We Want Information

The penultimate episode of The Prisoner, "Once Upon a Time", was written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, the show's creator. The above caption slide, as you might expect, comes from that episode's title sequence. Well, it comes from one version of the episode's title sequence, anyway.

For you see, on Network's DVD release of the series (I believe this was the 2007 issue for the 40th anniversary of the series), that caption isn't there. It's replaced by one that says "Directed by Don Chaffey" (meaning that the DVD's version of the episode has no credited writer at all). The picture at the top of this article, correctly crediting McGoohan as the writer and director of the episode, is taken from a copy of the episode on YouTube, but I don't know its source.

For the record, Chaffey was the series' key director; "Once Upon a Time" was the sixth episode in production order, and Chaffey had directed four of the five episodes produced beforehand. According to McGoohan, there were only seven episodes of the show that 'really counted', and all of Chaffey's episodes were among that number. But unless every single source on the series I've checked is wrong (which includes about half a dozen different books and several websites), and that first picture is also somehow wrong, he didn't direct this one.

I have several questions about this, which are as follows:

• Was this fixed on later versions of Network's DVD release? Are there any other versions with the erronous Chaffey credit?
• How did it happen at all? A remastering issue, I'd guess, but it's still difficult to see how this could have happened. The release is meticulous in every other detail, and McGoohan himself was said to be very pleased with it, so it's hard to see how a mistake like this could have slipped through.
• Is the version with McGoohan credited definitely the one used for the original broadcast, and the Chaffey one definitely used in error? That's what I've assumed, but is it possible that the DVD's version correctly reflects what was originally broadcast, in error, and it was changed to McGoohan's credit for later versions? (Seems pretty unlikely, but you never know. It's worth noting that during production, the shooting scripts had a pseudonym on them instead of McGoohan's name.)

So, once again, if you have any way of knowing what's going on, please do get in touch.

Prisoner Who

It is rather odd how The Prisoner and the original series of Doctor Who have no writers or directors in common.

Lewis Greifer (who wrote the Prisoner episode "The General" under the name Joshua Adam) submitted the story that ultimately became the 1975 Who serial Pyramids of Mars, but the original version was deemed unusable and rewritten so completely by script editor Robert Holmes that what was ultimately broadcast was essentially a totally different story (and used the pseudonym "Stephen Harris"). So I don't think we can really count that. And Moris Farhi had scripts for both the very first season of Who and The Prisoner rejected... so it definitely could have happened, but it just didn't.

Anyway, there's a thought that was slightly too long to coherently express on Twitter. You're welcome to it.

A Number of Any Kind

The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s groundbreaking 60s drama series, is well-known for having a production history as complex and intriguing as the show’s narrative. This affected the show’s running order when it was first broadcast for various reasons (some of which we’ll get to later in this piece), and over the next five decades there have been a great many arguments about what order they should actually be watched in. So, whilst scrabbling around for something to write a blog post about, I thought I’d have a go myself.