Cult TV Blog

The introduction to this series of posts can be found  here. As I stated in the introduction the purpose of these posts is to examine several episodes of Danger Man and The Prisoner in pairs to see how they work and particularly to identify any structure. So I have identified the following repeat structure in Koroshi and Shinda Shima, the final episodes of Danger Man, which were also joined together as a film. Koroshi : A Japanese female spy is pursued and killed. B Drake arrives in Tokyo as Edwards. C Potter gives him a record. D The record includes a picture of an emblem. E Drake seeks an explanation of the emblem from an old wise man. Drake meets Rosemary F Rosemary takes Drake to see Nigel Saunders. (Inversion of the going to the wise wo/man motif at E) G Drake is introduced to the death cult through the very heavy hint of a koroshi murder scene. H A man tries to kill Drake. I Drake saves Rosemary from a murder attempt. J The purpose of the death brotherhood is to end rule by t...

I have been prompted to watch this episode by a new comment posted on my  original post  on this episode. It has been some time since I have watched many Danger Man episodes and have also not watched through The Prisoner lately so wanted to revisit what I thought before. When I started this blog I had an ongoing fear that I would find I had blogged about all the interesting shows and run out of things to say. This no longer frightens me because I now realise that good TV can be watched repeatedly and bring different things to mind. In my first post I decided to take the view that this episode was a true precursor of The Prisoner. This time round the episode has made me think differently, purely because of the opening scene of the car crash. It is evident that Drake of course works for an organisation. And this has taken my train of thought two ways. The first is that the opening scenes remind me of the Avengers episode, The Hour That Never Was. Visually they are incredibl...

I was sure I had blogged about this, but if I have I can't find it. This is the last black and white Danger Man episode and it's a stunner. For a start the human chameleon John Drake becomes the cool DJ Johnny Drake, or JD. How cool is that? For another the setting is about as groovy as you could want. At the time we didn't have many licensed radio stations in the UK and the inability of the BBC stations to cater to the audience for pop music led to a proliferation of pirate radio stations. Naturally pirate radio continues, but the setting places the episode firmly in the latest trends in 1960s Britain. Many of these stations were based off shore to take advantage of a legal loophole, but this Danger Man sets Radio Jolly Roger on the  Red Sands Sea Forts  in the Thames estuary. They are still there and an internet search demonstrates loads of nostalgia for their time as several pirate radio stations. That's right, the uber-cool Danger Man series recorded an episode...

Back to one of the classic themes for TV in the 1960s for this episode of Danger Man - namely the danger inherent in our modern technology if it is not handled correctly. In fact I love the way this show starts: the sequence showing the children trespassing in the virus research establishment is very effective and suggests right at the start that the doubtless deadly viri being researched in the establishment are not being looked after properly. Of course in this case there are potentially deadly consequences. It is strange but I have repeatedly watched all of the episodes of Danger Man (although not recently) and had no recollection of the amount of what we might call spy technology used in the show. Once again the ambivalent 1960s attitude to technology where it can both be our saviour and destroyer if it gets into the wrong hands. In this episode the spy technology used by Drake is a bug which he fires from an umbrella and which attaches itself to the lintel of a room opposite. This...

There are two subjects I keep returning to in my witterings here. One is the way in which these 1960s TV shows encapsulate the interests and concerns of their time. The other is the way in which their production is dictated by the technology of the time. Both are points which have great impact on this episode of Danger Man. Let's face it, if Judgement Day were to be remade nowadays it would look radically different, and the fact it is as convincing as it is, is a great testimony to the TV makers of the time. The opening scenes of the making of the bomb are completely studio-bound, and then stock footage is used for the externals of the airport, before returning to the studio for Drake's encounter with an 'official' who changes his travel plans abruptly. At the time this was the ordinary technology used in so many of these shows and in the restored boxed set I have, the seam between studio and stock footage is seamless. Similarly the subject is very much of the time. I h...

I don't usually do plot synopses - one of the reasons I started this blog is that the internet is heavy on description of classic TV shows & short on analysis, but I just feel a synopsis would be helpful here, so here is the one from IMDB: 'In Sophia, Bulgaria, a fellow agent has been picked up for interrogation, and Drake has to go in and get him out before he talks. Meridith (Norman Rosway) can only stand just so much, and upon arrival, Drake must act quickly. He is hampered at every turn by the secret police, as well as the attention of a young female interpreter (Jane Merrow) who has suspicions of her own about Drake's real motives. He manages to get to the roof of the police building and toss a gas cannister into the building's air intake vent, then breaks in, locates a groggy Meredith and hustles him outside to a waiting car. Playing cat-and-mouse wiith the police and his suspicious interpreter, he also has to deal with a delusional Meredith who still suffe...

I was planning a post on the Rik Mayall series Bottom. On balance I'm not sure I would call it cult TV, but nonetheless would recommend it as a jolly good view. I remain to decide on whether to post on Filthy, Rich & Catflap, which nonetheless I would highly recommend as a memorial to Rik Mayall. Meanwhile, back to Danger Man. Oh *how* I love this episode: it is a proper Cold War spy intrigue piece. The plot is relatively simple on the surface: Drake goes on a mission, finds the spy for the Other Side, job done. But it is plainly not that simple on any level. For a start it is evident that not only are spies from Russia present in London, but have even infiltrated into government! That opening scene reminds me of a sscene in The Professionals where Cowley is meeting with Russian agents, playing a gme of intelligence chess with them, to the great annoyance of Bodie & Doyle. It is very plain that the two sides are not completely divided, or even differentiated. I'm qui...

I've skipped over Parallel Lines Do Meet, although its opening beach scene has had me craving the sun so much, rather than our present thundery weather here, that I shall probably return to it. The reason for my jump to this one is it has made me think of the most persuasive evidence I have seen so far that Drake is *not* Number Six. It isn't really in this episode, as such, so perhaps I'd better come clean. I have an addiction. I have sufficient addiction thinking that I'm incredibly proud of it. It is to tobacco. I'm young enough that (in Britain at least) the kind of smoking shown in the opening scene of this episode - lighting up in an enclosed public place - would not have been illegal in Britain for some at least of the time I was smoking, but you'd have been asked to leave. I'm also old enough to remember my dad smoking in a department store & being asked to stop for the reason that it would set the sprinklers off, rather than any other reason. ...

A totally - I suppose unexpected would be the word to describe it - beginning to this Danger Man episode. A scene of archetypal luxury, with a man apparently listening to music from a record player. This scene then opens out to show another man reclining on a bed behind the chair. Once again, all the trappings of luxury - the drapes & the fur on the bed. The music provides the ideal climactic background to the man on the bed shooting the man (to whom he owes money) on the chair, after playing cat & mouse with him for some little time. He leaves the apartment & goes to a car, dropping a scarf on the steps, which he slips on as he returns, managing to get back in the apartment but knocking himself out. How to read this opening in symbolic terms? It could *almost* have a hint of homosexuality about it. Whatever, the man on the bed is plainly louche, a roue, a playboy. He's got it written all over him. It's written all over his flat. His flat is a studio flat, is cle...

This post is having the greatest difficulty seeing the light of day: I would like to blame it on an IT problem, but in reality it's been a me being silly with IT problem. At this point we are approaching halfway through the region 2 box set of longer Danger Man episodes, & I feel this is where the series really gets into its stride. Despite the years it's already been going on, I feel Drake or McGoohan develops a new reassurance in the role, the storiess have a new reassurance: it's as if everything is just falling into place. It's strange, since on the surface this one starts like an episode I wouldn't like of sixties drama: all manana & revolution in Latin America. However straight after the titles it gets into its stride as a Britain-based story of high society corruption. Yet I feel that doesn't begin to describe this episode: it is literally polished on all levels, plot & subplots work together in an engineered way, characterisation is excell...

One of the things I was hoping to happen, when I started blogging about old tv programmes, was that the process would make me think more deeply than is usual about the TV programmes I watch. Television is a terribly seductive medium: it sits in the corner of the room & the remarkable thing is for the most part people pay it no attention at all! Over the past decades it has spread, often into every room in the house, & is on pretty much all the time. Personally I think this is to do it a disservice. I only watch what I want - exclusively either on the internet or DVD. I personally never watch TV when it is actually scheduled. By a focussed attention you begin to realise a lot of the little subliminal tricks that go on, in advertising & so on, when you do watch it. You notice how the images are manipulated. Much of the information that enters our heads is unbidden & designed to work on us insidiously. To turn off from this is to become automatically eccentric, but also...

You'll notice I've side-stepped Colony Three. I will probably write about it at some point, but at this point I want to write about Danger Man as Danger Man, despite the unavoidable Prisoner overtones, caused in large part by my coming to that series first, & also my explicitly writing about Number 6 as John Drake. At some point I will also write about The Prisoner coming from a different viewpoint. Also, this is not a systematic commentary on Danger Man - I'm feeling free to select the episodes I like. The Battle of the Cameras feels quite different, for me, from the episodes where Drake is more-or-less obviously winding up (or being wound up) to resigning. It feels lighter, less spy-like. Perhaps it draws more on the sixties milieu of fascination with all things foreign, just then being opened up affordably to the unwashed masses. This Danger Man - perhaps, I watched them avidly as a child but have found them impossible to watch as an adult - feels more like a Sain...

If Don't Nail Him Yet relied heavily on an unspoken subtext of the agent's personal matters coming into play, this one hinges overtly on the workings of institutions - governments & even the spying game. Specifically, it's about what happens when an individual in an organisation is put out to grass for years & what happens when he becomes his own little outpost. In this episode the tension between Drake & his boss is explicit - he tells him he often overrates his abilities, after asking for a reassurance that a proper team to support him would be in place. This revisits the theme of Drake working in conditions that would lead anyone to get fairly terminally pissed off. It is also evident that Drake isn't the only one in that position - his contact in Beirut describes the difficulty of getting anything she needs, & this is contrasted with sledgehammer subtlety with the resources of the local police. There is a rather obvious moral here - you can only...

I like this episode a lot, for its scenes & for the inside scoop on what Drake's life as an agent is actually like. Rationally, I know that the lives of secret agents must involve a high degree of acting. Stanislavski has nothing on agents' needs to think themselves into a role, & that is what we see Drake doing here. I find this strange connection between the worlds & espionage & the theatre, fascinating. Yet how much more difficult for a spy to maintain a role, often alone, & in circumstances far more threatening than those where the only opposition consists of the public & the critics. The circumstances that give rise to suspicion of Rawson are oddly exactly the same as the question I raised about Drake himself in my last post: the relative opulence of Drake's lifestyle would probably be more easily explained in reality by a lush salary, & presumably covered by some cover story. Rawson's cover story - that he has friends in antiques...

I was prompted by a comment made by Mitchell on itsabouttv.com, when he was writing about the identity of the man in The Prisoner as actually being John Drake. He commented that for him Drake's resignation from the service was - words of the effect of - well on the cards for most of Danger Man as it approached its end. I hadn't thought of Danger Man like that before: it is only really when I worked through The Prisoner episodes recently, that I had made the connection between the two shows that explicit in my mind. I am aware that I have posted here on a few, carefully hand-picked to emphasise the John-Drake-as-Number-6 thing, but have largely ignored the numerous other episodes, so it's high time I got round to them. My posting here has actually worked out to be exactly the way I thought it would be - that it would come in spurts & that I would write multiple posts about one show before abruptly moving on to another show, usually without warning or conclusion. That ...

My last post was actually about the reason the photos vanished: I didn't realise deleting a picasa album would do that, derp. It left only my profile picture. I also talked about deciding what to do about this, & now I have decided: it would be too much to replace all the screenshots, especially as some of them were specific images referred to in posts, so I have replaced the title picture of Steed & Keel, will call the other pictures a loss, & continue from here. I realised too late for inclusion in my last post on an episode of Danger Man in which the actor Martin Miller appears, which I am writing in preparation for the episode of The Prisoner in which he appears, that there is a thoroughly Village way of understanding his character's death in the episode The Lovers. I am downplaying it in this run through The Prisoner because it is not really my main purpose this time, which is to explore the theoretical identification between John Drake & Number 6. It ...