The Annotated Prisoner - ‘Many Happy Returns’ 3

One last look around ‘Many Happy Returns’ today, before the first ‘series’ of The Prisoner wraps.

On the face of it, Act 4 of this episode - which pays off the story with remarkable economy in a mere twelve minutes - is much more conventional television. We are still nonplussed by the shift outside the Village, but the sight of P at the heart of the British establishment would be very reassuring to 1967 viewers. This, after all, is John Drake’s home ground, far more than his house, and there are people here who know him. One of them, indeed. is ‘an old, old friend’. The episode keeps going further and further in its attempts to convince you that P has actually, finally done it.

Act 4

We come up on P’s photographs of the Village. This is a major change from the Skene script, where Act 3 ends with the revelation that the roll of film has been ‘ruined’ by seawater … or, as P suspects, by ‘somebody’.

The screen version is much, much better, removing - or dampening anyway - our doubts that the Village are still monitoring him, and that the whole affair is another of their elaborate schemes.

It’s a shame that P didn’t take any snaps of the accessible bits of the metallic, futuristic under Village, which might have helped to overcome the scepticism of the Colonel and Thorpe. Photographs of Number 2’s living space or the more high-tech sections of the hospital would have been far harder to wave away as holiday snaps. But then, P - wisely - doesn’t mention Rover to them, perhaps for fear of sounding absolutely crackers. Human chess, exact doubles, and the Butler probably better not brought up at this stage either.

P does, intriguingly, tell them that the Village has a cinema, something not seen or even mentioned anywhere else. I wonder what films they’ve shown? I imagine the choices are the cinematic equivalent of the music played over the tannoys - bright, breezy, inconsequential fare. That Darn Cat! probably made it, maybe Carry On Screaming, but other big hits of 1966 like Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? or Alfie probably didn’t. And the likes of Thunderball and Our Man Flint would just be very awkward for everybody. A lot of tutting and sighs of ‘not very realistic’ from the audience.

The country house in which these scenes occur is Engadine’s salon again, the third of its four outings, complete with its arbour, seen very briefly at the start of the act.