Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Mark Elstob, Lucy Briggs-Owen, Alicia Ambrose-Bayly, Jim Barclay, Richard Dixon, Barnaby Edwards, Genevieve Gaunt, Jennifer Healy, Lorelei King, Glen McCready, Sarah Mowat.
The price of losing your own individuality is more than you think, more than you can afford, and more than society can bear as the race for hegemony of all continues on with relentless pursuit and fearful dominance.
Union is a state of acceptance that we are bound too, that we require for our species to survive, to prosper, but to lose oneself to the rigours of state compliance is to subject the soul to torture, to give government sanction and autonomy over waking moment and every ideal that you ever had.
One of the more subversive television serials to grave the screen in the 1960s was without doubt the excellent and insanely produced, The Prisoner. The programme gave its star, the late and much missed Patrick McGoohan, carte blanche to delve into the psyche of totalitarianism, of conspiracy, of psychological distress, alienation, and indoctrination. This was the spy story that Britain wasn’t ready for at the time, but which has gained its true status as legendary ever since.
In true Big Finish fashion, the story has been given a new lease of life via the medium of audio drama, and in its third series, The Prisoner continues to wonderfully baffle, to be extraordinary in its ability to unnerve, and sublime in the message that it accurately delivers.
Across the four seamless tales that make up the third volume of the conceptual audio drama, Free For All, The Girl Who Was Death, The Seltzman Connection, and No One Will Know, Number 6, played with vocal insight by Mark Elstob, confronts the hold that the village has over him with a plan of escape that only drives him further into the hands of those with the weapon held at his head he fears the most, the loss of his own identity.
It is testament to the power of the history of the series and the writing and production values of Big Finish that The Prisoner has become yet again a cult classic, the fans’ go to drama when they require an injection of the cerebral appraisal in their life, and it is to that end, and with quality support from the likes of Lucy Briggs-Owen as Kate Bosworth/Number Two, Sarah Mowat as Janet, and Glen McCready as Potter, that this version of the much loved serial stands up to the insane brilliance of its television counterpart and with as much depth as anything adapted by Big Finish.
Individuality is sacred, to allow it to be squandered is to die a thousand inconspicuous and invisible deaths, to be a prisoner in your own mind. We should look to the lessons played out for us by those who would have us blindly comply to the narrative, for in their actions shows their contempt for the mind of the those whose thoughts are free.
Ian D. Hall