The Annotated Prisoner - ‘Free For All’ 3

Panic attacks and delirium tremens

A grab-bag of annotations to Act 3 and 4 as I go this time, before Act 5, the end - and a final good look around ‘Free For All’ as a whole, next time. Some of these will be very short but hopefully sweet.

Electioneering

We pick up P as he emerges from the Labour Exchange, a changed man. It’s interesting that the Truth Test is done under the auspices of the inner office of the Labour Exchange, one of the few undervillage areas (ie futuristic, metallic) that’s more or less casually open to the village public. The outer office acts as a kind of lobby between the two design aesthetics; there are similar vestibules at Number 2’s house and the town hall.

The British labour exchange as a concept is worth a little examination. They were introduced by Winston Churchill in 1910, then a Liberal and the President of the Board of Trade, with the aim of reducing the time spent (and often wasted) by jobless people answering ads, hawking themselves about, etc. They put the final kibosh on the seasonal trade fairs where agricultural workers were hired, some of which had been part of British life for centuries (and which still linger in ghostly form as summer fetes and fairs). The labour exchange is a centralised, mechanised place full of filing cabinets, little index cards and information on people, so of course it’s very Village. Its computerised version is seen in the secret service’s vault in the title sequence every week. In ‘Arrival’ the job seeking villagers are lined up outside in two queues, divided by sex - this was the common practice in the decades before the war, which muddied the waters on what counted as appropriate men’s work and women’s work.

In ‘Free For All’, the use of the labour exchange as the venue for the Truth Test and P’s brainwashing is significant. As in the previous episode it is the place where he is ‘shaped to fit’, a round peg in a square hole that adjusts to become a round hole.

Get down the labour

Only a few years after The Prisoner, labour exchanges had become Job Centres, places that were often portrayed in culture - from The Boys From The Blackstuff to The League Of Gentlemen - as where dreams went to die. Their further rebranding as ‘Job Centre Plus’ in the 21st century wasn’t fooling anybody. A job centre that’s even more fun! I worked in one in the early 90s, and like most British people have spent a fair amount of time mooching in them. They have an atmosphere of municipal dread about them. Nobody is enthusiastic or happy about being there. The strange communal humming of ‘Boys And Girls Come Out To Play’ by the downcast villagers waiting for their appointments in the lobby capture that ambience perfectly. So the labour exchange is the perfect venue for P’s conversion from rabble rouser (well, attempted rabble rouser anyway) to establishment stooge.

His cheery emergence into the outer office gets a little, not strictly necessary, scene of its own, the only scene in this episode using that set, which means those five seconds are important. You don’t go to the trouble of filming that tiny moment - hiring background artists on a one-shot set - for nothing. It’s to show us that he’s not bluffing, that he really has been ‘altered’ by the Truth Test. So the labour exchange/job centre has done its job. P has been indexed and numbered.

The villagers and the media are waiting for him outside. There is an extra moment involving the photographer and his double in the script here, but presumably McGoohan realised at the location shoot that another one of these would conflict with the ‘converted’ hale and hearty demeanour P is displaying at this point.

The villagers are at their most unsympathetic here and in much of this episode - utterly pliant and suggestible and moved about as props by the regime. There is no George Colouris or Annette Andre standing wistfully or cynically to one side this week.

Background artists standing about waiting for direction

There’s clearly an implied time lapse between this scene and the next, which begins very nicely with a pull back from a robotised stump speech by P on the tv screen of his own cottage. Fenella pipes up to tell us that it’s ’lunchtime’ on ‘this election day’, which makes it sound like it’s election day today, though it isn’t, til the day after. But some amount of time has passed, and P’s conditioning is about to wear off.

The ‘lye eezeet zoon’ panic attack and the subsequent escape attempt/fight on the speedboat are staggeringly well directed, with dollops of production value provided by Portmeirion, and pace and cutting that are surely unprecedented for a TV show in 1966, British or American. The shots of the mechanics being knocked into the water are phenomenal. The tiny difference in Rachel Herbert’s performance as the maid after P runs from the cottage - split second reactions filmed weeks apart on location and in studio - reveal an incredible attention to tiny details. The helicopter POV shots of the boat give a grandeur and swagger to the thing. (It’s slightly unfortunate that scenes of waterskiing didn’t make it into ‘Arrival’, as viewers might question why the Village has a speedboat just lying about. Not the kind of thing you expect in a prison.) And when Rover turns up and proceeds to spawn two baby Rovers, the madness and idiosyncrasy of The Prisoner are at their very height. No other TV series, no other piece of fiction, is anything like this.

Good luck finding anything else like this on TV

It’s worth remembering here, I think, how very uncanny these scenes would have been in 1967 not only for that strangeness but because the audience was very familiar with John Drake (and let’s not be coy, that’s who this is, to all intents and purposes) as utterly unflappable, even in the tightest corners. Here the super cool spy is humiliated, emasculated, panics, gets knocked about and loses a fight against something incomprehensibly strange. Never mind the balloon, the penny farthing, the weirdness of the Village. It is that which may well have been the oddest thing about The Prisoner for them. (The only equivalently disorienting moment in Danger Man - Drake’s fight with himself in ‘The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove’ - is very quickly revealed to be just part of a bad dream.)

Here I must also note that this week, according to Number 2’s warning to the Control Room, the beach is at the southern perimeter of the Village. Who knows, maybe the Village revolves?

Interestingly, the hospital re-brainwashing scene that ends Act 3 is not present at all in the shooting script. This montage of clips from earlier in the episode, in the fine old Hollywood style of ‘Is there a chance the track could bend?’, is laid over a mishmash of brainwashing offcuts and bits from ‘Once Upon A Time’ and ‘The Schizoid Man’ (the little wooden calendar prop by his bedside gives the latter’s orugin away). As originally written, P was back on his feet and straight back on the stump. I’m guessing that this sequence, that spans the end of Act 3 and the start of Act 4 and jumps over the ad break from the hospital back to P’s cottage, was added after a first assembly edit. Someone must have seen that and got confused as to why P seemed to have broken mentally free, but was then back to being a brainwashed pawn. Hence this addition, of his conditioning being topped up.

But.