I missed this event on the day it was announced, and then caught it at the Volokh Conspiracy. I was a big fan of McGoohan. He was famous mostly for two TV roles, and was most famous for the wrong one.
In the late sixties he starred in The Prisoner. He plays a secret agent who resigns and is promptly kidnapped by, well, it isn't clear who. He is held prisoner on an island, where the whole point of the social organization is to drive him crazy so that he will reveal "information." If I recall correctly, no actual questions are ever asked. It's a very weird show, and was supposed to be making all sorts of shrewd and sophisticated comments on modern life. But really it was just weird. It must have been great fun if you were stoned, but I was way too young for that in 1968.
The Prisoner was sort of a spin-off of an earlier show, Secret Agent. That's the American title. The British title was Danger Man. Ours was better. It had the best theme song of any TV series I can remember, and I include Hawaii 5-0. Johnny Rivers wrote "Secret Agent Man," and it probably ruined his life. The driving guitar is perfect, and the words are just as good.
Swinging on the Riviera one day,
and lying in a Bombay ally next day;
Oh no, you let the wrong words slip
While kissing persuasive lips,
Odds are you won't live to see tomorrow.
Secret Agent Man. Secret Agent Man.
They're giving you a number
and takin' away your name.
That's the good stuff boys and girls. A lot of story squeezed into a third verse. Here is a video clip of Rivers performing the song.
Secret Agent was a very shrewd and serious show. I watched it as a child and again on public TV when I was in grad school. McGoohan played John Drake, a secret agent working for, who, exactly? Britain? NATO? There were definite cold war themes. But the theme of the show was the moral ambiguity in cold war grand strategy. In every episode, Drake has to outsmart really bad guys, but he usually has to make moral compromises to do it. In one episode, he has to leave behind an innocent girl who trusted him as a prisoner in some Eastern bloc gulag. Circumstances leave him no choice, and the bitter taste of that is the last moment of that week's episode. That is really TV drama, and huge bouncing bubble gum balls chasing McGoohan along the beach in Prisoner can't compare.
McGoohan also played Longshanks in Brave Heart, the ruthless English king. By the end of the movie I decided that the Scots pretty much deserved what they got. McGoohan was the real thing.
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