The Therapy Zone

    As you will know, The Tally Ho was the village newspaper, bringing you such headlines at No.6 Speaks His Mind a report during the elections during Free For All. What Are Facts Behind Town Hall? Committee Hearing Continues, No.93 Confess Disharmony. Is No.2 Fit For Further Term? and so on and so forth However these are the only articles which are actually read able! All the other print of the newspaper has been pains taking cut from other newspapers, and again painstakingly stuck higgledy-piggledy and reprinted so that the text makes no sense at all. Why, well that has never been fathomed, and is open only to speculation as to why anyone would go to so much trouble when all one is able to read of The Tally Ho newspapers on the screen, for but a few seconds only - are the headlines!

    In later years, The Tally Ho appeared in the outside world, and taking on several guises. Of course The Tally Ho which you are reading today is the latest metamorphosis of the newspaper.

   Back in 1989 The Tally Ho was given over to being a newspaper reporting on Prisoner conventions which are held annually at Portmeirion. At this time the layout of The Tally Ho stll resembled that of a newspaper.

    They then tried to be clever in 1989 and make The Tally Ho look more like the Independant newspaper as pictured below. But at leat it still maintained the look and layout of a newspaper.

    And then worse, depending on your point of view, taste and political bent, The Tally Ho took on the look of The Sun newspaper!

   And finally by 1993 The Tally Ho changed. The look and feel of The Tally Ho as a newspaper went and gone, as the once proud newspaper became little more than a newspaper, without the look and feel, for newspaper cuttings taken from other newspapers, magazines and Journals.

   It is the hope of this Tally Ho, that this more recent metamorphosis of the newspaper is more than that.

    Have you observed the cups and saucers, salt and pepper pots often used by No.6 during the episode of both The Schizoid Man and A Change of Mind? They depict horsemen and soldiers, and were borrowed from Portmeirion and of course used for props. And the name of the pattern... Penny Plain and is demonstrated in the following pictures.

    The Penny Plain range was launched in 1966 and was only on the market until 1968. Nicely timed for the Prisoner it would seem.

     Not only does such crockery appear in the afore mentioned episodes, but also ‘Arrival’ – ‘The Chimes of Big Ben’ ‘A B & C’ – ‘Free For All’ – ‘Dance of the Dead’ – ‘Checkmate and ‘Hammer Into Anvil.’

   Penny Plain certainly gives the set of No.6's cottage a unique look and a great deal of originality. In the more upmarket settings, like No.2's office of the Green Dome and the Labour Exchange, there is the floral design of 'best china.'.

   And you will have observed, that there is one time when the pottery’s trade mark is revealed on screen, and for but only a second or two. And which appears in the episode of A Change of Mind, when No.6 tips his drugged tea into the plant pot. When originally screened this would have gone by unnoticed. You can observe the Portmeirion trade mark on the above picture, if you missed it.

 

Be seeing you