One of my favorite podcasts is Steve Wright over on BBC2. It started out a few years ago with just his “Ask Elvis” segment, but they started throwing in some of the interviews he gets with big names (Jack Nicholson, Billy Joel, David Tennant etc.) and then I was hooked for good.The one I listened to today had Ian McKellen (fanboys will know him as either Magneto or Gandalf), who mentioned that he was working on a 6 part re-imagining of The Prisoner.Â
Originally broadcast as a series in the late sixties, Patrick McGoohan played a Secret Agent Man who was kept as a prisoner on an island village. You could never tell who exactly was keeping him or why exactly was he was being kept. He said he wanted to retire, was it his own agency locking him down? An enemy spy agency trying to break him? Every week he, referred to only as “Number 6”, would try to escape or the leader “Number 2” (who was played by different actors as the series progressed) would have a scheme to try and break him.
The original series is kind of odd in that the final episode is very strange and it’s not really clear what the hell was going on at all. Long before “Lost” or “The X Files” this series presented a story that really made you think, and forced you to think long after it was over.
As they say in the Village… “Be seeing you”.