The Prisoner Comment

   Producer/director David Tomblin on ‘The Prisoner.’ “Leo McKern, he did ‘The Chimes of Big Ben’ and soon after, McGoohan wrote ‘Once Upon a Time.’ It was a very intense episode between Pat and Leo. It was an amazing two hander.... that was Patrick's baby. He wrote that and did everything on it, and Leo was amazing. It was really a battle and I have the greatest admiration for Leo McKern. He is a fine actor and he really hung in there. Patrick is a tough man and once he starts putting the pressure on in a situation like that, to live with it you have got to be quite a person - and Leo got through it fine. An amazing performance on both their parts!
   The idea of ‘Living In Harmony.’ Well, when you are in the sort of situation, your ears are always open, and if you hear somebody say something, or you have a conversation about something, it turns into another idea.

    If I remember it correctly, Patrick was playing squash with Frank Maher and Frank said in a strange moment: "Why don't we do a Western?" So I sat down and wrote an idea for it based upon - in parallel -with ‘the Prisoner.’ And then I got a guy who was ambitious to be a writer, Ian Rakoff, and we started to write and then he had to go and do something, and I sort of wrote it. I was quite excited by it because when I finished it, I had the idea of life-sized photographs and I injected that afterwards, after I finished writing it. So I was quite pleased with that.

    ‘The Girl Who Was Death,’ that was an idea that I sketched out some long time ago before for ‘Danger Man.’ There was a period where we weren't doing very much, so out of boredom I wrote this outline. Then, when we were searching for more ideas for ‘the Prisoner,’ I got it out and had a look at it, and thought; "Well, we could use it for the Prisoner." It was out of context, in a way, but I thought it could be a lot of fun. And that's what I was meaning earlier - you could put stories into ‘the Prisoner’ and make them work for the series.

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