lot happier with the emphasis on wit and word play.

Then again, I know I’ll be back in my green cathedral before too long.