EXTRAORDINARY CRIMES AGAINST THE PEOPLE AND THE STATE
Read to the Indianapolis Literary Club  February 3, 1990
George W. Geib

It may come as a surprise to those who were required to live through them, but the 1960's are now enjoying a great revival.  Whether your interests lie in domestic dissent, foreign violence, or the curious musical forms that arise out of either of those, the early 1990's promise to be a time of nostalgia for many.

If that's the case, one area that we undoubtedly won't be able to exclude from our retrospective look will be television.  Thanks to the marvels of forty channel cable, and to the paucity of the current program offerings of the major networks, we can often enjoy seeing a number of the big eye's old offerings if we're willing to forgo southern preaching and western auctioneering at odd hours of both day and night.

Most of the re-runs are fun if you're interested in seeing what a small cohort of Malibu beach home owners thought the republic looked like in those not too distant days.  But every now and then you run across a show that breaks the mold, and commands more than passing attention.

My vote for the most interesting of these are the ones that leap out precisely because they didn't portray the world as if it were an extension of upper middle class southwestern California.  And among those alternatives, the work of British television producers stands.  The redcoat invasion, circa 1965, is one of the key moments in the development , and the diversification, of modern American broadcasting.

We shouldn't, I suppose, call it a redcoat invasion, however, because, it started just before the mass market introduction of color television receivers -- and many of the offerings that you'll encounter on the rerun channels will remain in what the English call "monochrome" until Ted Turner catches up with them.   One of the key British stars of the era, Patrick MacNee, tells in his memoirs of never seeing himself in "tint" until he watched one of his  shows in a sports bar during a Palm Springs vacation.

I don't intend to argue, by the way, that the shows we're going to talk about represent the first time that audiences encountered a British accent.  The higher salaries of American broadcasting have long lured the British entertainer to our shores, as any number of images and caricatures in American television will attest.  Many, in fact, followed a path that led from London to Los Angeles by way Toronto, where the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) performed a marriage of British and North American forms.  But the idea of letting an entire European program series reach the American viewing public is an innovation of the middle 1960's -- and one that I invite you to join me in reviewing.

Our story, however, will better begin if we go back in time a few years to London to ask what the British themselves were watching as the decade opened.  One answer, which should come as no surprise to any paperback reader, is that they loved adaptations of those mystery-action-adventures that they like to call thrillers.  With titles like Danger Man, they performed many of the same mythic roles for British society that westerns did for us.  One of the better received was a show that used the oft-successful format of mixing professions:  Police Surgeon.  It starred a tall, handsome, young man named Ian Hendry, who built a reputation for projecting innocent good looks and British justice across the screen -- and who earned as his reward the opportunity, when the series ended, to co-star in a new vehicle that A. B. C., the Associated British Corporation (later Thames Television), was planning.

The Associated group had taken note of the remarkable success in the early 1960's of a particular thriller format -- the secret agent presented by Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, legitimized by John Kennedy's endorsement of Fleming as a favorite author, and popularized in Sean Connery's early 007 films.  Eager to shift the format to television, the producers of Police Surgeon conceived a show that would combine Hendry, reprising his medical detective's role, with a new cloak and dagger man.  For the latter role the producers turned to an experienced actor and emerging producer of documentaries on world leaders, named Patrick MacNee.

Each actor's character in the series received a name and a description for his character.  Hendry's was David Keel, a young doctor who had been projected into the world of crime and espionage to seek retribution for the murder of his wife.  MacNee's was John Steed, a shadowy agent whose task was to punish those whose crimes against the government eluded normal authority.  The series title, The Avengers, defined their common meeting ground.

It was a comment on the producers' initial target audiences that the early shows of the series were shown only in England’s industrial midlands.   From the start, it was a success on British television.  But it was a success that could clearly be traced to the door of MacNee, who artfully turned John Steed into a national hero.  MacNee's character was the ultimate secret agent: trained in the lethal arts to the point where he could kill with a finger’s blow or the tip of an umbrella,  impeccably attired in elegant Regency and Edwardian fashions, and as quick with his wits and his repartee as he was with his actions.  The plots were classic thrillers, in which the Avengers defeated everything from corrupt dock workers to neo-Nazi doctors, murderous bigamists, industrial saboteurs, and assorted arsonists, assassins, and blackmailers.

Hendry tried gallantly to hold his own, and most critics say he managed well for the first year.  But the handwriting was on the wall (or, should one say, the crawler was on the screen?).  In any event, a lengthy actor's strike at the end of the season offered a convenient reason, and Hendry disappeared into the world of the cinema, leaving the series to MacNee.

With Hendry gone, the producers found themselves faced with  the challenge of finding a new co-star.   Uncertain just how to proceed, they experimented with three alternatives in the second London season.  The first was to continue the doctor's role with a new actor, Ian Rollison, who played three shows as Dr. Martin King.  The second was to copy the popular American series, Peter Gunn, and pair Steed with a nightclub entertainer.  Julie Stevens accordingly played the role of Venus Smith in five episodes.  The third, and ultimately the successful, was to cast the co-star as a feminist lead, a role in which Honor Blackman ultimately succeeded in the role of Cathy Gale.

Blackman's character tells you much about how British television projected feminism twenty-five years ago.  Consistent with MacNee's character, she was an independent, educated, articulate woman, able to engage in repartee with both John Steed and a wide range of villains.  Simultaneously, she was an active crime fighter, with a special skill in judo-karate.  Finally she was a trend-setter in popular women's fashions.  The series' designers, taking full advantage of the shift in fashion that was bringing the leather look to Britain, clad her in a range of leather boots, jump suits, and culottes that both created an "Avengers" look in fashion and triggered an interesting range of kinky fan mail to Blackman.

Ever attentive, however, to the family audiences of early TV, the series downplayed the sado-masochist implications of the role, and instead concentrated upon developing the snappy dialogue, which carried over into two very successful seasons.  In the process the series began to move up the socio-economic scale, abondoning the world of world of crime -- with its business and industrial locations
-- for a new world of aristocratic parties, diplomatic receptions, wine tastings, costume balls, and high tech laboratories.  Criminals increasingly became shadowy figures who would have felt at home on the pages of an Eric Ambler novel, or became government and corporate leaders led astray by the tastes and trappings of power.

Then, the cinema struck.  Blackman -- who had been earning a hundred quid a week -- was offered a six figure contract and the female lead in the third of the James Bond films.  She promptly departed the series to assume the role of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.  The producers of The Avengers  had to head back to central casting to find an actress who could carry over the Blackman role -- educated, physical, and fashionable -- with minimal adaptation.  The choice was Diana Rigg; her character's name was Emma Peel.

Rigg's character was younger, her fashion less leathery, and her martial art  of kung fu so carefully choreographed it was designed by a ballet coach.  But the role was essentially unchanged -- so much so that she would eventually remake several of the Blackman episodes without significant changes in setting, characters, or dialogue.

The major change of the fourth season was the intended market of the series.  During its first three years, The Avengers had sought a British audience -- and had done so with the use of the locations the British so often consider exotic:  Africa, Buenos Aires, the West Indies, Hong Kong,  Paris, and the jet set bars and hotels of London.  But now the series sought a new market: America.  Convinced they could sell the series to the Yanks, the production team made a series of key changes.

First, at the technical level,  they adopted the American system of television broadcast, involving a greater lines on the projection screen (the British system precluded direct American broadcasts, and helps to explain why the Blackman shows so long failed to appear in American syndication).  Simultaneously, the producers shifted from video-tape to film, with its superior theatrical quality.

Second, they brought the series home to Britain, attempting to fill each episode with everything that might remind an American audience of popular images of the British Isles.  Street names became veddy British, starting with Steed's new address at Five Westminster Mews.  Stylish British cars, potty British characters, high British fashions, low British pubs, old British castles, and new British technology burst from the screen.

Finally, humor and fantasy took on a much more central role.  The old leather look survived long enough for the series to produce two stylish whip and bondage shows (which waited over a decade to make it to America), while the new look and approach became apparent in titles such as the Maneater of Surrey Green, the Superlative Seven, the Girl from Auntie, and Mission: Highly Improbable.  It's hard to imagine Ian Hendry fighting a killer nanny in a nursery, or dueling with the Caped Avenger on the side of high rise office.  And Cathy Gale was never tied to a railroad track in front of a speeding miniature steam train, or asked to wear a diaphanous nightie and walk through the backlit dungeons of Castle De'ath late at night.

Eventually, America's ABC (not the Associated British Corporation) purchased thirteen of the twenty-six British shows as a summer series to run in 1966.  Predictably, fantasy-oriented plots predominated, while a few more changes were added in the process of reaching the American public.

Concerned that audiences might misunderstand the series title, they cut a special opening sequence -- never seen in Britain -- that featured the stars sipping champagne on a stylish chessboard as the announcer reported that "Extraordinary Crimes Against the People and the State Must Be Avenged by Agents Extraordinary.  Two Such agents are John Steed, Top Professional, and his partner, Emma Peel, Talented Amateur -- Together Known as The Avengers."  Clever summary tag lines that subtitled each show  were dropped.  The Yanks never learned that the Girl From Auntie, for example, originally read, "Steed Almost Outbids Himself, and Emma is a Bird in a Gilded Cage".  Nor did "A Sense of History" retain the report "In which Steed dons a gown, Emma becomes a don".

Most important, the series was picked up for thirteen new episodes -- provided they were shot in color, to conform to the shift that occurred that year in prime time programming.  British audiences, still using black and white, were compensated that a total of 26 of the color episodes were shot.

The fifth series saw the continued emphasis upon style, fantasy, and humor, combined with what most consider its best writing and snappiest dialogue.  Most fans consider it the essential year of the program, and it is these shows that you are most likely to see on the rerun channels.   For those who have only time for one show, I recommend "Epic", "In which Steed catches a falling star, and Emma makes a movie".  It features our heroine kidnapped by a group of over-the-hill film producers, headed by the crazed Z. Z. von Schnerk, who are intent upon producing The Destruction of Emma Peel, filled with every cliche of the early epic cinema and restrained only by the fact that they have no extras for the crowd scenes.

Both ABC’s, however, remained skeptical of the willingness of American audiences to enjoy British style and humor, and with the possibility of renewal up in the air, Rigg followed Blackman into the James Bond cinema where she suffered the cruel fate of playing opposite the weakest of the James Bond actors, George Lazenby.

For one last time the producers looked for a new heroine, and in some haste gave the role to an untried young actress named Linda Thorson.  Thorson proved more successful in fighting villains than who did in controlling her weight or reading her dialogue.  I quote MacNee:  "During rehearsals for what would be The Avengers' sixth season, I cracked a couple of ribs. In an attempt to throw Linda through a wondow, I'd folded up under the weight of this delicious weight".   The problem was intially met by the use of a strong cast of supporting actors, including John Cleese in an inspired role as a bureaucrat charged with maintained the face of every clown in the kingdom, painted on raw eggs.  It wasn't enough to secure renewal, and the series limped to a conclusion.

It's interesting that the one exception to that sad evaluation was in France, where the series, affectionately retitled "black bowlers and brown boots" developed a cult following -- and even generated funding for an ill-fated attempt at revival in the mid-1970's called The New Avengers.  The less said of that, where the style survived but the supporting characters and snappy dialogue did not, the better.

If The Avengers was the first British series picked up by prime time American television, it was not the only one.  Two years later another series that also utilized the secret agent format joined it, suggesting more of the possibilities inherent in the thriller format.

Here the key figures were Independent Television producer Lew Grade (since created Lord Grade) and his  most successful actor, Patrick McGoohan.  They had first worked together in the early 1960's on a fairly standard thriller series called Danger Man that employed the American-born and Irish-educated McGoohan in a series of plots involving him with the implementation of British policy around various locations at home and on the continent.  The series enjoyed limited popularity in the early 1960's, went out of production for over a year, and then returned in the mid-1960's to achieve sudden success.

Everyone disagrees as to the change in fortunes:
 -- Grade, ever the businessman, attributed it to the improved marketing that achieved both syndication on the continent and a better time slot at home.
  -- McGoohan, an emerging creative talent who took an increasing hand in the writing and rewriting of the plots, claimed it had more to do with the growing complexity of the lead character, John Drake.  McGoohan increasingly used the series to explore the psychological effects upon the individual of working outside the normal channels of government and law. Simultaneously he asked the effect upon government of using the secret agent and his methods to achieve the aims of a democratically elected government.

Given both the rapid market penetration of television and the uncertainties of politics in the Cold War, each theory is plausible.  Those who would like to judge the latter can do so by watching the portion of the Danger Man series that achieved American syndication with a new title and theme song as Secret Agent.

In either event, the series was two weeks into its production for the 1966 run when McGoohan approached Grade and proposed a radical change in direction.  Danger Man was to end production, to be replaced by a new  series for which McGoohan had already prepared half a dozen scripts.  The new program, for which Grade was asked to provide a significant increase in budget, would involve McGoohan in a very different kind of danger.

His new character was to be a British government agent recently -- and angrily -- resigned from the service for reasons unstated.   Returning home to his flat, he was to be gassed unconscious and transported to one of the most unusual internment camps ever envisioned, the Village.  There, under the pressure of his captors he was to subjected to a variety of trials and tests designed to make him reveal his reasons for resignation -- and to test his powers of personal survival.   Titled appropriately, The Prisoner, it was originally intended to replace Danger Man for its 26 week production schedule.

The Prisoner reflects greater creative control by a single individual than most television productions have ever considered.   Beyond conceiving the idea, McGoohan served as executive producer throughout the series,  starred in the title role, authored three episodes, directed three others, composed the incidental and theme music, designed a number of sets, props, and costumes, and selected the film site location.

The introductory credits to each episode repeated a series of scenes graphically depicting the resignation and abduction of the unnamed protagonist, normally to be followed by a scene in which the prisoner, called Number Six, would awaken to confront one of the fifteen actors and actresses who played the camp administrator, called Number Two, during the series.  This dialogue, with minor variations, then followed:

Where am I?
In the Village.
Who are you?
I am the new Number Two.
What do you want?
Information.
Whose side are you on?
That would be telling.  We want information.
Who Is Number One?
You are Number Six.
I am not a number, I am a free man.
Number Two's cynical laughter then followed.

The interchange set the recurrent tension of each story, as Number Six  then confronted the Village administrators -- sometimes to undermine their authority, more frequently to attempt escape.  The escape shows are usually high on the list of fan favorites, including one called "The Chimes of Big Ben" in which he follows a route similar to an escape from the Iron Curtain, only to find himself transported to the Village rather than London; and "Many Happy Returns",  in which he makes it his London superiors only to be placed upon a reconnaissance plane to find the Village and then find himself ejected, with parachute, over the site.

There remains to this day some question as to what McGoohan's ultimate plans for the series were.  He was working in an era when a British series normally ran for 26 programs, and Grade has repeatedly indicated he intended to work within that framework.  The original production schedule called for two thirteen week blocs.   In practice, however, the series ultimately extended to only seventeen episodes.  McGoohan has since, reflecting subsequent television developments, referred to his proposal to Grade as a mini-series.   Certainly McGoohan started with no more than seven script ideas (in some interviews he has said six, or even five), and was clearly running out of both creative and physical energy by the time the series reached a dozen episodes.   Time constraints forced the writers to create one entire episode in which the Prisoner left his body -- thus allowing another actor to play the role while McGoohan labored to meet other production deadlines.  At least one (and probably two) of the later episodes were obvious reworkings of scripts originally planned for Danger Man, and each half of the two part concluding episode was written and filmed at widely separated times.  There is, in short, less dramatic unity than one might expect.

Yet the central theme of the individual struggling against powers that are at once very immediate and very vague runs throughout.  Much of the appeal of the series was, and is, the fact that one was never certain -- even with the closing credits of the final episode -- where the loyalties of any individual truly lay, or what the ultimate identity of the shadowy organization that had kidnapped the Prisoner really was.   McGoohan populated his episodes with characters who were never quite what they seemed, sometimes assisting him only to prove to be agents of Number Two, sometimes opposing him in the belief that he was himself an agent of the Village supervisors.

The Village itself supported this dramatic tension.  McGoohan was wonderfully vague in locating it.  In two different escape attempts it appeared to be on the coast of Morocco,  or on the Baltic near Estonia.  Yet its climate and culture -- and the concluding episodes -- made it appear to lie somewhere within southern Britain.  In actuality,  the exterior scenes were shot at one of the most unusual locations in Britain, the Portmeiron resort on the north coast of Wales.  The resort was everything a good "folly" should be:  picturesque, with rugged hills, forest, and sand and shingle beach, and with a variety of individual guest houses that copied varied period and national styles of architecture.   Yet the central appeal of the Village lay in its daily life.  Outwardly it was relaxed and cheerful as that of any resort in the world, its inhabitants clad in gay holiday styles with multicolored capes and beach umbrellas.  Yet inwardly each person was stressed by the presence of Number Two's organization.  The series delighted in using everyday objects in unusual settings that suggested symbols of power and deception.  McGoohan, for example, repeatedly used images of chess, white against black, to reinforce the tension of village life and to give setting to his dramatic characters.

He also serviced his Village with a technology that seemed at once benign and hostile.   The technical gadgetry of the 1960's was readily available as servant to man, yet the deeper science  was clearly hostile to him.  Perhaps the most disturbing image was Rover -- a large white floppy balloon that seemed to arise from the ocean depths and move with an independent, conscious, and hostile power along the borders of the Village, capturing and often soullessly killing fugitives while howling inhumanly.

McGoohan portrayed the British government in a similar light.  On the one hand, his hero regularly sought upon escaping, to reach a government office and report the existence of the Village.   Yet each of his escape attempts appeared to be foiled in part by well placed government officials who worked with the Village's administrators to return him to his captivity.  It is filled with 1960's statements about western political culture.  If one were to watch only one episode I would recommend "Free for All".  It's a clever satire on politics, in which the Prisoner is offered the opportunity to run for election as the new Number Two.   He begins by articulating the philosophy of individualism, and gets nowhere.  Then, with the aid of some electroshock therapy, he behaves in a delightful caricature of the media politician, and, of course, wins overwhelming -- only to discover, as you'd expect, that the system never changes even if the players do.

Most important, McGoohan placed his own character in that same light.  As he was fond of saying in press interviews, Number Six is the only cardinal number that takes on a clear, but different, meaning when placed upside down.  His character was often seen by other villagers and some Number Twos as a plant by higher authority.  He cast one show in which a mirror image of himself represented Village authority, and, most important, in the final episodes he assumed the role of Number One.  Most Prisoner fans now accept that the answer to "Who is Number One?" should be read  not "You are Number Six," but "You are, Number Six".

Of course, if prisoner and captive are the same, the Prisoner's defense of individualism in the face of harrowing pressures and tortures -- both physical and psychological -- takes on a new and different meaning than appeared to many who saw the early episodes as a clean struggle between light and dark.  One can instead argue that McGoohan's political commentaries move to a very different place on the political spectrum.

Clever as it was, the format was also self-limiting.  There are only so many ways to escape from a prison, and only so many ways to express individual dissent in the face of arbitrary authority.  By the time the first series of 13 programs was over, the show was already experimenting with ways to maintain the conflict without using the Village setting.   One possibility was to shift the internal shots from their bland London location -- a set on which the Dirty Dozen had been shot -- to new sets designed by McGoohan to illustrate his theme of "science out of control".  Several followed, including a particularly somber series of medical torture chambers and computer control booths.  Yet as often as not, the potential of those locations seemed to be lost.  In one scene, for example, the Prisoner's travels took him past the balloon-like Rover, sitting immobile and surrounded by a group of human acolytes in Zen-like meditation.   The dramatic possibilities seem obvious, yet the establishing shot was never exploited.

The series also briefly followed the path of high fantasy, twice projecting the hero into dream-like or drug-induced settings.  One, in a mythical western town, forced the hero, now a sheriff, to wrestle unarmed with the organized violence building around him.   The other, framed as a fairy tale in a remote lighthouse, forced him to avoid nuclear devastation by wrestling with a series of villains costumed from the Napoleonic era.  The sets were clever, and the allusions to contemporary politics well developed, but eventually dismissed in the shows as dream sequences or children's stories.

I've suggested that the problems besetting The Prisoner were essentially creative.  We know that McGoohan was worn out by the experience, and to be frank, has never really recovered the drive he showed with the series.  His later films have been few and far between, and most have evoked little critical applause.  We also know that others on the production team were becoming troubled by their association with the series, notably the script editor, George Markstein, who has waged a twenty year fight in the media with McGoohan over which man was the source of many of the ideas in the show.

Yet I would suggest that the problem goes far deeper than these, to the very source of the inspiration for this series.  With due apologies to George Orwell and other dystopians of the high culture, The Prisoner, like The Avengers, is firmly rooted in the tradition of the thriller.  It works best when it captures the mythic values of its culture, and worst when it attacks them.  Its hero, the most secretive of agents, succeeds when he entertains and fails when he pontificates.  By the late 1960's the formula itself was wearing thin in Britain, where no amount of technology and no level of personal achievement could hide the withdrawl from east of Suez and the fact that Britain's own place in the world was rapidly shrinking.  What was once a deadly serious business of dealing with dark forces threatening society can quickly yield to mere fantasy when the forces of national power are faltering, as they then were.  The two series succeeded because they were high entertainment, of course, but also because they spoke to the uncertainties of avenging agents in a morally questionable world.  It was a brief moment in time, but one that may say as much about the era of the 1960’s as all the self-congratulatory retrospectives that we're seeing today.