Niklas' blog

Now that the American version of the late 1960s TV-series “The Prisoner” has started airing, I feel it’s incredibly important to remember the original. Here’s a sweet “all-star appreciation” of the series, including bits on how artists and people such as The Beatles, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were influenced by it.

When I started watching it, thanks to Swedish then-semi-underground TV-channel ZTV, the series had a profound effect on me, making my subconscious kick like a mule and sort of veer me in directions of van Gogh, Rimbaud, Robert Crumb’s “Fritz The Cat” and eventually Einstürzende Neubauten. I also loved the clothes, the veneer of it all, as though every seemingly superficial detail surrounding me hid an unnerving underground threatening to spiral forever and warp what I thought was right, over and over again. In short, it shocked me and threw my world upside-down in a way that “Planet Of The Apes” did when I saw it, 10 or 12 years old; then, I thought every film was supposed to end with everybody being happy apart from the bad people, who were duly punished. “The Prisoner” sort of threw me a gigantic wobbler by helping me realise that not all that looks nice is nice, and by the way questioning what “nice” is, to begin with. Questions, questions, questions. No real answers but from yourself.

Part drugs, part maverick, part genius, the series was an experiment set in a very acidic environment and broadcast to an English populace in the end of the swingin’ 60s. I guess this opened a lot of minds that were supposedly already open.

And here’s an entire stream of the very first episode, “The Arrival“, of the English series. Enjoy.