Here's a man who's not just a number
The cult 1960s British TV series The Prisoner is back, digitally remastered and re-released on DVD for its 40th anniversary. Neil Davey speaks to scriptwriter Roger Parkes about his work on the show, reclusive star Patrick McGoohan and the ongoing appeal of the series.
Roger Parkes. Although it’s not necessarily a name you’ll recognise, you probably should. The man’s had some 15 novels published and been responsible for getting on for 100 hours of classic TV — Z Cars, Crown Court and The Onedin Line included.
For a particular group of people though, the name will be instantly recognisable. You know the sort: the ones who dress up in holiday camp style clothes, hang out in Portmeirion and debate just who Number Six was. These people will currently be delighted as The Prisoner, the cult 1967 series, has just been released on digitally remastered DVD. And Roger, 74, is still delighted to be discussing it.
‘The Prisoner was my first screen success,’ he says. ‘I was working at the Beeb at the time and, although I’d had a novel published, I hadn’t managed to actually get any script work. It was quite a baptism.’
While writing was always the ultimate goal — ‘the piece of grit in the oyster,’ as Roger calls it — his career has seen him do a number of unusual roles, from story editing to magistrate, via the RAF, agricultural college and prison visitor. ‘Well, you need a back-up, don’t you?’ he asks, cheerily. However, courtesy of one episode of the cult show, his longevity appears to be assured. Why though has The Prisoner survived with reputation intact when so many series have vanished from memory?
‘The primary reason,’ explains Roger, ‘is that McGoohan ensured, by writing the last two episodes and more or less killing off the character, that it wouldn’t go on, that there would just be these 17 episodes. That, I believe, lends itself to the cult. The fans can be loyal to it, they know there won’t be another one, nobody got tired of it — that lends survivability to it in that context.
‘The other thing is that there were lots of unanswered questions. We never knew where he’d come from, we never knew who he’d been abducted by, where he was being held and why, what the secrets were. All of these tend to foster the cult of mystery and the fans have got endless speculation, I think that tends to make for cultism.’
The brevity of the series probably does have a lot to do with it, particularly on a series like The Prisoner where the longer it gets drawn out, the less satisfactory the resolution is likely to be — a lesson the producers of Lost should learn ASAP, perhaps?
‘It got like that with The Fugitive as well,’ agrees Roger. ‘Lew Grade would have liked The Prisoner to run on for several series. When Patrick McGoohan and [script editor] George Markstein talked Lew Grade into launching the series, he saw it as a long term investment and he fell out, quite substantially I believe, with McGoohan when McGoohan effectively killed it off.
‘Also Grade didn’t like the way it was moving away from reality, which was something McGoohan was quite determined to do. He wanted to break the mould of Dangerman. There’s a little suicidal element in him!’ Roger chuckles. ‘That’s probably the wrong word but he likes to kill things off.’
Indeed and, in the process, he probably secured The Prisoner’s long-term appeal.
‘There’s another dimension to the cult status,’ adds Roger. ‘Just by being in that strange village, Portmeirion, and by having those holiday camp uniforms, that lends itself to the fan clubs. My wife and I often get invited up to these conventions, increasingly so, in fact, although,’ he laughs, I think that’s a case of last man standing.’