Last time I updated my blog at any length, I was thick with mucus and struggling to make sense of daytime television. Much to my approval that day, I found Patrick McGoohan's seminal creation The Prisoner screening on ITV4.
I first became acquainted with this bizarre little series back in 1992, when its twenty-fifth anniversary was being celebrated with a re-screening on Channel Four. I enjoyed the programme so much that watching it became a weekly ritual, complete with beer and nachos. Would Number Six ever escape his captors in the Village?
Like many viewers during its original screening, I struggled to make sense of The Prisoner when I tried to view it as a conventional drama, but the series' fundamental message, as far as I was concerned, was that mankind should at all costs embrace his freedom of expression and his right to individuality. With this accepted, I realised that everything my father had ever taught me about not following the massed herds; about taking pride in ploughing your own furrow in life, was confirmed in here in glorious Technicolor, with a wicked Ron Grainer theme tune to boot.
Repeated screenings over the past two decades have revealed the series to contain many layers, all waiting to be peeled back like an onion skin. Every time I watch it I learn a new lesson. McGoohan, who will by now be enjoying his 81st summer on this earth, predicted far more about modern society than anything of Orwell's. His bizarre creation may not have made much sense to frustrated viewers, watching in black-and-white on their hired Rediffusion sets back in the 1960s, but watching the classic episode 'Hammer Into Anvil' last week, I was brutally reminded of how this classic series prophecised much of the modern surveillance society.
In the episode, Number Two, the 'democratically-elected' leader of the Village and McGoohan's nemesis, finds his uncompromising interrogation techniques responsible for the death of one of the Village's residents. Number Six vows to avenge the death, and embarks on a campaign of subversion in order to destroy Number Two's mind and cause him to step down.
Here, Six's every move, word, phonecall and action is recorded and continually monitored in case he lets his guard down. In one scene, his voice patterns during two separate recorded conversations are compared in order to make a case for his 'guilt'. McGoohan's eventual victory at the end of the episode is a rare one, and all the more savoury for it.
Today, I read that the Home Office plans to record, from next year, all our emails, phonecalls and texts, all in the interests of national security.
Well then, where, in the name of national security, are the extra police officers we keep being promised? Every day, people are being knifed, mugged and attacked, sometimes for no more than the shoes on their feet or the change in their pocket. How much is all this extra surveillance costing us, if we can't feel safe on our own streets? Don't get me wrong. I have nothing to hide. I am, however, concerned about the basic civil liberty to privacy being grossly breached.
I read all this in a newspaper I found on the train to my beloved capital city London today, which brings me neatly onto the subject of London's "free newspaper" culture. 'Free For All', episode 4 of The Prisoner, sees Number Six being invited to run for election as the new Number Two, and finds the supposedly democratic electing process anything but. The village newspaper (read 'propaganda sheet') foretells Six's victory and tells the Village population continually what to think, and how to vote come election day.
All this reminds me of Associated Newspapers' career assassination of Ken Livingstone, perhaps one of the most passionate and principled politicians of our times. Scarcely a day in April passed by without a snipe at Ken and a thinly-veiled hint to vote for Boris Johnson come May 1st.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnson was hailed as a winner even before the first vote had been cast, something which has caused me to abruptly halt my lifelong habit of buying the London Evening Standard, and strengthened my hatred of the Associated Press stable of reactionary rags like the Daily Mail, which routinely picks on the fat, the unfashionable, the poor, foreigners and anyone who doesn't fit into their quasi-Utopian blueprint for British life, while remaining one of Britain's best-selling newspapers. Hmm, isn't intolerance to others one of the fundamental principles of how wars start?
So how, in what I idealistically like to think is a democratic society and a rationally-thinking world, could a politician with a track record for gaffes like Johnson's get elected? By brainwashing Londoners by giving them free newspapers like the vile London Lite, that's how. Honestly, you could give the job to the kids' puppet Sooty and he'd do a better job.
Well, all you apathetic Londoners, you've got the leader you deserve, and I hope you're happy.
