Remaking "The Prisoner"... as good as "Doctor Who", as bad as "Minder" or as indifferent as "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin"?

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It has taken five years, two directors and a desert shoot to film the revival of The Prisoner and it was as weird as the plot.

On Saturday (17/04/10), you will finally get to see ITV’s six-hour remake of The Prisoner, the trippy 1960s cult classic. Enjoy it: you are witnessing the culmination of five years’ toil. That would be a protracted gestation for a feature film. For a television series, it is an eternity. But then The Prisoner is not a normal television series. Even those who have no recollection of Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 original will be aware of it: a surrealist knockabout featuring giant killer bouncy balls, a strange “Village” that was both a paradise you would never want to leave and a hell you couldn’t escape, glassy-eyed villagers intoning “Be seeing you”, and a protagonist in a black turtleneck known only as Number Six.

This was a drama so weird that it seared itself into popular culture — everything from Twin Peaks to The Matrix to The Truman Show owes it a debt. And in broader terms, its studied ambiguity enabled it to mean almost anything viewers wanted it to mean, which, in 1967, was a lot: the individual against the state, East against West, free will against fate, the culture wars. Analyse at will. It was so weird, and so long (17 hours in all), that it could never be made in the creative corset of today’s ratings-driven, advertiser-led television industry. So when the first murmurs of a remake emerged in 2005, there was much gnashing of teeth.

The new Prisoner needed a distinct location, an unmistakable aesthetic — costumes, sets, props — and a big-name cast to attract new viewers. That meant big money, which meant a co-production. AMC, the American cable channel best known for the brilliant 1960s advertising drama Mad Men, initially signed up for the remake with Sky 1, the UK satellite broadcaster whose drama output at the time was primarily Dream Team. It was a partnership that should have had “Creative Differences” splashed across the very first memo. It didn’t help that The Prisoner required more creative decisions to be made than most series. What would the Village look like? How outré could the plot lines be? To what extent should the new version cleave to the original?

By April 2008, it was being reported that Christopher Eccleston would play Number Six; filming would take place in Portmeirion, the odd-looking Welsh village where the original was shot; and that Patrick McGoohan, the star, creator, producer, writer and director of the 1960s series, would have a cameo. (In January 2009, mid-shoot, McGoohan died. There would be no cameo.) Most of this was wrong. The mini-series would consist of six one-hour episodes written by Britain’s Bill Gallagher (Clocking Off), with the American Jim Caviezel as Number Six, and Ian McKellen as Number Two, the sinister overseer of the Village. Trevor Hopkins (Dracula, Poirot) would produce, and Jon Jones, who made his name with Cold Feet, would direct. The Village would be situated in Swakopmund, Namibia.

It didn’t help that, to enhance the “movieness” of its Prisoner, AMC had insisted on Caviezel, the actor best known for playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s controversial The Passion of the Christ, for the McGoohan role. He was cast, presumably, for his US pull — he had never done a television series before, and told me he had never heard of The Prisoner, nor McGoohan’s part in it (to him, he was “the guy who played the king in Braveheart”). Those who worked with Caviezel on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and The Passion of the Christ told of how he was obsessively “method”, and intensely religious. On The Prisoner, he would listen to Gregorian chant and was constantly accompanied by at least one acting coach. All of which would have been forgiven if Caviezel were the new Olivier. But watching takes, palpably he was not.

The location itself was also driving the actors to distraction — Swakopmund, a sternly surreal German holiday town half an hour from the desert, is a visually cloying time warp where German colonial meets Toy Town, a holiday camp that would have made Albert Speer proud. It is the perfect location for the new Village. But the actors and crew had to live there for nearly three months, and most were going slightly potty two weeks in. As McKellen put it: “Swakopmund has the feel of a prison. The mighty Atlantic on one side, and on the other the massive desert, with buildings that look familiar but are strange because they’re a colonial German relic in Africa.” Ruth Wilson, who plays Six’s love interest, says: “We all felt we were slightly in The Prisoner and had no escape. We didn’t really know what the hell was going on.”

At least that last bit sounds like they had joined in with the philosophy of the original series! Personally speaking I remember watching this as a pup and, quite frankly, those six foot bubbles scared the crap out of me!

Why was this so scary?

The original was here