TIME TO STAND UP FOR INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY?

WILL WE “BE SEEING YOU?”

By

JERRY AHERN

Two weeks ago, Sharon was browsing through TV Guide and noticed that the Independent Film Channel (IFC) was running the original 1967 series “The Prisoner,” the brainchild of the seriously brilliant Patrick McGoohan – actor, director, producer, writer, two-time Emmy winner and thinker.  Sharon and I first watched the saga of “Number Six” when it was new to the USA and aired as a summer replacement series. This was in 1969.  It was produced for British television in 1967.  There were seventeen episodes, each an hour in length when shown with commercial interruption, as the series was intended to be seen.  Over the intervening years, “The Prisoner” has shown up on Public Television and in the home video market.  It’s available on DVD and, one of these days, Sharon and I’ll stop promising ourselves to buy “The Prisoner” and actually buy it. 

Although totally different one from the other, one wouldn’t be stretching credulity to say that Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner” is to television what Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is to literature.  McGoohan’s masterpiece is that good.   McGoohan – who created, produced, acted in and directed much of “The Prisoner”—threw in everything, clues galore to what was really going on.  Everything from the id, the ego and the superego to superspy action comedy to a psychologically quirky western is included as Number Six resigns from British Intelligence, is knock-out gassed, kidnapped and awakens in “The Village.”  The Village is run by “Number Two.”

At this juncture, if you are unfamiliar with this classic, you might be asking, “Who is Number One?”  Oddly enough, that’s what Number Six continually asks when the various Number Twos – they don’t last long, failing in trying to break Number Six – demand to know why he resigned. Number Six will not reveal any information, because he does not know on whose side the mysterious Number One’s malevolent minions happen to be.  Number Six defiantly proclaims, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” 

This is heady stuff for television.  As this is written on October 4^th, IFC has only run the first six episodes, three each Friday night.  They will run the remaining episodes ganged together.  Or, you can go to AMC’s website and see the episodes.  AMC, on November 15, 2009, will be showing the new original mini-series version of “The Prisoner,” starring Jim Caviezel as “Six” and Ian McKellen as “Two.”  If the new mini-series will be even almost as good as the original, it will be a landmark television event.  If the in-your-face individuality or death philosophy of McGoohan’s original is made “politically correct,” it will be very sad. Hopefully, “Six” will truly be “Number Six,” the ultimate rugged individualist who will never break.

McGoohan’s Number Six is undiminished.  “The Prisoner” is just as resonant today as it was when Sharon and I were first impressed and inspired by it forty years ago.  If you believe in individual liberty and despise big, intrusive government, you owe it to yourself to see the original McGoohan series.  And, you owe it to McGoohan’s memory – he died after a short illness at age eighty, on January 13, 2009 – to give the new mini-series a chance.  Number Six was wonderfully quotable. Picture, if you will, the leading Congressional Democrats trying to push their socialist agenda and a defiant man seething with controlled rage shouting, “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered. My life is my own.”  As my old high school creative writing teacher Jim Norris used to say, “Good stuff!”   As they say in The Village, “Be seeing you!”