Guy Doleman
Until Act 4, the new viewer will assume that Guy Doleman, with his wood-panelled, oak-smoked voice and punctiliously clubbable smoothness, is the second lead of The Prisoner, playing the permanent antagonist of P, the human face of the Village authorities.
He is all ‘be reasonable, calm down, settle down old chap, don’t get into a flap’. He’s seen it all before, and P is just another stroppy new Village inmate, albeit a rather important one that has to be treated with special courtesy.
Every number 2, whatever their physical differences and individual quirks, is an iteration of this type, a distillation of the English upper class establishment that was already fading fast in 1966, and which is now totally extinct (despite some crazy people’s delusions). The conspicuous cultivation by the Village of this kind of public authority figure is deeply suspicious to P and to 60s viewers. This almost studied Englishness smells of fakery, of being learnt. Contemporary culture was awash with undetectably suave gentlemen who are actually Nazis or Soviet Communists, sleeper agents in deep cover. ‘Are you … “English”?’ P will needle a later number 2.
It is also somewhat lost to us - because we live in a world of metallic walls, keyboards and screens - that Number 2 is meant to be incongruous. The metal sliding door beyond the conventional panelled white door of the Green Dome’s vestibule is the first inkling of the hidden modernity under the surface old-fashionedness of the Village. The circular Living Space, with its lava lamps and push-button controls and automatic chairs, is unsettlingly futuristic - but at the heart of it is someone much more in keeping with the outer Village world of regatta wear and old world charm. Number 2 is in charge, but he is dressed for life in the streets of the Village, with the scarf and umbrella (which is not the case with the Supervisor and the personnel of the Control Room, who wear dark blue and grey work clothes).
And Number 2’s charm isn’t - quite - the ‘come in Mr Bond’ sarcastic politesse of the arch villain. It is disarming. Doleman is affable, conciliatory, quite likeable. His hint at a lack of personal identification with the task at hand - ‘Personally I believe your story, but then what I think doesn’t really matter, does it’ - is the textbook soft boss tactic; reasonable, open, polite, and all the things an interrogator and tormentor should not be. It’s meant to throw you, a standard Village procedure, and I imagine it normally does. (It’s worth noting that the later number 2s who display sadism or particular personal enthusiasm in the post - Gordon, Nesbitt, Cargill - are the ones who fail most dismally.)
Guy Doleman was called away urgently from Portmeirion for personal reasons that remain unclear, but for an actor to be excused from a location mid-shoot is so unprecedented one assumes only a close family bereavement or a medical emergency would suffice. The production having to work around Doleman’s absence - re-blocking the scene in the Village square so that he is on the (studio) balcony in Borehamwood, his double’s face covered by a megaphone in Portmeirion - works to the episode’s advantage. The initial appearance of Rover benefits enormously from the positioning of Doleman’s location double above, and McGoohan below.
So, here we have a very very English actor, playing a very very English (apparently, maybe) character. Guy Doleman was actually from New Zealand and he grew up in Australia. He is best known as Count Lippe in Thunderball, where he suffers the same sauna-box inconvenience as P will in ‘The Girl Who Was Death’, and in which he reports to Largo, ‘number 2’ of SPECTRE. His other most notable role was as the highly number 2ish Colonel Ross of the Foreign Office in The Ipcress File and its two sequels, where he is often trying to suavely damp down a furious Michael Caine. Like several of the number 2 actors, Doleman was what used to be known as a ‘confirmed bachelor’.
Doleman seems to have been typecast in such parts. He is perhaps somewhat blank - there is little suggestion of anything much going on behind the urbane surface. That is a snag for an actor, the kind of thing that prevents his career taking flight. But it makes him perfect for number 2, and even more perfect as the template for every number 2.
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