Caught On Camera

  Here it is, the dome being placed upon a Go-Kart in order to make the original 'Rover,' which was supposed to go over any terrain, including sand, be able to climb up steps, and even walls, and go underwater like a submarine. The only thing this original Rover could not do was fly, but then as it turned out it couldn't do any of the other things it was supposed to do either. The best it could do, this 'Rover' was to run on tarmac!
   The driver of the Go-Kart, once the dome had been fitted, couldn't see anything through the narrow slit, and once the Go-Kart was fired up, the driver was almost suffocated by the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipe!

   No, somethings are not meant to be, no matter how you try and force it to work. Eventually, so the story goes, they got this 'Rover' down onto the beach, but wouldn't run on the soft sand, and sank without trace.......Now I never believed that story for one moment. I mean sank without trace, is that underwater or in the sand? There are no quick-sands at Portmeirion, and if this machine sank below the waves, then it would have revealed itself once the tide had gone out!
   I mean it's not scary at all is it? Well it doesn't frighten me! And what's more, had this 'Rover' actually worked, then it may very well have made the Prisoner an utter laughing stock! And of course if that had been the case, then we would not have this Village Gaurdian to protect the good citizens of the Village.

Originally the idea was to have the Village Guardian turn red - red with the blood of it's victims, which was then thought to have been too frightening for the television viewers at the time. Well as a very young boy I remember watching the original  BBC series of Quatermass and the Pit, and that didn't scare me, I was intrigued me.I am amused by the sound effect for the Village Guardian, a cross between a bicycle pump, Gregorian chant, and a  diver breathing through an aqua lung, simple enough, but both as a sound effect, and visual effect the Village Guardian work strangely enough, and is perhaps the most iconic visualisation of the Prisoner.    Be seeing you.