The Annotated Prisoner - ‘Dance Of The Dead’ 3

As long as it is what the majority wants

On with my close reading of ‘Dance Of The Dead’, with the shooting script at hand!

Pavane and Beauty

Morning in the Village. What’s on Fenella’s playlist today? It’s ‘Pavane’ by Roger Roger et son Grand Orchestre - which is stately and haunting, not at all the ‘bright wake-up music’ specified in the script. It’s from Vol 10 of Chappell’s Mood Music series, and the piece is described on the sleeve as ‘dance lente et majestueuse avec hautbois et violons, Moyen-age, Louis XIV’, which means slow, majestic oboes and violins out of the Middle Ages

Music editor Eric Mival was keen to use the ‘French stuff’ which was newly arrived from Chappells. There was a lot of this - the 1967 Telecineradio series of albums comes to 17 volumes worth. The influence of these records on The Prisoner, through Mival’s enthusiasm for them, is huge. The off-kilter, quirky quality of this bright, slightly over-melodic French jazz-pop adds extra peculiar flavour to the series at many of its key moments - the Sgt Peppery ‘Rag March’ of the race for the bus in ‘Fall Out’, ‘Bienvenue Mr Jones’ at the dreamy party, almost the entirety of ‘The Girl Who Was Death’. It’s all markedly, recognisably European, Serge Gainsbourg. Reeves and Mortimer tapped into this cultural strain with the music accompanying their sketches as Tati-esque flatulent Frogs Le Corbussier et Papin.

Ooh La La

‘Pavane’ is very French, though a lot more restrained. When the Prisoner soundtracks were released, I was astonished that this very beautiful little piece wasn’t genuine classical music. It’s an attempted homage to Fauré’s ‘Pavane’. As is ‘Little Me’ by Little Mix, which got to number 14 in 2013, which I think counts as a hit.

A pavane itself is a slow court dance that originated during the Renaissance. It often symbolises mourning, as in Ravel's 1899 ‘Pavane pour une infante défunte’ (Pavane for a Dead Princess). So, literally a dance of death.

There is a lot of such baroque in ‘Dance Of The Dead’. Imagine this scene with the usual ‘up and doing’ military march, as written. Credit to Eric Mival for picking this instead, which embeds the different tone of this episode at the start. It gives the scene an extra eerie beauty.

Should TV be beautiful? I’m not sure. The small screen and the social nature of home viewing mean that TV is, by its nature, not normally an ‘immersive’ experience. There are distractions, conversations, sometimes even bright sunlight all but blanking out the screen.

This has blurred as tech changes, screens have got bigger, and TV has become, supposedly, more classy. The disparagement of TV as a medium of ‘talking heads’ has always got on my nerves. Because that’s what it is, and that’s fine. My skin instinctively prickles when I hear about beautiful shots in TV, particularly considering its twenty-first century colour palette of dull browns; wedge, umber and dun. There is so much ‘beautifully’ shot murky rubbish today.

Meaningful

Meaningless

Meaning and significance were unusual in 1967, whereas now they come in dollops attached to the most flimsy material. Almost everything on Netflix is shot as if it contains the meaning of life. This is the one area where we might credit John Nathan-Turner, in the very early days of his marathon stint on Doctor Who, to have been ahead of his time. His first year, Tom Baker’s last, is oddly beautiful; as the Telegraph said of ‘The Leisure Hive’ in 1980, it is ‘irritatingly atmospheric’. Which is Netflix all over.

But, unlike ‘Meglos’, ‘Dance Of The Dead’ actually does, maybe, contain some meaning - so it gets away with its splendidness. There is the symbolism of the scene of P being outrun by Rover on the shore; the sunlight flaring through the clouds as the weird poem is heard over the radio; the ‘Germanic horror’ (as the script requests) of the underground files room. The genuine weight of the script merits all the visual majesty. The difference with 2025 is that Netflix would try to make ‘It’s Your Funeral’ or ‘The Chimes Of Big Ben’ the same way. Which would be a disaster.

Further Annotations