Cult viewing: Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar
"I am not a number. I am a free man!" So says the heroic, obstinate Number Six, concluding the recurring dialogue for the title sequence of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein's cult TV series which originally aired on ITV in 1967. Four decades on, this pervasive tagline probably has far better product recognition than the show itself. But with the arrival this week of the series on DVD, The Prisoner could well attract a new generation of devotees, so continuous has been our collective, national conviction that we are not numbers, but free women and men.
I first came across the catchphrase in 1985 in Just Give 'Em Whisky, a song by Colourbox (one of the first bands to make entire tracks using sampling techniques), in which were spliced together excerpts from The Prisoner and other futuristic confections such as Crichton's Westworld and Kubrick's 2001. But it was McGoohan's repeated lament that found the most prominent place on the graffittied walls of my adolescent imagination.
I was eager, then, to see the series itself, partly because of its promise of connecting me with some echoes of my earlier self, and partly because few things are more interesting than seeing the future through the eyes of those in the past. In particular, while contemporary futurisms often appear to be dull, predictable expansions of current notions of possibility, looking back at the future one is freer simply to marvel at the craft with which the future was conceived.
Above all, it is the clarity with which the modernist design that you find in the Prisoner - no less than in 2001 and even Woody Allen's Sleeper - speaks of the future that is most striking, since it comes from an age in which the future was still largely conceived in terms of an utopian reward for technological progress. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, society by and large urged on the future with all possible speed, a desire reflected faithfully in the history of architecture and design.
The Prisoner is particularly interesting in this respect because the place in which Number Six is incarcerated, The Village, was shot in Portmeirion, a holiday resort made up entirely of kitsch, incongruous follies, a kind of madcap take on Italian renaissance architecture and the humanist spirit that gave birth to it. The Village's very palpable malevolence comes from its inauthenticity, its unsettling architectural falsity providing the perfect mask for the anonymous, invisible power behind.
Indeed, the dated veneer of The Prisoner, with its lava lamps, Mini Mokes and man-eating ping-pong balls, actually comes to provide much of the series' contemporary attraction. Behind the Florentine exterior, say, of Number Two's control room in the village, the multicoloured rows of buttons speak so much more powerfully of the way the concept of remote control has dehumanised and amoralised the sphere of human action than can today's more dynamic interfaces. It was the technology of the button, after all, that brought universal destruction within the same mundane reach as calling an elevator or switching on a radio.
But perhaps the oddest thing about watching The Prisoner is that today's real-life version of the invisible, bureaucratic menace is so woefully inefficient when compared with its fictional representation. "There's not much we don't know about you," Number Two says at one point, putting me in mind of how little anyone official seems nowadays to know of one. Perhaps today's major enemy isn't so much anonymous omnipotence as anonymous incompetence. Perhaps The Prisoner's contemporary struggle isn't against being numbered per se, but against being wrongly numbered.
