Patsy
I think it will be worthwhile, as we go, to stop off now and then for some appreciation of actors. Their life stories are often fascinating. The Prisoner being made when it was, these lives very often bump into the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
Patsy Smart (1918 - 1996), real name Hope Foster Smart, is the waitress at the café, the first person P speaks to in the Village. She was the daughter of H.C. (Henry Casimir) Smart, an Australian entrepreneur who settled in Britain and became quite the mover and shaker in Anglo-Australian affairs and cultural exchanges, which netted him a CBE. Her brother was Ralph Smart, creator of Danger Man.
Patsy seems to have come to acting later in life - her first screen credit, she is in her late thirties - but this gave her a niche. She turns up regularly in small parts as landladies, housekeepers, women next door. The Village waitress is very much one of these parts; slightly frosty, evasive, with the hint of an edge and thoughts of her own. As she matured she became a stock portrayer of dotty or sinister old ladies, often called on to supply disapproving reaction shots (there is a memorable appearance at a bus stop in Only When I Laugh) or to be colourfully eccentric (in everything from Terry And June to Miss Marple). She is a wonderfully gummy ghoul in both Doctor Who and Blake’s 7. But she was best known then as the acidic and boilingly resentful Miss Roberts, Lady Margery’s lady’s maid in Upstairs Downstairs.
Wikipedia tells us that Patsy Smart died of a barbiturate overdose at the actors’ retirement home Denville Hall, which is terribly sad. Worse, she wasn’t the only actress in this episode to meet such a tragic end.
Music Says All
The first bit of incidental music we hear in The Prisoner is some nicely understated woodwind - logged in the production’s files as ‘Eerie background’ - composed by Albert Elms. Elms is the credited ‘musical director’ of the series, and would write complete scores for seven of the episodes. Bits of those seven scores would be sprinkled across almost all the others (with the exception of ‘The Chimes Of Big Ben’, which was edited very early.) This little cue is the only piece of Elms music written specifically for ‘Arrival’, needed to bridge the quiet little spot between P talking to the waitress and walking to the phone box (and possibly also to smooth over the particularly jarring cut, where P is suddenly far from the café).
Elms is a perfect fit for The Prisoner - his jazz score (for jazz is the genre of secret agents), with its brass stabs and occasional bursts of slightly psychedelic guitar, takes its guide from the theme (written by Ron Grainer), and is squarely in the sweet spot of not too ordinary/not too weird.
But he was the production’s third attempt to find a musical director. And he was a journeyman TV/film composer - very much from the middle drawer, scoring other ITC series and later musical director for Benny Hill and Dave Allen. His two predecessors in the role were of a loftier cut. And neither of them worked out.
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