Now, if someone were to spray stun gas through the keyhole of my front door, and I were to collapse on my sofa only to regain consciousness in a slightly kitsch 1960s serviced apartment, outside which lay an exquisite Italianate village, a stretch of sparkling coast, a startlingly cheery populace all speaking in RP accents and social order maintained by means of a gigantic white plastic ball bubbling out of the sea… well, to be frank, I’d be thrilled.
Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six, on the other hand, is seething about it from the start; and the film director Alex Cox, who sat watching The Prisoner as a 13-year-old in 1967, does a terrific job of giving a fresh interpretation to what must be the world’s most analysed television series.
Although Number Six, kidnapped and taken to the enigmatic Village, always insisted that he was not a number but a free man, he never got round actually to vouchsafing his name. And what really was this psychic conflict between him and an ever-changing array of authority figures going under the title of Number 2? Over the run of 17 episodes, the series teased and tantalised with clues about the Cold War, about the perversion of science, the boundaries and permeability of personal identity and the illusions that could be bred by both totalitarianism and liberty. There were way-out sci-fi sets, all plastic and purple lighting, set against the sumptuous background location of Portmeirion in north Wales.
Every week Number Six would face a new adversary — these figures were played by an array of the finest character actors, including Patrick Cargill, Mary Morris and George Baker. And each episode would end — after various twists, turns, action sequences, outbursts of surrealism and seeming escapes — with Number Six still trapped within the Village.
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