The Prisoner Comment

   To the question, “Did McGoohan ever discuss who the mysterious No.1 was going to be? Did he ever talk about the meaning of Rover?”   To which Camera Operator Jack Lowen had this to say:

    “No. He was really very secretive about the whole thing. As I said, it was all within himself. He never discussed it or talked about it, and nobody knew what the outcome was going to be.

    We got the feeling that it was a physically existing village in some unknown place to which he had been physically and forcibly transported to by persons unknown. The thought that it could all be in the mind didn't, I think, really occur seriously to anybody.  Whether it occurred to McGoohan or not, whether this was his intention or not at the time, I don't know.

    We may have thought" You know this may turn out to be all a dream or something" but not seriously. It was all: "How is it going to end?" I'm not totally convinced that Pat himself was entirely sure how he was going to end the series when he started it.

    I think he must have had several possibilities in mind, but I'm not convinced that the final outcome was the one he originally started out with, I think it built up.

   I think it was a great series and it was a bit ahead of its time in a way. It is just a little bit too avant garde for the year. A few years later, two years later, and it would have been nothing. It would have been one of many, because there were so many weird series around that time. But I think it set a trend when it started out.

   I felt that if it did turn out to be all in the mind, it was a bit of a cheat. There were one or two episodes, about a third of the way through, which could not logically exist if it was all in the mind. You could not have sequences which McGoohan did not take part in, in which he was not in any way involved, something presented only to the audience which he did not see, he didn't know about, if it was supposed to be happening in his mind. So therefore it was a cheat.

    I don't know whether these scenes were done when the original concept was slightly different, but I feel they should not have been there, or at least, should have been changed, if it was going to be all in his mind.”

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