I could talk about the prisoner all day and listen to someone else talking about it all day.

“Protect Other People” in … oh i see someone’s already posted this. Man, Mitch- these are great! The Prisoner was a Summer replacement for The Smothers Brothers here in the States. I was familiar with his work on Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and first saw The Prisoner when I was 10 in 1967. Went to a PortmeriCon in 2003 and met Vincent Tinsley. When I arrived I met this guy Ian running cables for tannoys near No. 6’s place and volunteered to help. Ian had the run of the place and he took me up the bell tower. It was unbelievable.

There was the behind-the-scenes making of / lore The Prisoner (and later Danger Man) magazine series that had a DVD on the cover of the episode that particular issue was about. (One of an absolute glut of similar mags around 1999 or so). In it, it stated that POP was intended to be short for 'Protect Other People'.

POP: Protect Other People. This is brought out in 'Once Upon a Time'. In the series there are times when No. 6 acts to protect an innocent person.

Hi Mitch, thanks for this fun video and sending me time traveling back to 1967 my good lady and self married in August 67 and we lived with Sue's parents. I inflicted the Prisoner show on my poor father-in-law that fall. He henceforth referred to any strange tv show as "one of those Bennett shows". We all moved to Canada in the seventies but Sue and I managed to finally get to Portmeirion in 2019 an absolutely fascinating place. So as I now watch my DVD's I can gloat and say I've walked the village :o)

I thought the Village was like an Esher drawing when it came to walking around it or in a taxi or ambulance and that the Village that Number 6 wakes up in each day may not be the Village he went to sleep in. . I think that the episode of the General was meant to be shown before A,B & C because Colin Gordon in the General says he's the new Number 2 while in A,B & C he says "I am Number Two" Now where did I leave my Deck Shoes and Anorak.

As someone who hugely enjoys you talking about stuff I know just a little about, this is just a treat! And who would dare to guess Youtoob algorithms, even the dart players who assembled them have no idea, they were blindfolded (but, on the whole, very _very_ good…) - but I digress… I always loved the way the Prisoner did not make sense throughout. To me, it seemed totally determined, McGoohan may have been a stuck-up Catholic but I thunk he also was trying to break molds and making some things contradict each other seems to me something that may have been totally on purpose. A bit like Gene Wilder as Wonka, losing his stick and falling - and then jumping up: unsettle everyone and make them doubt everything? Well, whichever way… Bless YT for giving you the chance to live out L’esprit d’escalier here, and bringing me joy! Thank you!

Interesting!

Nice thank you! 👍🙏

A lot of the Prisoner Village sets were recycled from MGM Borehamwood. They were mainly from the Donald Pleasence/David Niven/Sharon Tate/Deborah Kerr folk horror Eye of the Devil, then used in the Dirty Dozen, and the church is also in Casino Royale 67 (again, a film a lot of people compare to the Prisoner, and hey they use the same sets plus some cast IIRC). Also, I think they're also in Inspector Clouseau (1968). The irony is, if we like some nuts, include Ice Station Zebra cos McGoohan playsa mysterious British spy, that was shot in MGM CULVER CITY, which Borehamwood was effectively an annexe to, down to some fairly similar looking backlot sets (I believe when they did the Miniver Story in 1950 at Borehamwood, they had to reproduce sets from Culver City to add some continuity from Mrs Miniver). And that uses the MGM Culver 'Dutch village' to play somewhere like Dunoon or Sandbank, and it looks surprisingly convincing. But in my head, that's like an honorary Borehamwood film.

Any revamp would pointedly end with de-pop...

I first became aware of the Prisoner when the science fiction short story author Harlan Ellison did one of his weekly segments on the new sci-fi channel here in the States, he spoke so very glowingly of it that I knew I would have to seek it out and discovered that it was on the cable channel A&E. I watched the whole thing and then purchased the box set DVD's which I still have to this day. My favorite EP is one Ellison recommended himself "A.B.&.C", and a few years later when Ellison was a consultant on Babylon 5 the plotters at the end of the first season all do the "Be Seeing You" motion to each other to prove their loyalty. Simply a wonderful show and it has inspired much that I admire. Also, just watched the video haha, the actor Neal McDonough who played Lt Compton in band of brothers also has refused to do love scenes his whole career because of his religious beliefs but he's taken much more of the McGoohan approach to it and unlike cavezel you pretty much never here about it.

I'm generally inclined to believe that Number 6 was John Drake, and not confirmed as such for legal (royalty payment) reasons. I keep meaning to watch all of Danger Man then The Prisoner to see if there's some sense of continuation.

Wasn’t McGoohan also anti-firearms?

Did the song/nursery rhyme ''Pop Goes The Weasel'' not show up in at least one episode? As soon as you mentioned it that was what sprang to mind. It's been a while since I saw the series so I may be mistaken.

You know I still don't think ive seen every episode 😬