BOOK AND SAMPLE CHAPTERS
SAMPLE CHAPTER - ONCE UPON A TIME
“Guilty - read the charge!”
‘Once Upon A Time’ explored. Bold, daring, audacious.
“This is a favourite of mine. It’s a little autobiographical – it’s always nice to get that stuff out of your system, isn’t it?” Patrick McGoohan. 1984 doc
“Everyone thought it was a crazy, ridiculous script.” Patrick McGoohan.
“I used to write under pseudonyms. One was Archibald Schwarz. Mickey O’Toole, the props master, said, ‘Have you seen this rubbish Patrick’. I said, you’ve got to trust him Mickey.” Mickey confirmed this. “I looked at the name on the script, Archibald Schwarz and I said to Pat: ‘Who in the name of Christ is this Archibald Schwarz – is he a lunatic or something to write that?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry Mickey, it’s all good stuff’.” ‘The Prisoner Investigated’.
“When my father looks up childishly with his ice-cream cone and I believe it. I totally believe he is seven, a young boy, licking his ice-cream, it was an amazing feat to pull that off… Catherine McGoohan.
“Pat had just read something on child behaviour and that’s what he was into with see-saws and so on.” Tony Sloman. Number Six.
“There was a brilliant 2-part episode with Leo McKern which they did immediately after mine. I think it was the best of the lot, personally. He was the psychiatrist and I think the scripts were terrific.” Anton Rodgers. ‘In the Village’ Issue 17 winter 1998
‘As far as I’m concerned, this episode holds all the answers to the series.’ Arabella McIntyre-Brown. ‘Number Six’. Issue 3
Above the Law. De Profoundis. Arise.
One of the many reasons ‘The Prisoner’ made for such an enthralling and exciting television experience was the uncertainty element. That is, what’s it going to be about this week? Rather, over and above the central premise of one man striving to holdfast to his identity, individuality, and integrity, the canvas became ever more adventurous, ever wilder and unpredictable.
To recall, the pilot episode, ‘Arrival’, sketched out the scene, initially the narrative appeared to be our hero’s attempt to escape a mysterious Village, then with episodes, ‘A. B. and C’ and ‘Many Happy Returns’ one became aware the Village concept could not contain the energies, with the chains finally being broken with Script Editor George Markstein’s departure as he despaired of his plan to confine ‘The Prisoner’ to a variation on the conventional spy genre.
With, ‘Do Not Forsake Me’, leading the way, this viewer realised we were going in an altogether different direction. The boldness of a story without the driving force star excited me. I remember thinking, when first viewing this, “Wow, the series has broken free – no holds barred”. Of course, ‘The Prisoner’ never allowed the viewer to become complacent, but this was really nothing compared to what was to come. Because, the following week – we got a Western. No titles until the scene was set, then one began to understand the formula had been cleverly transposed to the Wild West. The next week I was prepared – what startling adventure awaited us viewers? Now we had a James Bond spoof, what fun! The message was, “Viewers, fasten your seat-belts, because nothing is certain any more!”
With this in mind, we were presented with ‘Once Upon A Time’. To say it was a ‘duel’ albeit mainly verbal is to not do it justice. It was riveting, intense, claustrophobic, exhausting – both for protagonists and viewers – powerful, and all consuming. McGoohan’s script might be best described as, ‘experimental’, breaking conventional boundaries, where the battle between two adversaries, was enacted using words, not the blunt physicality of weaponry. The premise was unlike anything I’d ever seen, let alone evening TV family entertainment. The sheer quality of acting impressed. Both McKern and McGoohan breathed - indeed were - Numbers 2 and 6. Both were impressive, rousing, exciting, inspiring. Their acting transcends the norm, splintering the glass ceiling and scaling the very heights. One ‘Prisoner’ commentator puts it very nicely, when referring to McGoohan, the script written and directed by McGoohan ‘demonstrate his great abilities as a theatrical writer and cinematic artist, as well as his tremendous range as an actor’. Thoroughly immersed, they lived the parts. Watch the episode now and the powerhouse performances simply fill the room, far larger than the screen from which they have escaped. For McGoohan it was partly autobiographical, part views he felt passionate about, conveyed with a burning intensity. For McKern, trying to keep pace, it was, as we know, overwhelming, and impacted on his mental health. Six of One member Arabella Macintyre-Brown, in an article for our Number Six magazine wrote in 1985, ‘As far as I am concerned, this episode holds all the answers to the series. It goes beyond the surface level puzzles to the heart of ‘The Prisoner’ as I see it. The struggle within one’s own mind for an integrated identity and thence individuality.’ In conversations more than one other member has said much the same to me. ‘Once Upon A Time’ sent the strongest signal yet. All that had gone before set us up for this: the core message writ in capitals. But how had we got here?
If the reader pauses, and reflects upon ‘The Prisoner’s’ tight production schedule, and the sudden emergence from seemingly, thin-air in the shortest of time frames, we must pose the question, just how could McGoohan conjure up, not just an inventive episode, but one that was wildly unlike any other that would be produced in the production run? It is a fascinating tale, and one that is testament to the creative genius who, at every turn, would astonish, surprise, and challenge us to, ‘keep up’. So, let us consider in a little more detail, the circumstances that led to the genesis of this script.
Given that McGoohan was a man of substance, who had ‘breathed’ on various aspects of ‘Danger Man’, including the scripts, he had a track record. ‘Free for All’ demonstrates clearly that he was a man who thought deeply, with an inquiring mind, and a wide range of interests, being an intelligent and widely read man, (he mostly enjoyed biographies), my guess is he had read books that dealt in psychology, and encountered this transference process, storing this information away in his mind.
Then, it was a combination of factors. In the first place, the first four scripts had been filmed and, before leaving Portmeirion, a handful of scenes were filmed for, ‘Chimes’, but there were no further scripts finalised. Tony Sloman, ‘The Prisoner’ film librarian, told me, “During the shooting of ‘Chimes of Big Ben’ it dawns on people they haven’t got another episode to shoot, but they’ve got a great Number 2” ‘In The Village’ McGoohan, cannily realised he had an actor, a personality, a Number 2 that had risen to the challenge. He told ‘Primetime’ magazine, “I thought he was just great, and then I knew he would be the protagonist in ‘Once Upon a Time’, he was the ideal one.”
Clearly, a script had to be sourced quickly, but, from where…? From the overworked enthusiastic imagination of Patrick McGoohan emerged this script. Sources differ, varying the timing from a thirty-six-hour creative burst of writing, to two or three pages of script appearing each day. A second, very clever reason for devising a studio-bound two-hander was financial considerations. Tony Sloman, in an interview he gave me over twenty years ago, said, “Of course, how clever, with costs rising and an overspend – particularly on those early episodes, how clever to devise an episode that was far less expensive.”
These three factors prompted McGoohan, in these still early ‘Prisoner’ days to distil his thinking and craft a script pure from the source itself. With ‘Free for All’ he had satirised political campaigning, the media, and the democratic system itself. ‘Fall Out’ would be his thoughts and reactions at journey’s end, but in, ‘Once Upon a Time’, we got to the essence of how the actor saw the philosophy and ‘message’ of the series.
We know that the premise of this episode is psychology, or, to be more precise, a psychological process. The ingredients: a psychological process involving regression therapy, the expunging of, and reseeding of a revised pattern of thinking, the mechanics including confrontation, conflict, and the insidious manipulation of an unsuspecting quarry. The episode is very theatrical in its realisation. As we begin, Number 6 displays his aggressive tendencies and the scene is set. Number 2 must try a new way: to gain Number 6’s trust, to win his respect, only then he may reveal his secrets. Their journey begins with we viewers entirely drawn in, being transfixed by their exhausting battle of wills. I find it intriguing that so private a man should be so revealing regarding elements of himself. Not just matters he felt passionate about, such as technology, ‘progress’, moral codes, but the world about him, and drawing on his own life experiences. I have remarked elsewhere that what we are seeing in this series is McGoohan, or a version, elements of, perhaps the kernel of the man. I guess, when he speaks of the individual, the lone wolf, I have gleaned the strong impression that this is true of the man. Again, Tony Sloman told our ‘Number Six’ magazine,“Pat had just read something on child behaviour and that’s what he was into with see-saws and so on.” If this was the premise, from where did McGoohan draw the inspiration? I believe it came to him from a number of influences.