Dance move Number 6

I don't know about you, but as a bored, angry, teen adoptee in rural New Hampshire, Patrick McGoohan's postmodern-existentialist-Cold-War-panopticon-satirical freakout The Prisoner blew my mind when PBS started broadcasting it at 11pm on weeknights. Man versus Society? Man versus Himself? Man versus Giant Latex Smothering Balloon Breast Sentry? Take your pick. Now, for all you dance freaks and Prisoner fanatics, I pass along a clip to bring a smile to your face and get you shakin' it. Be seeing you.

Comments

[Andrew Eglinton]

What always surprised me about the Prisoner was the location, it felt very Mediterranean when it was actually shot on location in Wales!

[Ian W. Hill]

Oh, thank you. Now I have to post it on my blog in case people miss this.

McGoohan also wrote/directed a number of Columbo episodes -- one of which, a season ender, is a very strange and beautiful piece of television (Berit's comment: "It's as if they asked, 'who could we get to really end this season with something crazy-ass? McGoohan!'"). If you want more great PMcG, check those out.

[Robert Stanton]

Tried to post this before, but it never appeared, so forgive me if it surfaces twice: Some of the Columbos to which the above poster referred were written by off-Broadway playwright Jeffrey Hatcher ("Three Viewings," "A Picasso," "Compleat Female Stage Beauty," later the Billy Crudup indie "Stage Beauty"), who was commissioned by McGoohan to write a screenplay for a long-since aborted film-adaptation of "The Prisoner."

Hatcher's a "Prisoner" freak, and has traveled to Portmeirion, the Welsh resort where the series was filmed (and, coincidentally, the place where Noel Coward holed up to write "Blithe Spirit," in the Village Insane Asylum by the Stone Boat), to attend the annual meeting of the Prisoner Appreciation Society, where the do things like reenact the famous chess game depicted in the video, or restage the burial of one of Number Six's comrades.

Rock on MC Number Six.

[Tom X. Chao]

You might enjoy my audio tribute to Patrick McGoohan, which I posted in my daily podcast, "The Peculiar Utterance of the Day," located at http://txc.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=109383

Or, you might not.

[Jason Grote]

I love THE PRISONER. I've always wanted to do an environmental-performance adaptation of it on Roosevelt Island, which has a few alarming similarities to the Village - the Roosevelt Island paper is literally a broadsheet, and because there's only one of everything, a lot of the businesses are just called what they are - "sports bar," "card shop," etc. And once, when I tried to escape into Queens via the Hellgate Bridge, I was stopped by a roaring, bobbing weather balloon.

For real, though, if you go into the basement restrooms in NYU's Bobst Library, there is a roaring wind-tunnel sound exactly like the roar the balloon-guard makes. Has anyone else ever noticed this?