The Prisoner - from Patrick McGoohan to Sergei Viktorovich Skripal

Be Seeing you!

S smiles to himself.  He is a free man, not a number.  He ushers his daughter out of his modern suburban house, pulls the door to, and helps her into his car.  Together they have a drink and a pizza in the city centre, smiling as the waiter takes their photo.  Then as they stroll away a fog overcomes him.  He struggles to breathe, as if he is being smothered by a great balloon...... He collapses, on a bench.....

When he regains consciousness he is disorientated.  His head hurts.  His mouth is dry. He pulls himself up to raise the blinds and looks out of the window.....

He is confused.  The phone on the side table rings.  S lifts the receiver.  Good morning to you.  A suave, cultivated voice speaks.  I hope you slept well?  Come and join me for breakfast.  Number 2.  The Green Dome.

Boris Lavrov offers S tea. With lemon or polonium?  Sergey Johnson smiles.  Now please, he oozes.  It's my job to check your motives.

I've been checked....

Of course, but when a man knows as much as you do a double check does no harm.....  A few details may have been missed.....

I wake in the village.  The sun is up; the tide is out. In my head I hear the voice of Patrick McGoohan.  I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.....  My life is my own.

Is it?

Thanks to my younger brother, Tim, I have just re watched all seventeen episodes of The Prisoner.  I first saw it fresh in the sixties, when it was a sensation.  Ever since then the clipped tones and sharp image of McGoohan have been in my head.  Every so often I have run across sands and shouted, I am not a number:  I am a free man!  

And I have gloriously vindicated the right of the individual to be individual.  I used to wear striped socks at school, for example....  I was Unmutual....

And I am surely not alone in this?

Patrick McGoohan first visited Portmeirion, an Italianate village in North Wales designed and built by architect Clough Williams-Ellis, in 1960 to film an episode of Danger Man.  So when he 'retired' from that series and wanted to produce something different he returned here to be imprisoned by unknown authorities.

The series was highly successful, with over eleven million viewers for most of the first showings, but it perplexed many and the final episode was not what everyone wanted. McGoohan's character, Number 6, is told that he is free to go, having survived a bewildering succession of examinations and tests.  

The ultimate revelation, however, is that we are prisoners of ourselves, which McGoohan defines as: about the most evil human essence.

The central theme of The Prisoner is, in McGoohan's words, the freedom of the individual.  I want to yell back, 'That's our right.  The loss of one's own individuality is a nightmare.'  

But there is a more concrete, more sinister, essence.....

What do you do with an ex- secret agent?

The Prisoner still has a large following. From April 20th to 22nd this year The Prisoner Appreciation Society (http://www.sixofone.co/)  will be holding PortmeiriCon 2018 celebrating 50+ years of The Prisoner.  

On June 23rd at Elstree Studios, Borehamwood, The Unmutual Website (& Quoit Media Limited) will be presenting NOT A NUMBER, A Patrick McGoohan Retrospective..... (see http://www.theunmutual.co.uk/)

If you haven't ever seen it, The Prisoner might now seem a curiosity.  It isn't perfect, for sure, and some of the costumes and hairstyles, special effects and sets are very sixties, but despite these and other drawbacks it still intrigues and surprises. McGoohan himself is an impressive presence and many of the supporting actors keep up with him, though Leo McKern temporarily broke down with the strain.  It was ground-breaking in many ways; it challenged the TV industry and the viewing public; it was unusual in that its 'hero' kept failing to get away and that there was no arch villain to blame it all on in the end....

And it was worryingly prescient.  Whose side are you on?  How many times have you been captured on CCTV today?  Are you a number?  Or a free person?

I am a privileged visitor at a Catholic boarding school.  On one side of the corridor there are evenly spaced wooden doors, set into the block stone walls with ogival arches over each frame.  On the other side there is a cloistered square, monastic in architecture. It is by no means a prison, though to an imaginative child some of its features might seem just a little enclosing.....

A framed article mounted on the corridor wall catches my eye. The heading is: Patrick McGoohan, 19th March 1928 - 13th January 2009, Old Ratcliffian 1940 - 1944, Actor.  

Apparently he excelled at maths and boxing.....

Patrick McGoohan was born in Queens, New York City, but was brought up in Ireland and then London.  With the blitz came evacuation to Loughborough, and school at Ratcliffe College.  In twenty years he was Danger Man, and then, 86 episodes later, the highest paid TV actor in the country, he resigned..... 

And he became The Prisoner.....

After the last episode of The Prisoner (Fall Out) aired on February 2nd 1968 there was such an outcry that McGoohan had to escape with his family to a remote place in Wales until the furore had died down. He subsequently moved to Switzerland, and then to California.  In the 70's he wrote, directed and appeared in episodes of Columbo, and in 1995 played Edward I in Braveheart. 

On January 13th 2009, aged eighty, he died.....

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time
It's easy
All you need is love
All you need is love



Be seeing you!

London 15 - Handel and Hendrix

The Brook Street Brothers

I am in the heart of London's Mayfair.  I hear the sound of a guitar coming from an upstairs window. 

It explodes on the pavement a few feet from me. 

A door is open.  

Creaky stairs take me up, flights of fantasy, a stairway to heaven.....

A party is in full swing. Not conservative....  A sixties theme.....

Music by the greats......

Ostrich feathers, and a room full of mirrors.....

I used to live in a room full of mirrors

All I could see was me

Well I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors 

Now the whole world is here for me to see.....

Broken glass was all in my brain

Fall in my dreams cut me in my bed

Fall in my dreams cut me in my bed 

I said A makin' love was strange in my bed 

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!!!

The bar is in the kitchen, looking out on a forlorn London, chimney pots and grey buildings. But the bar is well stocked, and guests feel free....

Mine host is majestic.  Lord, the willows weep and moan for him......

There is some confusion.  I need to go downstairs.  And sideways.  The tenant is unhappy.  I remember entering a flat once, in search of a party, and finding nothing, then discovering the party was upstairs....

I have to say that there is a certain spooky quietness about this place....

The man downstairs is a trifle grumpy.  His sleep has been so disturbed that his bed isn't....

I cannot help but see a resemblance to my friend upstairs.  Could there have been some exchange of molecules, I think (without thinking of Brian O'Nolan)?

I hear deft fingers on the keyboard....

But then I don't. There is no one here.... Or is it me that is deft?

Time to tell a story.  

I love music.  Of all kinds.  (Pretty much.)

At the right moment, George Frideric Handel's Chaconne in G Major will take my mind off the complications of daily life.....

At other times, James Marshall Hendrix playing his C# Blues at the Albert Hall on February 18th, 1969 will set cations a-jiggling through my plasma.... (which, in due course, will take my mind off the complications of daily life....)

Anyway.  A story.  True as it can be....

The velvet jacket above was worn by Jimi for a show at The Kirk (aka The Kirklevington Country Club, once a filling station and garage on the old A19) in Yarm, North Yorkshire, on January 15th, 1967.

[The Kirk, by the way, was a venue that hosted the famous, before they were famous.... Stars-to-be such as Cream, Joe Cocker, Dire Straits, Rod Stewart, Yes, Thin Lizzy, The Moody Blues, Traffic, Brian Auger, Geno Washington, and so on, and so forth.... ]

After the show B J (Chas) Chandler, bassist of The Animals and Hendrix's manager, got into into a fight with a bouncer who had apparently made racist remarks about Hendrix. Jimi intervened, catching the jacket on a nail, ripping it below the left pocket.

The wife of the owner of The Kirk, John McCoy (of The Crawdaddies), offered to stitch up the tear and return it to Jimi when McCoy was next in London, but by the time that happened, Jimi had replaced it with the double-breasted jacket familiar from many pictures.

John McCoy was given the jacket, and he kept it hanging on a nail in his garage and then later on display in Martha's Vineyard Club and Bar (as The Kirk was renamed in the 1980s), along with Chris Rea's guitar, until John sold the premises in 1989.  In 2011, it became a feature of memorabilia to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Jimi's death. The Kirk went through several changes before 'burning down' and being redeveloped as a row of four cottage-style houses.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience were paid £50 for their appearance at the club, and afterwards stayed up all night drinking at Chas Chandler's Newcastle home.

Such were the Sixties....

Awwww shucks!

In 2014, John McCoy played a reunion gig for The Kirk at The Crathorne Arms (where Eugene and Barbara McCoy live and work), from which a version of Kansas City can be seen on YouTube.....

In Brook Street, today, you may visit the Handel House, at number 25, and, via the same entrance, the Hendrix Flat, at number 23, or you can crane your neck up to read the blue plaques that commemorate the musicians who once lived here.  

Jimi Hendrix died on September 18th, 1970.  I was staying with my brother in Sheffield at the time, and when the news broke people were stunned and struggled to accept the fact. Within hours of his being taken, unconscious, to hospital in London, Hendrix Lives! was scrawled across the walls....

I am not sure that such shock and grief followed the announcement of the death of George Frideric Handel on April 19th, 1759. He was 74 and had been blind for years, following botched cataract operations.  

He had no immediate family, but he was given full state honours, was buried in Westminster Abbey, and more than three thousand mourners attended his funeral (not a bad turn out at all, though the population of London was 750,000....)  

[And think, he, like Jimi (and King George II, the reigning monarch at the time) was an immigrant - whatever next?]

Jimi was buried on October 1st, 1970, in Greenwood Cemetery in Renton, after a private family funeral in Seattle.

After a chorus of When the Saints Go Marching in, Jimi's coffin was lowered into the earth. His gravestone reads:

Forever in our hearts, 

James M. 'Jimi' Hendrix, 

1942-1970.

To visit these two apartments is to climb those stairs to heaven, to mix with dreams.  There's nothing there, but then all your past presents itself somehow, if, like me, you can remember what it was to be young....

Purple haze all in my eyes

Don't know if it's day or night

You got me blowin', blowin' my mind

Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?

I am on London's Brook Street, in Mayfair.  I hear the sound of a harpsichord coming from an upper window. 

[With no thought of Kenneth Horne] I deftly sidestep the threat, and carry on, regardless..... 

http://handelhendrix.org/