Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009)

I've just learned, via Craig Ceely's blog, that actor/director/writer Patrick McGoohan, the creator and star of the classic TV series The Prisoner, has died.
I'm in shock.

Thank goodness the Free Radical magazine managed to interview him before his death.

Click to hear this important message from that first series:

"I will not make any deals with you... I've resigned... I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered! My life is my own."

NB: Read a full obituary and tributes at http://www.theprisonerappreciationsociety.com/.

Holiday viewing

'Twas the season to kick back catch up on essential holiday viewing.  Here's some of the holiday films and DVDs I managed to fit in this year.  Lack of decent rain rather kept the viewing down:

Glenn Miller Story - perfect Christmas day viewing.
Spooks - catching up on all the episodes I missed back in Season Two.  Truly nail-biting drama!
House - catching up on Season Three.  Who has time to watch TV during the year?
The Prisoner - there's always someone who needs to be (re)introduced.
Twilight Zone - classic Rod Serling episodes so sharp you cut yourself.
Wicker Man -  "You'll simply never understand the true nature of sacrifice..."
Casablanca -  always worth re-watching.
Third Man - Orson Welles does Graham Greene.  Twin genii.
Marnie - a reminder that Sean Connery was once almost too good for film.
The Town is Quiet - Marseilles on a bad week. 
Dark Blue World - excellent Czech Battle of Britain romance - and some great flying scenes.

Now I look back at the list, it must have rained more than I remembered!  So what did you curl up in front of in your cinema room over the holidays ?

'Lost' & Chekhov's gun

The playwright Anton Chekhov once offered a pithy literary principle for anyone pulling together a plot. Said Anton, If a gun appears on the wall in the First Act, then it should go off the in Third.

In good drama, in other words, nothing should be unintentional. If you're not to have an audience that feels cheated when they leave the show, then questions asked of the audience in the First Act should be resolved by the Curtain.

Based on this principle, novelist Ed Cline compares my own favourite TV series The Prisoner with the series Lost, which on the face of it has many parallels. However ...

[See Ed Cline's 'Lost' and Clueless for the full story. Note that Ed "would caution the reader... about plot spoilers to follow, but there is no plot to spoil." ]

New Prisoner?

News for Prisoner fans like myself:

BBC NEWS: Remake for cult show The Prisoner
Patrick McGoohan played Prisoner Number 6 in the original Cult TV series The Prisoner is to be remade into a six-part series for Sky One, the broadcaster has confirmed. Director of programmes Richard Woolfe promised a "thrilling reinvention" of the drama about an ex-secret agent trapped in an isolated village.

Too early however to tell if this is good news. Like all fans of these TV shows, we remember with horror the Avengers film... In the meantime, click to hear this important message from that first series:

"I will not make any deals with you... I've resigned... I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered! My life is my own."

LINK: Remake for cult show The Prisoner [Hat tip Robin T]
The Unmutual. A Website dedicated to the 1960s TV series The Prisoner
The Prisoner for a new generation - Jennie Fiddes, The Unmutual website
Message from The Prisoner - Movie Sound Clips [audio]

RELATED: Films & TV

Another Saturday morning ramble, 1.

At the end of every week I have notes about all sorts of things I wanted to write about but never got around to. Here's just a few of these (in no particular order) that you might want to ponder yourself:

• Those pictures show Cardiff's Millenium Stadium, which (conditions underfoot aside) is perhaps the world's finest rugby stadium. And there seems to be a message there for Trevor Mallard, doesn't there? To paraphrase John Lydon, "This is Not a Bedpan."
  
• The prosecution of Greg Carvell for shooting a machete-wielding intruder is igniting much-deserved outrage. Oswald Bastable rounds up blog comments on the matter. The Sensible Sentencing Trust says, "We have become a society that stands up for the rights of the criminal and we’ve trampled all over the rights of the law-abiding citizen. It’s despicable" -- and they're right. Libertarianz, as you might recall, said Carvell deserves a medal, not a charge sheet. Even former lawyer Richard Worth has a view on the matter, and as a former lawyer his view helps to encapsulate the case:
  

  On Thursday 27 July 2006, Ricky Beckham burst into the premises of Small Arms International in Penrose armed with a machete and allegedly said "give me the guns or I will kill you". Greg Carvell shot Beckham in the stomach at close range with a handgun. It seems a classic case of self-defence. The law is clear - you can use such force to defend yourself as is reasonable in the circumstances; up to and including deadly force.

  Rodney Hide, however? He has no view. None at all.
• Rodney does have a view on property rights however. Like our friends in the Clark Government who, in their pursuit of a waterfront stadium are showing us what they really think about issues of moment -- in their case of the legal chains that bind us, and which they themselves wish to be free of -- in his otherwise laudable pursuit of the Carlaw Park option Rodney Hide shows how he really feels about property rights: "Mr Hide said he would support using the Public Works Act to confiscate private land at Carlaw Park." Can I hear a "Sheesh!" ? How about a "For fuck's sake!" ?
  
• Did you know that Patrick McGoohan from The Prisoner and Diana Rigg from The Avengers have a Degree of Separation of 2? The Uni of Virginia have a 'Star Links' system that allows you to determine the degrees of separation of any film or TV performers. Try it out.
• And speaking of John Lydon, Clint Heine has linked to a You Tube clip of Johnny Rotten (AKA Lydon) on censorship, which I imagine would be good ... if I could get the damn thing to load. See if you have more success than I have to date.
• Karl Popper's defence of science is still sadly popular, and still so threadbare that as a defence it does everything science's attackers want. Sydney University's D.C Stove attacks Popper and four other "modern irrationalists," explaining how all their irrationalism about science became credible. I'm told it's very good, but as I haven't yet read it myself I can't say that first-hand. Let me know.
• A Glossary of Free Speech is up at Bernard Darnton's FreeSpeech.Org.NZ site. Highly useful. Highly recommended.

More to come later this avo: Look for more 'Ramble' updates through the day -- and look out too for two posts I'm putting together on the Stadium debate: one showing what lessons the Sydney Opera House competition, architecture and construction has for the Waterfront Stadium, and another looking again at Carlaw Park.

RELATED: Stadium, Property Rights, Politics-ACT, Politics-NZ, Self-Defence, Films, Free Speech, Science, Philosophy

4 things meme

Pinched from Ruth at Chaos Theory:

4 jobs I've had
* Tofu maker
* Warehouse Manager
* Carpenter
* Project Manager

4 movies I can watch over and over
* The Castle
* Life of Brian
* Amadeus
* Malcom X

4 places I've liked
* John Soane's Museum, London
* East Berlin just after the wall came down
* O'Riordan's Public House, Brentford
* Guggenheim Museum, New York

4 places I've lived
* Wellington
* Sydney
* Perth
* London

4 TV shows I love
* Scrubs
* The Avengers
* The Prisoner
* Howard Goodall's Big Bangs

Four places I've vacationed
* Hersonissos, Crete
* Murmansk, Russia
* Dublin, Ireland
* Normandy, France

4 of my favourite dishes
* Falafels
* Spicy Sichuan Tofu
* Moules Frite
* Miso Soup

4 Places I would rather be right now
* O'Riordan's Public House, Brentford
* Verandah Bar, Raglan
* Taliesin East
* Taliesin West

4 sites I visit daily
* SOLOPassion
* TradeMe (I confess)
* Cox and Forkum
* CapMag

4 victims I'm tagging - whoever wants to martyr themselves.

More liberty at the movies

Now for some more uplifting material. David Boaz has posted his personal list of his all-time favourite libertarian-themed movies here, to which I'd add at least three more: 'Braveheart,' 'Breaker Morant,' and the entire TV series of 'The Prisoner.' (Okay, it's not a movie, but it is fabulously libertarian.) Perhaps the most topical of all libertarian movies at present is 'The Castle,' although not everyone agrees. I hope the good people of Kelo have a chance to watch it before they're thrown our of their homes by order of the US Supreme Court.

And while talking liberty and movies, Crypticity has noticed a certain liberty-flavoured ad played before a recent screening of 'Hotel Rwanda.' See what he's talking about here, and see the ad for yourself here. Reports have it that said ad was pulled fom the Bridgeway Northcote after fielding a "number" of complaints. As my informant says, "I think I hear the ruffling of feathers." :-)