Ahead of our screening of the final Prisoner episode Fall Out at Leeds Town Hall next Friday, theCV caught up with ALEX COX to discuss I Am (Not) A Number: Decoding The Prisoner, his book on how Patrick McGoohan finally killed off Danger Man…
Film director Alex Cox is probably best known to a generation of UK film fans as the gangly custodian of BBC’s Moviedrome, a weekly excursion to cinema’s outer limits.
Before each screening, Cox would offer his 10 cents about the film you were about to see, a measured and unapologetically smartarse assessment delivered in the curiously flattened tones of an undertaker…
Cox has always been a movie literate film-maker himself, a fact evidenced by the tell-tale B-movie references, groovy soundtrack choices and pop cultural in-jokes of films such as Repo Man, Walker and Sid & Nancy.
Think Tarantino was there first? Guess again!
Now living on America’s West Coast, the director is a huge fan of sixties series The Prisoner, first watching it as a teenager when it aired on British television in 1967.
Last year he published a book about the experience, I Am (Not) A Number (Kamera Books), in which he put forward his ideas about the show and offered his own answers to its many questions.
the CV: Lew Grade’s ITC is such a key fixture of ITV’s entertainment scheduling. ITV4 is still showing The Champions and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), for example, but only The Prisoner seems to have attracted obsessive close scrutiny and such wildly partisan reactions. What do you think sets the series apart from its stablemates?
Alex Cox: It is far more original than those series. Most of these thriller shows were riffs on James Bond, solo or teamed with a beautiful woman. The Prisoner is completely original; watching the first episode you can believe Number 6 was a spy, but by episode 17 this seems distinctly unlikely. The series deals with issues which have become increasingly significant: the abuse of medical science and drugs as means of social control; mass surveillance; intelligence projects which are autonomous and could be run by either side…
theCV: The series clearly resonated with you when you first saw it as a teenager. It’s tempting to fashion a connection between The Prisoner’s allusive and ambiguous storytelling with your own work as a film-maker. How far would you describe seeing the show as an early awakening to the possibilities of television or film in this respect?
Alex Cox: The Prisoner is preparation for life! It encourages the viewer not to be an idle cabbage, but to rebel and defy the forces of authority, and to refuse to accept their propaganda. At the same time the show (demonstrates) how hard this is, as Number 6 sometimes more identifies with The Village and plays along with its experiments.
theCV: In your book, you propose a new reading of The Prisoner based on the order in which episodes were conceived and created. How did you arrive at this hypothesis? Would screening the episodes in this order have diminished the show’s impact by making more sense?
Alex Cox: No, I think watching them in the shooting order makes the experience more enjoyable. When they began shooting, nobody knew where the series was going, nor how many episodes there would be. As each episode was shot, and edited, the nature of The Prisoner became clearer – if not to George Markstein, the story editor, then certainly to its writer / director / producer / star, Patrick McGoohan. Some viewers might prefer to save the episode Once Upon A Time for penultimate viewing, as the last episode Fall Out follows on from it, but the earlier episode is revisited in abbreviated form at the start of Fall Out (anyway), so no harm would be done by either sequence.
theCV: My colleague Phil Kirby is fascinated by MK Ultra and other psychological abuses as warfare. You devote a sizeable proportion of the book to discussing mind control and drawing contemporaneous references to the Cold War and beyond. How far do you think McGoohan and his production team (particularly George Markstein) would have known about these things and how keen were they to smuggle them in and address them?
Alex Cox: I don’t think Markstein had to smuggle the parapolitics and mind control angles in: I imagine McGoohan found them completely fascinating. Markstein was the one who knew about the Inter Services Research Bureau, which apparently ran a “holiday camp” for returned spies and suspected double agents in the wilds of Scotland during the Second World War. Both men were interested in the weird eccentricities of the intelligence agencies, as we all should be. On the basis of Many Happy Returns and Fall Out, The Village seems to be a British-run operation. And why not? Wouldn’t every loyal Brit be proud if the operation turned out to be a cover for an Apollo-beating, British Moon Mission?
[Phil Kirby: They have been trying to produce super strong ape soldiers / astronauts for years… probably already have. Do you know about CRISPR technology? And did you know that in the ’60s there was a CIA black op code named “Acoustic Kitty” – spy cats, just like the one in The Prisoner..?
Alex Cox: Was Number 2’s cat a spy? I don’t recall him/her “dogging” Number 6…]
theCV: We are screening the final episode of The Prisoner as part of a citywide festival to mark the 50th anniversary of the events of May 1968. Obviously Fall Out was conceived and made in the preceding year, but how far do you think The Prisoner feeds into a growing dissatisfaction with society and the Establishment?
Alex Cox: The Prisoner doesn’t just “feed into” disaffection with the elites and their vision of society: it feeds it per se! To watch The Prisoner is to be entertained and inspired to act spontaneously, against the instructions of our masters, to be aware that victory isn’t always possible, and to remember that the struggle never ends.
theCV: Do you think McGoohan lost sight of the project? Markstein seems to have had a clearer – if somewhat prosaic – concept from the start…
Alex Cox: They had different points of view. Markstein’s, as far as I can tell, were of the series as a science-fictiony spy drama. Maybe McGoohan thought that too, at the beginning. But as the shoot progressed – as he got increasingly involved in writing and directing – it become something else. Something infinitely better and more interesting.
theCV’s Phil Kirby has been exploring Cox’s take on The Prisoner through a series of daily posts which focus on each episode in the order suggested in I Am (Not) A Number.
Alex Cox’s book I Am (Not) A Number is published by No Exit Press who have given us a signed copy to give away to one lucky audience member at Friday’s screening. More details about the book here.
