Saturday 8 January 2011

Being Unconventional!

   Hello folks, happy New Year to you. I might have mentioned last time how that I'm attending this years Prisoner convention held at Portmeirion in north Wales. Well I've decided that I'm gong to arrive in the style of No.6. Yes, I'll be wearing my piped blazer, but I'll also be sealed up in a crate which will be addressed to The Prisoner Convention, Hercules Hall, Portmeirion, Gywnedd, North Wales, and hopefully that should do the trick. Well this is how No.6 and Nadia arrived back in an office in London during The Chimes of Big Ben, and how I will arrive at the convention. Imagine the look of surprise on people's faces as the crate is opened and I suddenly burst out! What a brilliant plan.
    It was this time last year, that I was impatiently waiting for the new series of THEPRISONER to appear on television screens here in the United Kingdom. I had seen the adverts on ITV, but is was not until April 2010 before the series hit the television screen. I took to it like a duck to water, because it was something of what I had been half expecting, unlike many of my contemporaries who took an instant dislike to THEPRISONER. I don't know why, because the two series are not so very far removed from each other. I know the views of an old friend who switched off after only watching half an hour of the first episode Arrival and condemned the whole series. Now he'll never know what it was all about, sad really. I thought that he of all people would have given the new serie a fair crack of the whip....oh well.
    I have to say that with the Prisoner my sympathies lay with No.6, but in this case, I'm more inclined to sympathise with Two, perhaps because Ian Mckellen's character Two is stronger than that of Jim Caviezel's Six. Six is more subtle than his predecessor, as indeed is the whole series of THEPRISONER, not so full in your face as the original, and that I find more intriguing. As for Two, he's got a bent and twisted mind.......I bet he was put on the potty side-ways, and that made him want to sleep with his mother, which he probably did.
   In the new series there's no escape from the village, well its surrounded by desert for miles and miles in all directions. Whilst in the original series it was suggested that death was an escape. That the Rook once said that he'd die one day and beat them all. Well that idea is carried on and developed in THEPRISONER, by suffering a 'village death' one escapes the village to return to that 'other place' from which you came, in a previous life. So if 93, who I believe is the former No.6 of the original series, but not played by Patrick McGoohan, but John Whitely, died a 'village death,' to what 'other place,' what former life would he have been returned to? I mean there was evidence that he came from London, hence the sketch he drew of St. Stephen's Tower, which houses the bell Big Ben. But 93 was wearing an old style piped blazer as worn in the original series. So, having died a 'village death' out there in the desert in Arrival, did 93 return to his former life in London, or that of a prisoner in the village?.................I wonder if the scriptwriter Bill Gallagher could enlighten me on that score?
I'm Johnny Prisoner

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