Learn about Number Six
The news that Patrick McGoohan died earlier this week left me nonplussed. I recognized his face, and I know that he was the star in a program that still receives critical acclaim, but after that… The Prisoner has taken on a larger than life significance among “important TV series of the past”, but to be fair I was barely into high school when he was sent to that mysterious Village, and there may have been other, more relevant things going on in my life.
And now I have a burning curiosity about who Six and Two and Eighty-six were. What made this program so important that there are still people debating the details, over forty years later? The various sites such as IMDB and Wikipedia reveal that there were only seventeen episodes of “a TV hour” in length. Fifty minutes plus commercials. In comparison with other landmark programs, that hardly counts as sufficient for this level of posterity.
The theme song and opening sequence are readily available thanks to YouTube, and the box sets are on sale either at Amazon or eBay, so it’s not as if the memory banks have been wiped clean. But why can’t I remember; it was on at home (there wasn’t that much else available back then). All the elements that should have seized my interest were present: cool cars, killer robotic thingies, references to the shadowy world of spies.
I guess, for the sake of my own cultural education, that I’ll have to find and watch the season, in the privacy of my own home. After that I’ll have some of the cultural baggage that society assumes I do. Seventeen hours – a long weekend. Can’t be that difficult.
