The Annotated Prisoner Act 3 Part 1

Celibacy Galore

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE - have taken note of feedback, and I‘ll be doing shorter, but more frequent, posts to the Bunker. Of which this is the first. I reserve the right to ‘go long’ if I find a particularly rich vein.

Honey Trap Honeys

At the beginning of Act III, P storms back to his cottage - ‘it’s the only place he can ever go’ as a later Number 2 will observe - where he discovers his ‘personal maid’, all courtesan smile and pliability.

Convey nine different emotions at once, please

This is the very first of the Village’s plans to trick P into revealing his information, and it’s clearly a tried and trusted routine. Presumably ‘pretty flirty girl breaks down in tears and confesses “I’m a trap, but please help me anyway”’ works most of the time.

‘He’s no ordinary man, this has got to handled very differently,’ says an unsurprised Number 2, observing from the Control Room.

Stephanie Randall as the maid has a hard acting job in this scene - pretending to pretend to pretend to P, while making it clear to the viewers that she’s pretending the whole thing. The Supervisor’s line following P turfing her out of the cottage a second time - ‘She was most convincing, I felt sure she was going to pull it off’ - is one of those lines that tempts fate, as Randall is not the best actress in the world, and indeed this was her last screen credit. Significantly, like many of the glamorous actresses of The Prisoner, she was a Saint girl a couple of years before.

In The Saint episode ‘The Rhine Maiden’ filmed in 1964. She doesn’t play the titular maiden. What a striking photo.

The ‘guest girls’ of standard ITC fare - the ones on the heroic side, anyway - can be divided into three sub-categories.

1. Plucky young ingenue, forever shrieking ‘Simon!’ rather wetly in The Saint - Angela Douglas, Anneke Wills, Felicity Kendal

2. The sophisticated, more capable slightly older woman - often a computer expert, anthropologist or something germane to the story this week  - Jan Holden, Wanda Ventham (When women are permitted into the regular casts of ITC thrillers shortly after, this will be their category - Rosemary Nicols in Department S, Nyree Dawn Porter in The Protectors)

3. The haughty rich bitch - Dawn Addams, Lois Maxwell, Jan Holden, who with a slight variation, can be a frosty KGB agent - Mary Peach - to be melted by our hero

1. The Drip We never see drippy women on TV nowadays. We need drippy representation!

2. I have degrees in physics, economics, and biology, and PhDs in meteorites, archaeological medicine and medicinal archaeology

3. ‘But how dare you address ME, ze Countess of Backlottia, in this disrespectful fashion - put me DOWN - oooh, a diamond necklace!’

The Danger Man girls are a cut above these clichés, a little, but this division holds generally true.

But the unique nature of The Prisoner throws all this into confusion. Even the

female ‘goodies’ at the wetter end of the spectrum - Jane Merrow and Annette Andre - have more character and ambiguity than any comparable Saint girl. Like any other ITC show, The Prisoner always has a ‘girl’ guest star every week - (apart from the finale, which is another reason the last two episodes feel even odder than usual). No, none of them is Hedda Gabler, but they are more complex than their sisters in their sister shows.

And several of them are, like the maid, honey traps of a kind. Bo Peep, the Queen, Nadia, Alison, Kathy, No 9 later in this episode, all have an element of that, subdued though it is because this is 1967, and there are rules for prime time American TV, and because Mr McGoohan only kisses Mrs McGoohan. (John Drake in Danger Man never ‘gets’ the girl, or even attempts to. Simon Templar and Jason King clearly bonk every last one of them, after the credits roll. James Bond doesn’t wait for the credits.)

‘Give him love and take it away’ seems to be a standard Village strategy. Incidentally, this is another reason why ‘Do Not Forsake Me’ jars so crashingly with the rest of the series. If P has a fiancée, why is the Village not using her as leverage to get what they want from him? Why do they not consider her as the reason he’s chucking his job? And do they really have such little faith in his fidelity to Janet that they think the various ladies they assign him will break him? Of course not. Because he is glaringly, obviously unattached. And ‘Do Not Forsake Me’ and Janet are piffle.

Unlike most prisons, the Village is mixed sex. The population seems to be pretty much half men and half women. You’d think this would make it quite a sexual place. But aside from some very occasional flirting (another saucy maid in ‘Dance Of The Dead’), and distant hints in Act IV of this episode about Cobb and Number 9 and Number 9 and the ‘last pilot’, the place seems utterly sexless.

Are there couples? Relationships, marriages? We don’t see any. ‘They didn’t settle for ages’ says Number 2 of an elderly couple in this episode, but that’s ambiguous, and they are well past it. The two family groups we do see are a father and daughter in ‘Its Your Funeral’ and a married couple of ‘wardens’ in ‘The General’, and both those sets seem to have been brought to the Village as units. Where the children in the nursery come from is another mystery. I have a theory which I’ll reveal when we reach that episode.

One of the reasons Harmony feels so wild in comparison to the Village is its sexuality, the plunging décolletage and frills of its saloon girls, its prowling pervert, its lines like ‘you’ll need two of these to handle a woman’, its offspring wandering the streets. It is perhaps significant that three of the four ‘extra’ episodes made after the Ice Station Zebra break are all much sexier than what went before.

Love and sex in the Village are so unlikely - the general conversational mode, from and between everybody, is bright, polite, innocent and blandly friendly. (McGoohan was at pains to instruct Fenella Fielding not to make her PA voice sexy.) Only women that we meet outside the Village - Sonia Schnipps, Engadine, B, Mrs Butterworth - even have a knowledge of their own sexuality.

Nice try Virginia, but that is not a sexy outfit and it never could be

The men of the Village likewise don’t seem to be interested in the women. (To modern viewers the opening scene of ‘The General’ between P and John Castle looks hilariously like two homosexual men scoping each other.)

I have to conclude that everyone in the Village is on a very high dose of anaphrodisiacs, ie drugs that stop them feeling frisky. Which certainly makes sense, within the fiction - any kind of deep attachment between prisoners is going to be disruptive to the jolly-hockey-sticks ‘community’ spirit of the place. The Villagers often behave like obedient children playing games laid out by adults - maybe they are kept that way.

And compared to this, the other ITC shows are positively crackling with erotic charge. Nobody has ever watched The Prisoner for its light, flirty fun times.

NEXT TIME - The Control Room, and the Village Plans Planning Department