Local Prisoner Group

    A week this coming Thursday will be the first meeting of the {LPG} that's the Prisoner Local Group, at the Hope and Anchor public house. And there'll be plenty to talk about, starting with the Robert Booth biography about the late Patrick McGoohan who died two years ago on the 13th of this month. Two years, is it really as long as that? Anyway I wonder how McGoohan would have taken to this new biography, I suppose the proof of the book will be in the reading, to borrow one particular phrase.
   Roger Langley of Six of One: The Prisoner Appreciation Society, once wrote a so termed biography on Patrick McGoohan, but sadly it read more of an extended filmography than an actual biography, and I'd already got one of those. It will, however, be interesting to read if Robert Booth has got into the soul of the man McGoohan, to see what made him so puritanical, refusing to even kiss a woman on screen for any part he played? What made him so controlling over his work on the Prisoner? I wonder just how much of the man McGoohan Robert Booth has been able to explore? Because I know someone who has been able to carry out research into the young life of McGoohan, and has made discovories which are..........oi, what's the bleeding game? You can't do this......I wasn't doing anything...................and even if I was doing something it's got nothing to do with you ..............Here stop that!
    {I'm sorry readers, but J.P. was about to give the game away, and I'm not ready for such informatuion to be broadcast just yet}
      You can't do this to me, I'm not an imate you know - I'm not a citizen of the village! Now where was I?Talking about books I believe...... yes, I've read some books in my time, on the subject of the Prisoner of course. There have been one or two excellent ones written on the matter of the Prisoner, some indifferent ones, and some that make you wonder if the author or authors had in fact reseached the subject in the first place. The most recent book to be written on the subject of the Prisoner is damned awful.

There it sits on my bookself, two thirds unread, and I think it will remain in that state for some considerable time, if not for all time. The text is printed much too small. There are rudimentory mistakes made about the Prisoner series, and that can be said for the majority of books written about the Prisoner. But what makes this book so bad, is the fact that Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore do not appear to know, or have researched the subject at all! And as for Tim Palgut's book....

A good idea, but in my book, The Village files didn't go far enough! The most two enjoyable novels based on the Prisoner I have read, must be The Prisoner; Who Is Number Two by David McDainel, and Roger Langley's When In Rome. But for complete diversity, and a real enthusiastic read, that has to go to The Prisoner Variations by David A. Stimpson. sadly this book has been out of print these past years, but secondhand copies sell in the region of £35 a copy! I know that Dave's been working on other Prisoner based manuscripts, but thus far has not been able to find a publisher for them. I hope he does soon, as I and fans like me, are waiting eagerly for The Butler Speaks, the most in-depth manuscript to be written on the subject of the Prisoner to date. I know for a fact that Dave took four and a half years to research both the 

Prisoner and all related material. It's his magnus opus, or so he tells me.

I'm Johnny Prisoner