Beautiful blue sky, like you never see nowadays. Not a chemtrail in sight.
Patrick McGoohan, the Emmy award-winning actor created and starred in the 1960s cult TV show The Prisoner which was largely filmed at Port Meirion village in N wales.
Lew Grade was one of three Jewish brothers who had a stranglehold on British entertainment, and it is said things were fine up until the last episode which did not make sense, the series should have run for longer and the final episode had to be changed to fit what Lew Grade wanted.
The series captured the icy hands of the cold war, the paranoia that gripped us all.
McGoohan, who was born in New York but raised in England and Ireland, came to screen prominence in ITV's early 1960s drama series Danger Man, in which he played a secret agent, he was also considered for the lead role in the first Saint film and the James Bond movie, Dr. No before Sean Connery was cast, McGoohan refused both parts. However, it was The Prisoner, which aired originally on ITV between 1967 and 1968, with which he was chiefly associated, writing some of the episodes himself under a different name.
The story of the Prisoner which resonated well with viewers was an early attempt to show we had no democracy, his character, Number Six, spent the entire time being interrogated and attempting to escape from the prison – which was disguised as a holiday camp – and trying to find out the identity of his captor, the elusive Number One. He repeatedly declared: "I am not a number - I am a free man!"
The idea was based on the fact that in W W II a law was passed called "Rothschilds Law", which meant anyone who disagreed with the war could be immediately incarcerated without trial, this was known as Regulation 18B and many famous people were just collected and locked up for the wars duration, but none of us is really free, we are all just numbers to the government to be taxed and lied to, the large bouncing balls were novel at the time, but these are now commonplace at British Summer festivals, but whereas the originals were based on the giant globes which were listening and spying posts at Menwith Hill, the new ones are just play things, the Prisoner fan club hold their own family festivals at Port Meirion, called "The number 6 Festival."
The premise of the series is that we are all prisoners, but think we are free and have to know who is behind our imprisonment. Patrick McGoohan passed away on January 13 2009; ITV is currently remaking The Prisoner in conjunction with American cable channel AMC with a different twist than the original.
British rock band Iron Maiden did two songs based on The Prisoner, one was "The Prisoner" on the album "Number of the Beast", the other song was "Back in the Village" on the album "Powerslave". Also, on "Number of the Beast" in the inside cover the band said "Special thanks to Patrick McGoohan for The Prisoner intro and the great TV series."
T Stokes london
Pic: Patrick McGoohan and the Lotus sports car he helped make famous, it was the lowest car yet manufactured, the highest part, the tip of the windscreen was just 2 feet 11 inches.
