We're all prisoners now

Take a look back at many of the spy and sci-fi film and TV dramas from the 1960s and one will find them hard to place within any sensible context or period. There's scarcely a trace of a meaningful lineage that one can draw on. Creative efforts from this era, and of this oeuvre, tried very hard to be hip and cool, but just appear confused and decidedly dated today. Later episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., for example, frequently guest-starred bright young things drawn from the world of popular culture. By including such period-piece curiosities as Sonny and Cher, as opposed to creating the imagined effect and embracing the zeitgeist, these efforts mostly came off as deranged, artificial, and rather gaudy mise en scènes. And should one ever take an unfortunate detour into 1967's Casino Royale, one will enter one of film history’s great bizarre oddities, a car wreck of a film that urgently wanted to be a funny spoof of the spy genre, but instead leaves audiences just wanting to push the ejector button on their imaginary Aston Martin DB5s.

In a way, this general strangeness from an often deranged era in film-making is in one sense wholly understandable. If one was a writer, producer, or director in one's middle forties or fifties, it would be damnably hard to keep pace with the madly morphing, youth-obsessed society of the late 1960s. And what one gets from all this middle-aged angst is a display of televisual, filmic 'dad dancing' that is weirdly paced, designed, scripted, and, well, just plain weird.

Enter The Prisoner, which, though filmed in exactly the same time period of the late 1960s, is somehow refreshingly different. Still weird, but much more interesting and relevant to today's world. What manner of creation is The Prisoner? In terms of literary expression and dialectic, there are selections taken straight from 1984, a foray into Kafka's The Trial, and maybe even a sprinkling of A Clockwork Orange. And the story itself? Spymaster Number Six (played by actor Patrick McGoohan) is rendered unconscious by a mystery figure having resigned from his government job as a spook. He wakes up in what appears to be a pleasant place called the Village (Portmeirion in Wales), but it's really a comfortable padded cell where his every movement is spied on. The Village is a prison, run by a sinister group of people operating futuristic surveillance technology. They want information from him, and they will get it!

Fifty-five years after The Prisoner first aired the strange and mysterious plot has grown in relevance and meaning. With CCTV in abundance, smartphones (self-assigned tracking devices in every hand), and a raft of seemingly superfluous technologies designed to make life even harder and more frustrating, we seemed to have created our own modern-day Village.

Unlike the stark vision of perpetual war in 1984, the Village is an affluent society much like our own. And on the surface, it appears to be an attractive place to live. With stylish houses and an abundance of disposable goods, this is a gilded cage dystopia.

The Village is, in short, very much like today's society. Seemingly progressive, superficially international, but increasingly lacking a sense of past and with no sense of place. One might say that we all now live in a form of the Village, a gilded cage where we avoid debate and where we push down hard on the unusual, and the non-conformist. We are, in short, all of us prisoners in one way or another.