It’s always Pride Month of a kind in the Village. Credit: YouTube
It’s a place with no history and no identity of its own. It has no nationality. It could be anywhere. Its citizens repeat cheery slogans to each other instead of having conversations. They’re forever staging oddly joyless ‘celebrations’, parading in circles through the streets waving rainbow-striped flags, cheering and clapping. They live in fear of saying the wrong thing, not joining in, and being declared ‘unmutual’ by a mysterious, unaccountable committee.
But this isn’t Britain in 2020. It’s the Village, the very unusual prison that a secret agent played by Patrick McGoohan is banged up in (and forever trying to bust out of) in the 1967 ITV adventure series The Prisoner. The Village is portrayed on screen by Portmeirion, the quite beautiful and grand architectural folly in North Wales created by eccentric millionaire Clough Williams-Ellis, and still doing very nicely as a tourist attraction and hotel. It’s an amazing place, on screen and off.
In the decades following its original transmission, The Prisoner seemed a gaudy curiosity, and very, very much of its time. It’s got the clashing brightness of much early colour TV; a jarring half-jazz, half-guitar pop score; and a jumpy, psychedelic mise-en-scene. It clearly belonged to a very particular paranoid Cold War moment; a colossally expensive remake in 2009 starring Ian McKellen seemed totally irrelevant to the modern world, and died a death. The original lived on only as a cult series, remembered more for the nostalgia value of its vivid iconography than anything else.
McGoohan’s character (known as ‘Number Six’) is permanently angry, or at least tensed up — there’s nobody he can relax or speak normally with. This gives the show an intense, unrelenting atmosphere that makes it heavy going for some viewers. There are many things The Prisoner shares with The Good Place, but chirpy, flirty banter isn’t one of them. The thing most people know about the show is ‘Rover’, the giant white balloon which patrols the Village, roaring and heavy-breathing, and which often smothers McGoohan back into line to the accompaniment of frantic bongos and detuned electric guitars.
You’re never quite sure whether Rover is meant to be funny, frightening, a bit of both or neither. It’s a quality that sums The Prisoner up. To most people it seems, or seemed, a typically naff bit of meandering, a product of the time that also served up the Beatles’ rambling, almost unwatchable, TV film Magical Mystery Tour.
But over the last few years, as the public sphere of Western society has taken a very odd and unexpected turn, I couldn’t help thinking more and more of The Prisoner, and specifically the Village. While The Prisoner shares many concerns with Nineteen Eight-Four, it now seems that McGoohan (who co-created it, and wrote and directed many of the episodes) got it more right than Orwell — and did so in a Sunday night mainstream TV show with ad breaks, punch-ups and dolly birds.
The Village is just the backdrop to thriller stories that are inventive and unusual, though they’re recognisably of the same genre as Ian Fleming or Len Deighton. There’s a whole futuristic underground base beneath the Village of the kind Sean Connery is always blowing up. And on its surface level The Prisoner works as a spy story with a unique twist, Bond transplanted into a totally oppositional setting. But that backdrop now seems by far the most striking and relevant thing about it.
Unlike the shoddy goods and deprivation of Airstrip One in Nineteen Eight-Four, the Village is an affluent society, an apparently quite attractive place to be. It’s certainly not a communist hellhole; no cage was ever more gilded. Consumer goods are plentiful, all branded with the Village’s meaningless penny farthing logo. People are punctiliously polite and convivial until the very moment somebody (and it’s almost always McGoohan) starts asking questions or strikes a sour note. Then they either evade, pretend not to hear, get nervous, or run away. “A still tongue makes a happy life” and “Questions are a burden to others” are two of the Village’s often-parroted slogans at these moments. Inquiries about the location or history of the Village are particularly unwelcome — it’s just ‘very cosmopolitan’ and ‘international’.
There are regular applause sessions for “valued members of the community” — “they do a marvellous job!” Art is there merely to reproduce Village symbols, and has no value as beautiful or diverting in and of itself. Even sport and play are ideological: there’s ‘kosho’, a bizarre hybrid involving baseball gloves, helmets and trampolines, or human chess, which is monitored in case anybody makes a suspiciously individualistic move.
The parades and festivities are never-ending. It’s always Pride Month of a kind in the Village. A particularly good example is ‘Appreciation Day’, the climax of which is the unveiling — to much hooraying — of a stone monument that says simply ‘Achievement’.
And the Village is nothing if not progressive — at one point, during the election campaign, Chief Administrator Number 2 ends a stump speech by calling, “We know what we must do! What must we do?” A lackey holds up a board reading “PROGRESS” and the crowd dutifully chants it back. The recent ‘Progress Pride’ flag — updated to be even more inclusive, and displayed on the Twitter profile of the House Of Commons, for heaven’s sake — features a large red umbrella that’s so Village it’s hard to believe it wasn’t intentional.
Definitely the most eyebrow-raising episode in our current times is ‘A Change Of Mind’, in which McGoohan’s character is cancelled by a mob of ‘public-minded citizens’. A particularly heinous anti-social misdemeanour sparks this cancellation: he builds his own gym equipment and refuses to use the Village sports facilities. But this offence is merely a pretext. He’s taken before a ‘committee of social affairs’ and makes the very unwise move of mocking it.
Other miscreants who comply with the committee are made to give tearful public apologies (written for them) to the mob, including lines like “They’re right, of course, I’m inadequate!” The next stage is to attend a young people’s denouncing session, a kind of HR sensitivity course, which McGoohan sends up — at which point he is officially posted as ‘unmutual’, has his social credit removed, is officially shunned and marched up to the hospital to be ‘cured’ by a lobotomy.
The recent sight of Peter Hitchens being pursued down the street by placard-waving, slogan-chanting students was uncannily similar to the pursuit of McGoohan the unmutual by the marching mob. All it needed was the balloon to set the whole thing off.
Peter Hitchens strolling along so nonchalantly while a student mob harangues him makes for marvellous viewing. pic.twitter.com/x2O5Uamt0L
— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) June 17, 2020
I get the feeling the Village is very much where the elite institutions of our society want us to end up — a progressive, international community with no past and no sense of place, where we celebrate continually, avoid debate and difficult facts with mantras, reward non-conformity with ‘re-training’, and punish ‘Unmutuals’ with mobs. There is a large, and growing, blob of pure Village throughout our public life, and it’s seeping into our private lives too. Can you trust everybody in your DMs?
As Number 2 says of the Village in the episode ‘The Chimes Of Big Ben’: “What, in fact, has been created? An international community! A perfect blueprint for world order … this is the pattern for the future.” I remember when that line sounded a bit on-the-nose and quaint.
Can The Prisoner go back to being dated and irrelevant? Please?
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SubscribeOnce again kudos to Ian Birrell and fellow journalists for doggedly pursuing this story. You are doing a public good even if you do not receive the recognition you deserve.
There is something funny and surreal in this article. The author is forced to document every little step in the chain of evidence even when the weight of evidence clearly points in one direction.
How much more proof do we need that there was an attempt to cover up even the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan virus lab? I guess it depends on who the ‘we’ is in that question. For people at the highest reaches of US and Chinese (and UK) science who want to cover their own tracks, I suppose the answer is there can never be enough proof.
Thank you for this article and the hard work put in. I am sure that many of us who were called ‘conspiracy theorists’ for being sceptical of the accounts of governments, global organisations like the WHO, aligned ‘interested’ scientists working for many large organisations, big tech and corporate media, big pharmaceuticals and the like – now feel almost proud to be ‘conspiracy theorists’.
I would rather be labelled a “conspiracy theorist” and keep my integrity rather than give in and follow the delusional “naive realists” down the easy road of “the science”, that’s for sure. The problem is that the majority of people, including (in fact, in particular) highly formally educated people, sadly don’t seem to be able or willing to do that. We are facing a crisis of truth and meaning, and it is not going well.
Well said. I’m in much the same mind.
Birrell is full on establishment. Ex speech writer to Cameron, the guy who gave us Libya. Ex deputy editor of the left wing independent.
What he wants you to believe is what the establishment wants you to believe.
How do you square that with his pernicious attitude in digging out the truth of an establishment cover-up over the last couple of years?
Unless you’re contending that it was all an establishment plot to lay an establishment plot that was designed to be uncovered?
I am responding to the article written and not the personal history of the author….
This is what journalism should be.
Fantastic article, proper journalism in action. I pity anyone who clings to the naive belief that whatever is said in a peer reviewed journal is beyond question and necessarily above board. The Drosten protocol, infection fatality rates, effectiveness of lockdown measures, and much more have all been the subject of lies and misinformation published in previously respectable journals. The Lancet, in particular, has been dreadful.
But this how the CCP works – it gets its people into places of influence, it bullies, it intimidates, and it lies, lies, and lies again, through whatever means are its disposal. It has no ethical limits, and absolutely no respect for the truth. It’s ultimately very cowardly – it won’t ever defend its cheating in public, it won’t tolerate dissent, and it knows that its power rests on maintaining deceit.
The sooner more people in the west realise that they – and some in their governments – have been systemically manipulated by this vile, corrupt, despicable regime and its corporate and political allies, the better. The realisation that we have been attacked and tricked in this way will be unpleasant for many – some people just won’t able to process it. But it is now the responsibility of those in leadership positions across our society to put their big boy and girl pants on and start to get grips with this to help us fight this disease of misinformation and reclaim our enlightenment.
It’s worth quoting further paragraphs from Eisenhower’s farewell address, the same one warning of the military-industrial complex:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
It is this process that has rendered science-as-it-is-done completely corruptible. Not to mention subject to the pernicious vagaries of social science and various postmodernisms.
Eisenhower was clearly very prescient. His farewell address should be obligatory reading for every high school and university student, for every academic scientist, for every employee of government science funding agencies, and lastly for every politician. Perhaps that would put a stop to the “follow the science” sheep which sin’t science but scientism (a fanatical religious belief), and restore open scientific/medical debate within academia and medicine.
I became aware of this sometime ago. He said this in 1961, long before the massive explosion in technology. I wonder what he would say if he could see what has happened.
Yet again it is clear that academia are utterly servile to those who fund their research and entirely feckless about who funds their research.
Why do we give these “experts” such credence without first invalidating any who have received payment from an actor in the issue at hand?
That’s right. Follow the money. Applies also to climate research.
Absolutely great article. I agree with every word. Really what needs to happen is that a number of these so-called top scientists should be arrested and charged with treason. Perhaps a little bit overboard but it would certainly provide a lesson and example to others that using letters and esteemed academic/government positions of authority after one’s name does not give one license to knowingly disseminate propaganda at the behest of an aggressive foreign power.
Great article, hope there’s more to come on this issue.
However, I’ve long had great scepticism about the moral compass of science. I’d go so far as to say ethics fly out of the window when scientists think they are doing work ‘at the edge’.
In what mad world would a scientist deliberately take bat viruses from a habitat (where they coexist with the population) and remove them to a lab, then grow and engineer them to be more dangerous? Oh yes, the mad world of science.
It’s no surprise that scientists can be motivated by money, power and ego. Have we, however, by our deification of science enabled this to happen?
We have Covid to thank for showing us the spectacle of UK members of SAGE and NERVTAG fighting with each other publicly like rats in a sack. Sorry, that’s disrespectful to rats. But it shows that scientists are human, not gods.
If I was being pessimistic, I’d say that science will be the death of us. Anybody who has read Justin Cronin’s The Passage will surely agree.
I really want to disagree with you, science should not have to cleave to morals (morals beings fragile and changeable). But science is conducted by people and people are always partisan and easily corrupted, sad to say. Corruptis optimi pessima.
I just get my membership because of article like that! This is journalism, research, professionalism and base on the facts! Well done!
The WHO investigator says a Chinese scientist may have started the pandemic after being infected with coronavirus while collecting bat samples in the field. Whether they will count this as zoonotic transmission or a lab leak is unclear?
What is all this building up to mean in a court of civil law?
Will I be able to join some class action lawsuit in getting my losses paid back by China? Is the 10 Trillion, or whatever it ends up being, wasted by the USA on covid response going to be paid back? My guess is no –
Affirmation of the presentation by Nicholas Wade that tore aside a tight curtain. Clearly much more evidence of the attempts to counter the leak hypothesis. Wade was the first to note dangerous research done at lowered safety levels. The research may or may not be critical to mankind, but if done at all, it must be done responsibly.
One item that seems critical is the fact that this research often results in patents with potential financial gain involved. Given how money corrupts, we might need to alter the patent system for discoveries vital to heath. Some research relates to patents that if public funds are involved should be public property. Scientists employed by the public should be allowed no interest in those public patents.
Thanks for your report. We’ll keep an eye on it. Obviously, vigilance in thorough reporting on these events/issues will not recede until many more questions are sufficiently answered in a manner that is beyond dispute.
Thank you. I an a conspiracy theorist of course. Who else would read such journalism?