The Official Prisoner Companion
by Matthew White, Jaffer Ali

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Book Reviews of The Official Prisoner Companion

Book Review: Must Try Harder
Summary: 2 Stars

I suspect that a lot of the shortcomings of this book are due to it being written no less than 20 years after the original airing of the series. Put this together with the fact that the authors are (apparently) Americans, and you can begin to see why the book fails to show any great depth of understanding of what is a very profoundly British TV series.

At one point, for example, we are told that the Scots, Irish and Welsh Napoleans (in 'The Girl Who was Death') "represent various components of the British Commonwealth". I guess they meant the British Isles, or the United Kingdom - though neither of those groups includes Ireland, of course, only Northern Ireland. And in any case, how does this explain the Yorkshire Napolean?

(Incidentally, though these characters are listed as 'Napoleans' in the credits, they are referred to as 'Marshalls' during the episode. The authors don't even note this discrepancy, let alone explain it.)

On a different note, in their "Observations" regarding the episode 'A Change of Mind', the authors suggest that "it is easy to make comparisons between the committee in this episode and McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1950s."
If the authors knew a little more about the period when The Prisoner was filmed they might have made the rather more relevant observation that the various events in this episode very closely resemble the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution - of the 1960s.

I was also less than impressed by the actual episode guides. Most of these are written in a very uninspired style and contain regular, if largely trivial, errors of fact and grammar.
In the commentary for 'It's Your Funeral', for example, one of the photos shows McGoohan standing beside the helicopter with Eric Portman sitting at the controls and holding a phone. In fact, Number 2 in this episode was played by Andre Van Gyseghem (with Derren Nesbitt as his stand-in), whilst Eric Portman played Number 2 back in episode 4 - 'Free for All'.

I also found it strange that, in this 'official' companion to the series, the authors are less than fully informed about the pseudonyms used by the writer and/or director on certain episodes.
On 'Free for All', for example, McGoohan wrote and directed the episode under the pseudonym of Paddy Fitz, but is simply listed as Patrick McGoohan. But when we come to 'Many Happy returns' and 'A Change of Mind', both of which were directed by McGoohan under the pseudonym of Joseph Serf, the authors make no mention of it. Nor do they point out that the writer of The General, given as Joshua Adam in the on-screen credits, was actually Lewis Griefer.

Having said that, the book is certainly not a complete waste of space, containing material from production company handouts, script fragments, etc. As in The Prisoner itself, the reader simply needs to be careful about sorting fact (official material) from fiction.

Be seeing you 8¬)

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