You Can't Escape from Prisoner Collectibles

By Bill Kunkel

Patrick McGoohan’s enigmatic TV series, The Prisoner is perhaps the best example of a cult success in the history of American television. While only a limited number of episodes were broadcast – the show ran as a summer replacement on CBS in 1968 and was rebroadcast in 1969 – and the series has been infrequently seen in the intervening three decades, it is amazingly well remembered.

As with Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, two other favorite offbeat '60s TV series, The Prisoner had a gripping introduction that has become a part of the pop cultural language. A British spy (McGoohan, who had previously been involved in espionage in the British series Danger Man and Secret Agent) resigns his commission and is soon rendered unconscious. He awakens in a mysterious place known only as The Village, surrounded by shadowy interrogators. But during the famous opening sequence, it's McGoohan who's asking the questions.

"Where am I?" he demands.

"In The Village," he is told.

"What do you want?"

"Information."

"You won't get it," he promises.

"By hook or by crook," they assure him, "we will."

The Prisoner is then given the only identity he will receive during the entire series: "You are Number 6."

"I am not a number!" he insists. "I am a free man!"

We live in a world where each of us is assigned a numerical tag at birth, where numbers dominate every aspect of our life-where we can even be identified by an internal tag known as DNA. In many ways, today's sneaky-peepy society was forecast by the Prisoner's struggle to establish and maintain his individual identity in a colony of obviously intelligent people, most of who had surrendered to the mysterious "system."

The backstory remained maddeningly elusive throughout the show's brief run. Who were the high numbers who ran this place? Were other prisoners also resisting The Village? What information did the secret masters desire? Was it all a test to determine whether the Prisoner could be trusted? Why was Number 2 constantly changing? And the most important question of all: whom could he trust?

The Village was an elegant prison – it was, in fact, set in the picturesque Portmeirion resort in Northern Wales – but a prison it was. Everyone dressed the same, in strange-looking quasi-Victorian garb with straw boaters and little buttons carrying the Village's most popular greeting: "Be seeing you." Cameras intruded into every phase of the residents' lives, and huge, white globes called "rovers" patrolled the perimeter. These bouncing guardians pursued their targets, rendered them unconscious, and brought them quietly and quickly back to The Village.

The show's final episode is still discussed by fans of the series, with the conversation generally boiling down to: "What did that all mean?" If the series had been surreal before, it completely broke down in this mad conclusion which created more questions than it answered. Number 1's long-awaited first appearance-in a gorilla suit, no less-and a showdown in a missile silo between Number 6 and...himself (?) were only two of the elements in one of the wildest hours in TV history.

Despite its lingering popularity, there are remarkably few Prisoner collectibles available. Extensive searches turned up no straw-hatted action figures, "Be Seeing You" pins, or pewter reproductions of the show's trademark Victorian bicycle.

The most valuable items are actual show mementos – scripts, photographs, and marketing materials – and props. These items must be searched out, since they turn up infrequently, but given the small universe of genuine, first generation mementos, this could be a very profitable collecting category. On a more mass-market level, however, there are a few basic items which Prisoner fans should know about.

Steve Jackson Games, one of the leaders in non-electronic strategy and role-playing games, produced a Prisoner supplement for its GURPS (Generic Universal Role-Playing System). The accompanying book contains extensive background information on the series, including maps, a bibliography, and episode plot summaries. There was also an early Apple II computer game called The Prisoner which appears to have been published by a now-defunct company called Edu-ware. This item is extremely difficult to locate.

The Prisoner has inspired a lot of supplemental fiction, however, and many of the books have secondary market appeal, including a series of Ace paperback novels published in the 1970s. In 1988, meanwhile, Dean Motter co-authored and drew a DC Comics mini-series based on the show.

The collectible market for Prisoner items would certainly receive a major boost if the show were more accessible to new viewers. According to TV Quest, for example, no episodes are currently showing in the United States. Nonetheless, the words and images that the show produced remain a crucial component of the fabric of our reality. Every day, in some way, we are forced to affirm our individuality and, much like Number 6, we must resist all attempts to categorize, compartmentalize, and confine our bodies or our minds.

Be seeing you.

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The preceding material was written by Bill Kunkel. These are the opinions of the author, not the opinions of eBay, and therefore eBay does not validate the accuracy of or endorse these opinions.