A Christmas Prisoner

What might a Christmas special of The Prisoner have been like, if they had made one? Well, given how many Christmas episodes base their plots on A Christmas Carol, it might have gone something like this...

It starts with the new Number 2 visiting Number 6 while dressed as Jacob Marley, wearing a long chain wrapped around him. Number 6 enters into the spirit of the thing by asking, in the manner of Scrooge,

"You are fettered. Tell me why?"

"That would be telling," comes the predictable response.

Number 2 then warns him that this night he will be visited by three spirits. Number 6 scoffs at this, but soon finds himself drugged asleep (as usual) and when he wakes up he is confronted by...

"Who, and what are you?" demands Number 6.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"A?"

"I said, 'I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.'"

"I already thought this plot was structurally similar to A. B. and C. but this just confirms it. What do you want?"

"Why did you resign?"

"Spirit!" says Number 6 in his most defiant voice, "remove me from this place!"

By thus short-cutting the scene, the vision fades before Number 6's eyes, and is replaced with...

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me!"

"You look more like the Ghost of Space 1999. I suppose you're going to ask me why I resigned as well?"

"Well, since you mention it, my boy, why did you resign?"

"There are some upon this Earth of yours," returned Number 6, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of pushing, filing, stamping, indexing, briefing, debriefing, and numbering, in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

After a pause (i.e. an ad break), the spirit continued his plan, though without much optimism, and brought forward the two smaller spirits he had accompanying him.

"Aren't you going to ask me about..?"

"The boy is Ignorance, the girl is Want. As in: you are Ignorant of the reasons why I resigned, and you Want to know what they are."

After that, Number 6 silently stared down the spirit until he shuffled away, and the vision moved on to...

"Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?"

The third spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.

"You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us?" Number 6 pursued.

"Isn't that a tad spoiler-y?"

The vision is interrupted by the Colonel, who says

"Quite agree. Quite agree. Silly. Silly... silly."

"No," says Number 6, "I said 'spoiler-y.' Besides, Monty Python isn't going to start for another two years, so the general public's not going to understand this, are they?"

"If you're worried about what the viewers at home are going to think, my lad, have I got 'shadows of the things that will be' for you..."

Enter Cobb very suddenly.

"I thought I was supposed to play the Ghost of Christmas Past?"

Spinoffs

Russell "The" Davies says he wants Doctor Who spinoffs:

"There should be a Doctor Who channel now. You look at those Disney announcements, of all those new Star Wars and Marvel shows, you think, we should be sitting here announcing 'The Nyssa Adventures' or 'The Return of Donna Noble' and you should have the 10th and 11th Doctors together in a ten-part series. Genuinely. And I think that will happen one day. If we can just shift Doctor Who up a gear..."

So here are some* of my suggestions...

#1. An Earthly Child

Susan Foreman is stranded on Future-Earth in the aftermath of the Dalek Conquest. It's Doctor Who meets Survivors, and may include topical elements as our real-world society recovers from the coronavirus pandemic

#2. Guardians of the Solar System

Set in Space Year 4000, this is a pastiche of Star Trek with added Daleks. First episode title: It Came From Uranus!

#3. Agents of UNIT

Doctor Who meets Agents of SHIELD, as UNIT tries to defend the Earth without the help of the Doctor

#4. UNIT Declassified

This differs from #3 by being a '60s/'70s/'80s period piece, guaranteed to annoy hardcore Doctor Who fans by messing up their pet UNIT dating theories. It's Doctor Who meets The Sandbaggers or some of the more political episodes of UFO 

#5. The Exit of Peladon

Doctor Who meets The Thick of It, satire ensues when the planet Peladon holds an ill-advised referendum for leaving the Galactic Federation

#6. Spandrell and Engin

Two old Time Lords are pulled out of retirement to clean up corruption in the Capitol. Doctor Who meets Line of Duty meets New Tricks

#7. Peter Davison Presents

Peter "Davo" Davison is given a camera crew and a budget and allowed to send up DW in his own way, probably with assistance from Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Davo's son-in-law David Tennant, and anyone else he can rope in. Basically, make The Five-ish Doctors Reboot into a series, it would be great

#8. Trials of a Time Lord

Dramatisation of the production of the Colin Baker era, including the hiatus, in the style of An Adventure in Space and Time. The latter part of Tom Baker's era would also make for a subject equally full of incident, such as the abandonment of Shada

#9. Shangri-La

Ray and Mr Burton defend Wales the Earth of 1959 from alien invasions, occasionally assisted by the mysterious Goronwy and his cryptic, bee-related wisdom. With 100% more competence and 100% less sex jokes than Torchwood

#10. D84

Our robot investigator proves each week that he isn't as Dumb as he seems, lulling his chief suspect - invariably a member of Kaldor City's high society, or even one of the Founding Families - into a false sense of security until they eventually incriminate themselves. It's Doctor Who meets Columbo

"Just one more thing... please do not throw hands at me."

* The rest all involve crossovers with Blakes 7, as you would expect

Doctor Who Night 2021: End of Exile

For this year's Doctor Who Night we watched The Three Doctors and The Green Death, both from season 10. I don't feel a need to say much about them here, as I will hopefully be doing in-depth reviews of all that season's episodes soon...ish, mew.

What I will do is post some pictures. First, here are the second and third Doctors having a useless argument, which the third Doctor compares to Twitter years before it was invented, thus proving he's been to the future:

I have also been to the future and know that I will certainly be using this joke again in my review of The Three Doctors Episode Three, lol.

Next up, we have the Brigadier in The Green Death.

I can't imagine why the other mannys might think that...

... mew.

A Very Peculiar Series

After leaving Doctor Who in 1984, Peter "Davo" Davison made some odd acting choices in trying to avoid being typecast. 1985 saw him guest-starring in the BBC's Miss Marple, and then in 1986, still best known for playing a V. E. T. in All Creatures Great and Small and, of course, the Doctor, he took another medical role as Dr Stephen Daker in the BBC comedy-drama A Very Peculiar Practice.

In something of a forerunner to the style of Father Ted, Daker was the sane man surrounded by eccentrics, but only within the confines of the series' setting of Lowlands University - out in the real world, Daker's own foibles would (just as happens whenever Ted Crilly escapes from Craggy Island) make him seem as crazy as the rest of them.

Here Davo gets to show us that he is the master doctor of the comic technique of trailing off his sentences, leaving the second half unspoken, either because his interlocutor has already misunderstood him and has interrupted him before his meaning can become clear, or else because he has misunderstood them and is stopping himself when understanding belatedly dawns.

The series is a satire of university life in the 1980s, at the very heart of the era of Thatcher. Lowlands University faces constant budget cuts and the pressure for every part of it to turn a profit, or those not doing so may lose their jobs. This even applies to the medical team, where Daker is the newest member of staff. The other regular characters, then, are the other doctors - Daker's colleagues, but also his rivals.

The head of the medical department is Dr Jock McCannon, played by Graham "Soldeed" Crowden, a drunken stereotype of a Scottish doctor (back then you could get away with such things, it was the equivalent of portraying everyone from England as a football hooligan, or everyone from the USA as an overweight, loud-mouthed gun-nut with no knowledge of geography, history, or culture) lifted partly by the writing, but mainly by the gleam in Crowden's eye.

Barbara "Cracker" Flynn plays Dr Rose Marie, a straw-feminist whose attitudes can sometimes seem strange when watched from a distance of nearly 40 years. There's no laugh track on the series, which makes it tough to evaluate how audiences would have viewed her at the time, but it seems to me that we are expected to find most of the things she says absurd caricatures of real feminist positions. And so many of them still are ("illness is something men do to women"), but then occasionally she will say something that seems totally reasonable and uncontroversial, but which other characters react to in much the same way as to her extremist views.

Last, but by no means least, is the utterly tactless, would-be Thatcherite, Dr Bob Buzzard, played by David "son of Patrick" Troughton. This is the role of a lifetime for Troughton Jr, making the thoroughly unlikable character intensely watchable, and so Buzzard is the standout character of the series (yes, even up against the likes of Crowden). It's no wonder that he was the only one (other than Davo) to appear in every episode, up to and including the 1992 spinoff A Very Polish Practice.

In addition to the main cast, there are a number of noteworthy guest appearances. Timothy West is back for a rematch after having been in the same Miss Marple adaptation as Davo. John "Albany" Bird is a recurring antagonist - as the (it turns out aptly named) Vice Chancellor of the university, he is the one with power over the doctors' jobs.

And then in the final episode of the first season Joe "come off it Mr Dent" Melia plays Ron Rust, an author frustrated by his inability to write a script for the BBC, he is evidently a stand-in for the series writer Andrew Davies. His function within the show is to lampshade the implausibility of the events we see unfolding, particularly the eucatastrophe which the season ends upon.

The series succeeds best when Davies successfully mixes plausible scenarios familiar to viewers in the real world (the university's financial struggles, the office politics between colleagues, Davo's relationship woes) with a heightened version of reality full of exaggerated characters and surreal vignettes, such as the way every episode opens with the ongoing conflict (which is never referred to by any of the other characters) between the nuns and the scaffies.

It also has a very distinctively mid-80s title sequence and theme song. I'm left singing it for days after watching every episode.

Naughty Davo!

Purrot

Across 70 episodes made over 24 years (between 1989 and 2013), ITV adapted nearly all of Agatha Christie's stories about Purrot, the great detective. They were a mix of shorter and longer episodes (generally either 50 or 90 minutes), with the longer ones at first being reserved for the more prestigious or famous of the novels, before the shorter episodes were phased out completely towards the end of the run.

I have not read any of the original books, so cannot compare the adaptations to them, so any comparisons can only be to other filmed versions of Purrot such as the ones starring Peter Ustinov. Even if individual adaptations might not have been the best, the TV series Purrot, David Suchet, has absolutely become the standard portrayal of the character simply by virtue of having played Purrot the longest.

The memorable episodes of the series are, for the most part, the famous ones. This is partly because there are other adaptations for me to compare them to, and these are not always favourable to the TV series - the most famous Purrot case by far is Murder on the Orient Express, and the 1974 film version starring Albert Finney is clearly superior, even if Finney makes for an inferior Purrot to Suchet.

Of the less well-known stories that stood out from the crowd in the TV series I would single out Peril at End House (1990), an early episode with a memorable guest appearance by Polly "Atia" Walker, The ABC Murders (1992) thanks to Donald Sumpter, and Dumb Witness (1996) thanks to Snubby as Bob the doggy.

The main appeal of the early episodes, aside from spotting guest actors that I recognise from other things (Peter Capaldi, Andrew "Jarvik" Burt, and Christopher Eccleston, to name but a few - the latter well before he became famous), is the dynamic between the regular characters, Purrot and his companions Captain Hastings (Hugh "baddy from Edge of Darkness" Fraser), Chief Inspector Japp (Philip Jackson), and Miss Lemon (Pauline "Cleopatra" Moran). Each of these take their turn to be the Watson (or, in Japp's case, the Lestrade) to Purrot's Holmes, as well as frequently providing sources of comic relief.

Hastings' intelligence varied depending upon who was writing him, at times approaching the barely-functional levels of Nigel Bruce's Stupid Watson. This was because there were a number of different writers over the course of the TV series, each with their own quirks. Clive Exton was the main writer, generally responsible for the more solid scripts. Anthony Horowitz was also reliable - still early in his career, but not so early as when he wrote for Robin of Sherwood with a level of historical inaccuracy that was questionable even by that series' standards.

Less successful was David Renwick, whose four scripts were characterised by more outright komedy than was typical for the series, and by Purrot taking up hobbies (such as close up magic) which would never be referred to again after that episode. No surprises that this is the same David Renwick who would go on to create Jonathan Creek six years later.

Mark Gatiss wrote (or co-wrote) three episodes towards the end of the series, and let's just say they are none of them among the show's best installments.

Evil Under the Sun (2001) was the last time Purrot, Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon would all appear together - except for a reunion in The Big Four (2013), which barely counts because the three companions hardly interacted with Purrot in that one at all - and it marks a turning point in the series.

Starting with Five Little Pigs (2003), the series entered its Dark Age, which was en vogue for a lot of TV drama (and TV comedy for that matter) around that time. Plots were grimmer, with direction, lighting, and soundtrack to match. It was at this point the series dropped the iconic Art Deco title sequence and theme tune* that had been present since the beginning.

And humour was for the most part banished (save for Purrot's comic mannerisms, which I suppose were too well-established a part of his characterisation for Suchet to abandon). The reason why this series' Murder on the Orient Express suffers compared to the '70s film is because it was made during this era, with the result that it is po-faced and just a lot less... well... fun, as a viewing experience.

Towards the very end of the series, the last few mellowed out a bit and comedic moments were allowed to creep back in, as evidenced by Zoë Wanamaker's portrayal of new semi-regular Ariadne Oliver, a writer of murder-mysteries about a Finnish detective, so obviously a parody of Agatha Christie herself. Mrs Oliver first appeared in 2006, which was in the very heart of the Dark Age, but her mannerisms and eccentricities were allowed to become broader over time as the komedy slipped back in.

The cliché of the "evil voice" (whereby a baddy starts speaking with a noticeably more evil voice after they have been exposed as being a baddy) was played straight quite often in the early days of the series, although it was less common later on, perhaps because it was so brutally parodied by That Mitchell and Webb Look in 2009?

Another cliché the series frequently employed was that of the "drawing room exposé" (which Agatha Christie, and Purrot especially, is practically synonymous with) where Purrot would gather all the suspects together - usually in a drawing room - before explaining how the crime was done and who did it. Surprisingly, this wasn't used as often as you might expect, at least to begin with, it only became ubiquitous by the middle of the series.

* You know, the one that goes

# Here he is again

It's Purrot

It's Purrot

He's come to solve the mystery and catch the murderer #

Wolf Hall

I'm not sure how I managed to let this amazing TV series pass me by when it was first on the BBC back in 2015 - at least with most series I look at on this blog I have the excuse that they were made a long time before I was. I suppose I must have been occupied with other important cat business, such as rewatching Blakes 7 or having sleeps?

Wolf Hall is yet another historical drama set at the time of king Henry viii, of which there have been so many that a cat could easily write an article entitled 'The Six Historical Dramas of Henry viii' if one were so inclined. What sets this one apart from the others is that it takes as its Point-of-View character not the king, which is more usual, nor even any of his wives, but rather Thomas Cromwell.

Cromwell, played by Mark Rylance, is very much the protagonist, and as such is present in virtually every scene. His main antagonist is Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), who he spends most of the series seeking revenge against for her causing the political downfall of his father-figure Cardinal Wolsey (Johnny P) in episode one.

This is a total reversal of how Boleyn and Cromwell are normally positioned in historical dramas, such as in 1970s The Six Wives of Henry viii, the second episode of which covers a lot of the same historical ground as Wolf Hall. There Anne Boleyn is the focus (as the series name suggests) and Thomas Cromwell is played by Wolfe "Padmasambhava" Morris as the antagonist.

With so many prior Henry viii-era dramas to compare Wolf Hall to, 'Six Wives' stands out because of Keith Michell's arguably definitive version of the tyrant-king, against which subsequent portrayals are measured in the way Sherlock Holmes are compared to Basil Rathbone's. A typical example of such might be Ray Winstone's Henry viii in a 2003 ITV series, although probably the most extreme reaction against Michell was Jonathan Rhys Meyers in The Tudors (2007-2010). Wolf Hall's Henry (Damian "Jeffrey Archer" Lewis) is unlike all these earlier versions in that, while the king casts a long shadow over the plot, he is never allowed to overshadow Rylance's Cromwell at its centre.

What we get from Lewis when he is on screen is a sense of the king being somewhat detached from the struggles and squabbles of his subjects - perhaps because as king he is on another level above them, or perhaps because he has mannys like Cromwell to get their paws dirty on his behalf. We see this most clearly when, just after Anne has been beheaded (spoilers! of an event from 1536!) in a scene that carries on long enough to make everyone watching uncomfortable, Henry is the only one still laughing and smiling. Common to both Michell and Lewis's characterisations is the unavoidable historical fact that this was someone happy to have innocent mannys convicted on trumped up charges and sent to bloody executions for his own benefit.

The influence of The Godfather on the plot structure of Wolf Hall is very clear - Thomas Cromwell's path to power by doing what needs to be done, and then the simultaneous takedown of his enemies at the story's climax, echoes that of Michael Corleone. This is hardly the first historical drama to emulate that film, the 2011-13 series The Borgias also used it as a sort of template for its first season.

The six parts of Wolf Hall are paced much slower than I was expecting of a modern drama series, being more akin to something like the BBC's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with long, unhurried scenes that build the atmosphere and allow viewers to absorb the complex plot as it unfolds. The amount of times we witness the period detail of Cromwell and other courtiers removing their hats and bowing to their social superiors reminded me of the many, many instances in Mahabharat where characters exchanged formal dialogue of "May you live long," and "My respects." Well, 94 episodes aren't just going to fill themselves, you know, mew.

As a modern, big budget filmed series, obviously Wolf Hall looks fantastic, with all the resources the BBC can bring to bear upon a drama when it wants to... and which were beyond the wildest dreams of television producers in the 1970s. Even a prestige series of its era such as Six Wives was mostly studio based, and had to rely upon the quality of its scripting and the actors to make it what it was. And the cast was impressive - in addition to Michell and Morris it also had Bernard "Toby Esterhase" Hepton as Archbishop Cranmer, and Patrick Troughton appearing as the Duke of Norfolk only a year after he left Doctor Who.

 

But even for that, Wolf Hall easily boasts a cast list to match it - in addition to those I already mentioned earlier, I would single out Anton Lesser, David "Germanicus" Robb, and Bernard Hill, who as the new Norfolk we must compare to the mighty Troughton at the height of his powers. Hill is not to be found wanting - hardly surprising considering his experience, not the least of which was playing Richard of York, giving battle in vain in the BBC Shakespeare Henry vi trilogy (1983).

Even Mark Gatiss, not exactly the actor with the greatest range, is well-suited to his oily role as Stephen Gardiner - a very different interpretation of that part from Six Wives's Basil Dignam, but both were equally fitting and equally despicable. Gatiss more-or-less disappeared from the series towards the end, but given the prominence of Dignam as an older Gardiner in Six Wives, plus its sequel Elizabeth R (1971), I expect he would return if they ever made a Wolf Hall 2: Wolf Haller.

Wolf Hall is currently available to view on the BBC iPlayer.

Manny in a Suitcase

I've been watching Manny in a Suitcase from 1967-68, a.k.a. what if ITC had a bunch of Danger Man scripts they still needed to use after Patrick McGoohan resigned? It could almost be a version of The Prisoner from some parallel universe where it was fully explained why the main character resigned from the CIA in the very first episode, and then he went on being a private investigator doing standard telefantasy plots for the next 29 episodes after that.

For a series whose production and broadcast dates almost exactly coincide with The Prisoner, this really shows the road not taken by McGoohan, with a similar film stock quality and sound design - but with such pedestrian stories, visual design and direction by comparison.

Ron Grainer did the theme tune to this one too, which since the 1990s is probably more associated with its use as the theme to TFI Friday. While the theme music is great and memorable (associations with Chris Evans notwithstanding), the title sequence itself is incredibly poor, with possibly the laziest, cheapest-looking animation (if you can even call it that) of any telefantasy series I can think of.

The fifth episode, Find the Lady, is the first really good one, and in it we get our first (but most certainly not our last) Number 2 in the shape of Patrick "Du mußt Amboß oder Hammer sein" Cargill as a police 'Commandante' in Rome. Maxwell Shaw is the villain-of-the-week, and while he never made it into The Prisoner, he was in Danger Man more than once.

On the subject of Danger Man, while I'm still not fully convinced these aren't leftover scripts being produced with a minimal number of changes, we can at least see by this point in the series that McGill isn't just a straight swap for Drake - Drake would never have resorted to using a gun as quickly as McGill does, not even in his early appearances when he was an American too. But they have a very similar world-weariness (the only thing stopping McGill resigning from his job is that he already has) and a conscience that ought to be a liability in their world of betrayals.

Episode number... er... 6 on the DVDs was originally broadcast on the 27th of September 1967 (so, for those keeping track, that's two days before Arrival), and sees McGill knocked unconscious before the title sequence, kidnapped, brought to an isolated location, and interrogated for information. They proceed to drug him and subject him to brainwashing techniques (hence the episode title - Brainwash). There's a twist where a manny who seems to be sympathetic to McGill for a bit is actually working for the kidnappers, and then it turns out that the information isn't truly what they want him for - they have something even more convoluted and nefarious in mind.

The similarities with The Prisoner only end when McGill does actually escape by the end of the episode, after a gunfight and a scene where he meets a policemanny.

This is followed by one of the best episodes of the series, The Girl Who Never Was, a gripping deconstruction of a heist story, where McGill and the other principal characters are so distrustful of one another that they start betraying each other even before they retrieve the valuable painting stolen by the Nazis in WW2. The episode is so great because it introduces clichés of the genre only to subvert them, and Bernard "M" Lee plays against type as a down-at-heel former army officer who needs the money from the heist to "be a somebody."

Anton "Susan died a year ago, Number Six" Rodgers is Number Two number two in a two-parter, Variation on a Million Bucks, playing a Russian defector who has stolen a million dollars, and who various factions are now after. Sadly this turns out to be a story that has enough plot for only one-and-a-bit episodes at best, so it feels overlong, padded and, frankly, really sags in the middle.

Better is Web with Four Spiders, which was less predictable and avoided hitting so many genre clichés as episodes immediately preceding it managed, and so held my interest more. Ray McAnally (recently seen by me as the main character in Spindoe) and John Savident are the guest actors of most note, although the latter was only in one scene. Much of the action is explicitly set in and around Manchester and Salford for no readily explained reason - our American hero McGill claims Manchester is a "city of four million people," so I expect he did about as much research as this story's writer... expected the intended American TV audience to.

Jigsaw Manny was the first outright comedy episode of the series and so was something a bit different, even if half the jokes were based on stereotypes of those wacky Italians: emotional, incorrigible womanising, large families, the mafia, etc.

The Sitting Pigeon was a return to form after a bit of a dip in quality, with a plot very obviously based on the Krays, which would have been topical in 1967, where McGill is protecting a witness against gangster brothers. The plot departed from the usual Manny in a Suitcase formula by having McGill repeatedly shown to be ahead of the villains, anticipating their moves and countering them, a change from the usual setup where he'd be on the back foot reacting to the villain-of-the-week's superior resources.

It also boasts a decently large cast of recognisable supporting actors: George "Alec Freeman" Sewell, Robin "Judge Graves" Bailey, David "Neeva" Garfield, James "Butterbur" Grout, and Joe "come off it Mr Dent" Melia. No Number 2's, but we do get Mark "o Polo" Eden from It's Your Funeral.

Moving into the second half of the series now, The Manny Who Stood Still is yet another story about a double-cross where both sides try to play McGill, this time set in Franco-era Spain. It's not very interesting, except that it features the Shapmeister himself as the main antagonist.

Somebody Loses, Somebody... Wins? is a step up, partly from being pretty obviously ripped off from inspired by le Carré's Spy Who Came in from the Cold, partly from having Philip Madoc in a small role, but mainly from its giving a prominent role to Jacqueline Pearce, with a look and mannerisms not a million space-miles from Servalan, over 10 years before Blakes 7 began. (No prizes for any readers realising that it was watching this episode that inspired this post.)

Dead Manny's Shoes gives us our third appearance by a Number 2, this time it's Derren Nesbitt, playing a henchmanny. The incidental music in this (and the following) episode are very Prisoner-like, even more so than normal for this series.

The Whisper is the best episode for a while, possibly since The Girl Who Never Was, because it avoids most of the clichéd tropes that I've been seeing a lot of. Patrick "Protect and Survive" Allen gets upstaged by the other main guest-star, Colin Blakely. This is probably a very dated, if not outright racist, episode because of its unflattering portrayal of post-colonial Africans (which is similar to the approach taken by several Danger Man plots, as well as by other films and TV series of this era), but at least there's no blackface, and the black characters (the ones with speaking parts anyway) have some depth to them.

The next bunch of episodes are another mix of seen-it-all-before and trying-something-new. Roger Delgado turns up for a very small part (one scene, maybe two scenes maximum - barely enough to warrant a mention except that it's Roger Delgado) in one of the latter, Burden of Proof, with Wolfe "Padmasambhava" Morris getting the main villain's part. It's not a great episode, but it at least tries to keep the audience guessing what's going to happen next, and ends on another pyrrhic victory for McGill, reminding me once again of the show's Danger Man origins where this was a not too uncommon occurrence.

Other actors of note seen around this point in the series include Peter "Denethor" Vaughan and a second appearance by Philip Madoc, this time as a sinister-seeming psychiatrist. No Number 2's among them, but a significant role for Justine "Girl who was Death" Lord in the best of the bunch Property of a Gentlemanny. This one stood out because McGill was up against amateur criminals, so his background and experience as a professional secret agent allowed him to be on the front foot against them - this was also the case in The Sitting Pigeon, but this is still a rare exception rather than the rule for the series.

Another standout as we approach the end of the series was The Revolutionaries, thanks largely to Hugh "Channing" Burden's turn as a former revolutionary leader of an unnamed Arabic/Middle-Eastern country (no attempt is made to black/brown Burden up, which is most certainly for the best) on the run from the current regime and hoping the publication of his memoirs will bring it down. There's enough variation from the typical way these stories go to raise this one above the crowd.

A second surprise guest appearance from Doctor Who's Season Seven shows up in the same episode in the form of that bridge location that Liz nearly fell from at the end of Ambassadors OF DEATH part three.

The last disc of the DVD set kicks off with the worst episode of the series, Three Blinks of the Eyes, which contains the dreadful cliché of McGill framed for a crime he did not commit and having to go on the run to prove his innocence to the police. It partly redeems itself with a fairly original way of resolving the plot, but the damage had been done by then and I was not filled with confidence for the final two episodes...

... But I need not have worried, as they were both pretty good. Castle in the Clouds was a comedy episode with a low-stakes farce plot featuring Edward "the Jackal" Fox as a con artist, and turning up for a single scene near the end is our fourth and final Number 2, Rachel Herbert.

The final episode, Night Flight to Andorra, is a worthy ending to the series, partly because it has one of the better plots of the series (showing it still had some surprises left in it even after 30 installments), and partly because the main antagonist is played by Peter "Gollum" Woodthorpe, but mainly because the other guest actor of note is not a Number 2 crossing over from The Prisoner, but none other than Peter Swanwick, the Supervisor himself!

This has been a weird look into a strange world - a series that feels like it's from the pre-Prisoner era of more standard espionage tales, like Danger Man (to which Manny in a Suitcase is very much the spiritual successor) and The Saint, but with a production style that is exactly contemporary with The Prisoner.

I think it just goes to show that Manny in a Suitcase is what The Prisoner could have looked and felt like, had it had anyone other than Patrick McGoohan as the creative force behind it.