The Prisoner

After quitting his job as a secret agent - Patrick Mc Goohan finds himself trapped in a strange place - the village...

where numbers replace names & conformity is created by nice hats, colourful striped umbrellas, marching bands, an own village font(see below) and...

...the rover! - a big white bubble, that keeps the inhabitants from leaving the village by choking them.

I finally found this incredible-strange, surealistic, secret-agent-masterpiece.
Reading about it a lot of times pushed my excitement,
to finally watch the series on my own, up to unstandable grades.
I am glad i wasn't disappointed. First of all there is the great opening with a cool theme.
You will get the point of the series without any words until number 6 (Patrick Mc Goohan)
begins to ask ... "Where am I"? - easy answer -"In the village"  -
"What do you want?" - again easy: "Information" - "Who are you?"  - "Number 2" -
"Who is number 1?" - "You are number 6!"  -"I am not a number!" -  Laughing....



After realising that him and all the other fancy dressed numbers are prisoners,
number 6 fails 17 episodes long - trying to escape from this ataractics - drenched disneyland. But he still resists the numerous tries of different number 2 dudes to conform him and get to know why he resigned. Number 6´s secret isn´t really important - one could say it´s a classical "Mc Guffin" in a Hitchcock way. Hitchcock´s definition of the "Mc Guffin" is "something really important for the protagonists, but totally unimportant for the director or the audience. Hitchcock also says that the "Mc Guffin" is "nothing" - In the espionage movie "North by Northwest" it is all about "what are the spies searching for?" In one scene a CIA dude explains the maincharacter (Cary Grant,who is mistaken for a secret agent),what the bad guy is into.
"import / export"
"but what´s he selling?"
"let´s say government secrets"

With issues on mind control, fake elections, mass hypnosis and many more, the Prisoner is a damn good interpretable note on society - and still funny. Of course this giant of tv history was adapted by the Simpsons:

you can watch most of the episodes on this shitty side via megavideo:http://ganjavideo.com/TV_Shows/The.Prisoner.1967

and this is the link for the download of that village font: http://www.theprisoneronline.com/html/village_font.html