Was meditating on the enduring power of The Prisoner TV series for Matthew Sweet who wrote a rather excellent piece about its 50th anniversary. If you’ve read it you know I came up with a thesis that it has more in common with Anglo Saxon poetry than you might think. Here’s the full idea..
If the Anglo Saxon poets had had ATV budgets, I think they would have made something not dissimilar to The Prisoner.
The show is a meditation on the isolation of the soul and a physical version of the dream process that goes on in every mind. The Village is No 6’s anchorite cell. Sometimes his mind can journey afar, literally in the case of mind transplant to a different body. but mostly it must face temptation closer at home. But the show’s power is not in meaning, it’s about the processing of experiences and impressions and individual defiance against entrapment in a world of warring kings or sinister governments. Yes we can see plays on what was emerging in the news about brainwashing and Cold War prison camps. Where the Anglo Saxons used the possibilities of oral recitation, The Prisoner uses the huge technicolour budgets of mainstream commercial television to create luxurious art experiments that dabble in elements of counter culture.
The Prisoner’s power is in its world’s dream like self containment and refusal to follow logic; like the mid 60s colour England of deserted sinister country lanes populated by strange devils in the costumes of everyday authority figures, like nannies, in The Avengers with Diana Rigg. It is the sense of a sealed dream world that gives it power.
The lack of sexual relationships strengthens the purity of the meditation and gives The Prisoner a focus on puzzle-solving and survival. It’s a Conradian world of loners. The Anglo Saxons tried to use Christ to counterbalance the hardships of their world, The Prisoner had Patrick McGoohan’s arrogance and a budget to dabble in beautiful grooviness to counterbalance the chaos of the 1960s. The ideas are embodied in the single best episode The Schizoid Man.
