Photo: “Who lives at Number 1?” / “I do, Number 6…” Patrick McGoohan and Georgina Cookson in Many Happy Returns …
To count down to our special screening of Fall Out, the final episode of ace television show The Prisoner, PHIL KIRBY introduces a new episode every day in the order outlined by director Alex Cox in his book I Am (Not) A Number…
Tonight’s episode is Many Happy Returns …
Number 6 escapes. No really, he does. And it’s his birthday. And Number 2 has gone to such an awful lot of trouble, she’s baked him a cake and everything …
My sense of disbelief is very strong.
My disbelief could be suspended from the minute hand of the Town Hall clock and it would dangle there all day.
Give my disbelief enough old rope and it’ll pay out till the cows are redomiciled.
Therefore, if you spin me a tale based on mind control and LSD experiments and electroshock I can go along with that quite happily. Anything could happen. That’s psychedelic, man. Mind reading and psychokinesis? I’m game. Who knows, it could happen. Even wholesale transplanting of one personality into the body of another person… well, this is stretching it a bit but I’ll can my scepticism for the duration if it’s an interesting story. It could be fun.
But there’s there’s a weighty matter which stretches the thread of my disbelief well beyond its snapping point. It’s the limit of my tolerance.
And this heavy subject is?
Location, location, location.
East is East, and West is West, and if you know this you should know the rest.
I think it was Chekhov who said that if you have a working compass on a boat in the first act of your story you really mustn’t fuck about with North and South in the aeroplane in the last act. Otherwise, don’t put it there.
And this is my problem with this episode, Many Happy Returns. It tells us exactly where The Village is located, and this flatly contradicts where it must be if the last episode is to be believed (never Mind The Chimes of Big Ben.)
Alex Cox explains this anomaly by accepting the Village is where Fall Out says it is (on the Southern English coast) and argues that in this episode Number Six is “under the influence of yet more sinister drugs – so ubiquitous that their involvement in the narrative and his fractured interpretation of reality can be taken as given – which have distorted his sense of time and place.” This, he admits, is merely an “assumption”.
There is nothing in the episode to indicate anything of the kind though. Granted, Number Six has suffered numerous concussions, taken vast quantities of hallucinogenic drugs, and been subject to some intense mental torments in the previous dozen episodes. But in Many Happy Returns he manages to construct a viable sailing boat, stock it with sufficient provisions for a long voyage, pack a variety of items that show evidence of the Village, fashion a compass out of bits and pieces laying around his apartment, and keep a detailed log of his journey. This is not the behaviour of someone who doesn’t know where he is.
The likeliest location of the Village, calculated by a Royal Navy Commander and an RAF Group Captain, is “Coast of Morocco, South West of Portugal, and Spain.”
This gives them “500 by 1500 to sweep, 750,000 square miles… Quite an area.”
Number Six really ought to know that he can easily eliminate one of these options, however, and narrow down his search dramatically.
When he leaves the Village the sun casts a shadow toward the land, as it does when he washes up on the South coast of England. If the Village were in Morocco the shadow would be the other way around, towards the sea. These days nobody knows a cardinal point from a case of cholera, but this is something Number Six would have observed and understood. Why doesn’t he mention it? Maybe the drugs addled his brain after all.
Of course, it’s all just a ruse. The Brits are behind the Village. The Colonel and Thorpe are toying with Number Six. And Number Two is utterly Mrs Butterworth.
At least she’s made him a birthday cake.
Of course, it all could be a dream.
The oddest bit of this episode is the opening scene. This must be the fourth or fifth pyjama/dressing gown combo he’s got to wear… why are the Villagers only allowed one set of going out gear?
Read about previous episode Hammer Into Anvil here
theCV presents The Prisoner Fall Out plus a Q and A with Six of One’s Ant Brierly and Roy Stambrow moderated by Phil and Neil (God help us!) at The Courtroom, Leeds Town Hall at 19.00 on Friday 25th May 2018. Tickets are £5 (plus booking fee) and are available here