Thought For The Day

   During the opening sequence of ‘the Prisoner’ there is a long and deserted runway, not a road, but a runway on an airfield. Are we to take it that the runway represents a road, or has the Prisoner recently stepped off an aircraft? Either way, the Lotus Seven hurtles towards the camera, and then is driven over Westminster Bridge on the Prisoner's way to hand in his letter of resignation. We know where the Prisoner is going, driving to an underground car park, and eventually walks into an office the location of which is unknown. Although it has been conjectured that the office where the Prisoner hands in his letter of resignation is at the end of that underground tunnel in the car park. Why such an office would be at the end of a long dark tunnel in an underground car park I don’t know, as there is no actual evidence for this. Fictionally speaking, and not production-wise, the office could have been located somewhere in the depths of the Houses of Parliament, or perhaps a little further a field in the Foreign Office in Whitehall.

   So we have an idea of where the Prisoner was going, yet we have no idea where he'd been, how he arrived to be driving along that long deserted runway. Perhaps he had been to The Village, from which he was just returning, as he had towards the end of ‘Fall Out.’

    Having eventually returned to his house in Buckingham Place in the city of Westminster, the Prisoner gets behind the wheel of his Lotus Seven and drives off, leaving the Butler to enter the house alone. But having returned to London, the Prisoner doesn’t drive directly to that underground car park as we see in the opening sequence, as he is assumed about to do towards the end of ‘Fall Out.’ But is seen driving off Bridge Street and along Abingdon Street passed the Houses of Parliament. The only thing is, in ‘Fall Out’ the Prisoner is driving from the wrong direction if he’s supposed to have only left his home a few minutes ago, seeing as the Prisoner has come from the south side of the river Thames, when the City of Westminster, where the Prisoner lives, is north of the Thames.

   Perhaps the situation in ‘Fall Out’ is similar to the time when the Prisoner returned to London in ‘Many Happy Returns,’ when he had two calls to make, one in town, the other in the country. But in this case they are reversed. Instead of going to the office in town where he handed in his letter of resignation first, he made the other call in the country, to see the Colonel first. That would explain where the prisoner had been prior to seeing him driving in London. He’d been to see the Colonel at his country residence!

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