The classic television drama The Prisoner is running again, on the Legend channel. Mark Rowe considers the place of security and surveillance in the show. Understandably in some ways it shows its age; in other ways, it’s stood up all too well.
Each episode begins evocatively. Patrick McGoohan drives in an open-top car through central London (past the Houses of Parliament, we see). He parks, strides moodily down a dark corridor, slams a resignation letter on a desk (before the days of ending your employment by fax, email or voice message) so hard that a tea cup and saucer rattle (we get it, we’re in England). He drives to Buckingham Place (pictured) and packs a suitcase; only for knock-out gas to pour through the keyhole. Next thing McGooghan, and the viewer, knows, he awakes as ‘The Prisoner’, in ‘The Village’.
Over many hours of television, the questions remain: who is The Prisoner, why is he held in captivity, no matter how pleasant; who are the warders? What do they want? ‘Information,’ an unidentified voice replies to McGoohan, without ever specifying. That ‘The Village’ is the charming and extraordinary creation of Portmeirion adds to the mystery. McGoohan is a number, though he is forever rebelling against that, and seeking to escape, and get his life back (although, will he like it when he does?!). The warders are also numbers, which implies that while they’re in charge, they are as much part of an unfree system as he is.
Some of the filming, such as when McGoohan and others are supposedly driving cars abroad, is laughably clunky by modern standards; not a patch on the Mission Impossible films. The control room that we regularly see, where operatives monitor closed-circuit television of The Village, is not how monitoring centres have developed. When McGoohan was writing The Prisoner in 1966, CCTV control rooms weren’t yet invented, typically one camera would go to one monitor for one person to view. McGoohan’s stab at imagining the monitoring of a whole ‘Village’ assumed it would replicate how television studio camera operators (the world McGoohan knew) worked.
The setting of Portmeirion was the making of The Prisoner, not only for the details of the man-sized chess board, the mini-mokes, and bicycles with fabric roofs, but the fact that it’s without a fence or visible perimeter keeping people in. Instead, if McGoohan tried to escape across the sand (in north Wales, between Harlech and Porthmadog) a sinister white bubble would pop out of the water (called Rover), whizz along the water or ground and suffocate him.
Such security is counter-intuitive. If the 20th century (and The Prisoner was first screened in 1967 on ITV) has a nightmarish image, it is of the concentration camp: of barbed wire fences, guard towers and harsh lights, keeping prisoners in or even worse exterminating them. The Prisoner subverts that; he and the fellow prisoners have been deprived of their liberty, and even their identities; yet they’re well fed, and clothed; the surrounding countryside is pretty, and nothing appears to physically stand in their way of coming and going. Is it a metaphor for modern society? And if so, exactly what?
While the 1960s at the time and since were in popular memory an era of liberalising – mini-skirts, rock music and the like – you could as easily argue that the 1960s were the opposite, a period of galloping surveillance and telling people what to do generally. All was for our own good and in the name of law and order, of course: the first closed circuit television, eagerly pioneered by the Metropolitan Police; double yellow lines to limit on-street parking (and parking meters, famously noted by Bob Dylan); fluoride in tap water, even.
Visit where The Prisoner was filmed and the evidence is inconclusive. While Portmeirion has video surveillance cameras at its visitor car park, the site is conspicuously without cameras. Buckingham Place, a few streets from Buckingham Palace, is ironically even closer to the London office of the UK official National Cyber Security Centre, a part of the Government listening agency GCHQ. Most front doors in the street and its neighbours have surveillance cameras, including one Nest, the home automation part of Google. Nest evokes the natural world yet links tech that monitors our lives that was undreamed of in the 1960s (The Prisoner did imagine cordless phones). As ever, truth is stranger than fiction.
