Secret Agent Man!

In anticipation of a new careful viewing of Patrick McGoohan's significant series The Prisoner, I wanted to steep myself in ways I've not been able to do heretofore. Secret Agent or as it's known in Britain Danger Man is the McGoohan spy show that predates The Prisoner and first presents the super-spy "John Drake" who is almost certainly the same disaffected spy who become the titular "Prisoner". The connection between the two series is thematic for certain but not official, almost certainly due to the complications of ownership rights and suchlike. 

Despite being an immense fan of the Johnny Rivers theme song, I've never actually seen an episode of Secret Agent, and I found them excellent entertainment. (Note: The theme to the second season was an offbeat tune which a friend of mine said sounded like the theme of The Munsters performed by The Chipmunks. I can't really disagree.) The first series offers us our first glimpse of Drake, and he's a dashing and extremely capable espionage agent who is able to work in all theaters of operation and like most of his counterparts knows more than it's likely anyone person can know. And of course he laden with all sorts of nifty gadgets, my favorites are the frequently seen camera lighter and the shaver recorder. This conceit is forgiven of course for the sake of drama and he follow as he skips across the globe in a host of guises rescuing capture diplomats, stalking enemy agents and liberating stolen secrets. 

These early episodes are exciting little narrative pellets that race along dispensing just enough information to keep you aware of what's happening and why and then dashing off in a split second. The action is more violence and lasts typically only a few seconds. There are few of the extended fight sequences in the familiar manner of the Republic Serials. Here the movements are quick, brutal and few get up when tossed down some stairs or smacked with a ready piece of furniture. (Though truth told the fights do get more tradional and more tedious as the serious wears on.) Drake eschews guns for the most, even sometimes when a gun would be the prudent option. He prefers not to kill. 

Likewise he is a man of a strict moral code and we don't see McGoohan's hero making much time with the beauties who populate the stories. He's either got little interest or no time and a promiscuous hero seemed not the image McGoohan wanted to convey. The complexity of the character of John Drake was able to be developed a bit more when the show shifted to an hour with the later seasons. But I dreaded that the plotting would suffer and at first it did with odd additional beats added to shows to broaden them to length, stuff that really wasn't key to the main focus of the episode and at times felt almost like a new show. But this improved vastly as the shows went on. 

There's no doubt that by the end of the series the super-spy John Drake is a man who has at the very least become overtly jaded by his long service and at the most has developed disdain for his superiors who seem to sacrifice the nobility of humanity to fulfill the needs of any given situation. Drake himself is forced to make hard choices and he chooses to fulfill his duties, but one can see he's a man who is about to change that circumstance. 

That's the story of The Prisoner for tomorrow. Be seeing you.