Death's Head wrote: Every episode is a lesson in style, manners, dress, smoking and drinking. I'm still disappointed when I go for a job interview and I'm not offered a scotch.
It would really great to have lived 50/40/30/20/10/ButHonestNotToday years ago when pretty much every decision ever was made in relation to drink and smoking.
I wouldn't say his morality is entirely old-fashioned - his politics are pretty progressive for a British agent. The episode Whatever Happened to George Foster is one that springs to mind, where Drake helps prevent a business-backed, right-wing coup in a fictional Latin American state.
It is sort of weird, in that everyone involved in the making of the show found it horribly catholic and unbend-able, but today it seems really modern and progressive. McGoohan was clearly a man with issues (there's that famous example from
The Prisoner where he found it easier to stick his daughter in a wig and act out "intimate"- in in other words face stroking- scenes with her rather than just play opposite the actress playing his potential love interest) but he was also something of a genius who just through his presence created something not of its time.
Of course, all this good work falls down entirely in the colour episodes. It's the whitest, most middle-aged martial-arts society I've ever seen. Which would be fine if the episode was set in, I dunno, 1960s Stoke.
Oh yes, Audrey from Corrie is playing Japanese in the colour episodes isn't she? It says something for the clout he had by then he was able to quit and go "We won't do this... we're going to do this!" (and the irony is, the half of the production team who didn't go onto
The Prisoner wound up on
Man in a Suitcase, with an even more unforgiving lead and none of the dramatic rewards).
I've still not seen the half-hour ones. He has the funny accent in them, doesn't he? Same one he uses in the first couple of 50-minute episodes. I find it very odd.
Yep, the early (again, in the production order they're on the DVD's) episodes of
The Saint have a similar problem, hearing Roger Moore doing an American/trans-Altantic accent is just odd.
Have you seen
Ice Station Zebra? Before getting the blu ray (oddly complete with overture and intermission screens) and just relying on memories from TV broadcasts when I was a kid I always took the "He's playing Drake/No. 6!" claims with a pinch of salt. But no, he's a British spy under a false name who is clearly increasingly pissed off (and McGoohan's erratic SHOUTING VERY LOUD of certain lines shows the stress he was under from his TV commitments), it absolutely makes perfect sense in the film for him to be playing the same character between
Danger Man and
The Prisoner and about to go off the deep end.
SPOILER! (select to read)He resigned because he found out you couldn't even trust the bloke from Airwolf
Christ, in that case I hope I never meet Dan Reed. Or Manny Galan.
On topic-ish... I can't speak for Reed and Galen, but Lee Sullivan and Andy Wildman don't look like characters they've drawn (Sullivan, if anything, looks amazingly like Terry "Davros" Malloy), but the first time I met Senior I was all "OK, turns out you didn't have a style... you just thought everyone looks like that". Seriously, his self portrait in issue 200, is exactly him.