What We Can Learn From DANGER MAN

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

What We Can Learn from Danger Man

Although the names and numbers change, as is only right in a good spy yarn, we can infer that Patrick McGoohan’s flinty character in Danger Man (Secret Agent in the USA), Ice Station Zebra, and The Prisoner is the same man: John Drake. From these films a young person can learn that in the 1960s:

1. A fake travel agency can function in the center of London for years as a front for the British secret service without Communists, smugglers, crooked millionaires, corrupt members of parliament, or drug cartels figuring that out.

2. The same supporting actor, usually Aubrey Morris, can play a Chinese, an Italian, a Spaniard, and a Haitian, and no one is offended by that.

3. A secret agent travels with one small canvas bag which holds a business suit for the city, a tweed suit for the country, a dinner jacket, a trench coat, a turtleneck sweater, a pair of slacks, a change of shirts, a shaving kit, a large tape recorder, a large two-way radio, binoculars, a hat or two, sneakers for doing the cat burglar thing, and a pair of hiking boots.

4. A distinguished middle-aged man wearing a smoking jacket and holding a brandy snifter is a villain.

5. If there is an elderly colonel, and there usually is, and if he has a sweet, pretty daughter, and he usually does, she is always a traitor.

6. Scientists always wear white laboratory coats and eyeglasses rimmed in black plastic.

7. A computer is the size of a Ford Galaxie 500, clatters like a teletype, and features lots of dials and flashing lights.

8. Sometimes a character must get off the train or stop the car in order to call someone on a pay telephone. The pay telephone is convenient and always in working order, and the character always has the correct change.

9. Any airport terminal is about the size of a kitchen. When it is not an airport terminal it is a hotel lobby or a railway station.

10. A forest in Scotland, a copse in Kent, and jungles in central Africa, Haiti, and South America look exactly alike and feature identical plant life.

11. Almost all women wear dresses or skirts, except for Patricia Driscoll (nee’ Maid Marian) who rather daringly wears slacks.

12. Anyone can walk into any airport and immediately buy a ticket for any destination in the world on a plane that leaves within the hour.

13. Smoking is cool.

14. Coats and ties are required. A man sitting at the breakfast table will put on his sports jacket or suit coat before answering the door. When the police or military intelligence arrest someone they always give him a moment to tie his tie and find his coat before they take him away. Every man (except for Communists and other such low-lifes) removes his hat when entering someone’s home or office, and when dining.

15. In those funny little foreign countries airport staff are invariably surly and suspicious, wear moustaches, search luggage, ask nosy questions, and carry firearms. This would never happen in English, French, German, or American airports, where the staff are polite and helpful, and never snoop through travelers’ things.

16. Pan American is the preferred airline, though sometimes one must make do with BOAC.

17. All cars are English, French, or Italian.

18. The United Nations is a beneficent organization staffed by men (never women) of all nations and cultures. These men are good, wise, and honest.

19. London’s clubland rules the world.

20. Anyone stepping out of a hotel will immediately find a taxi available.

21. Typewriters. Newspapers. Telegrams. Rotary telephones.

22. Danger Man set the standard for complex gadgets hidden in pieces in shavers and pens, and which must be assembled over a period of minutes with much clicking and clacking.

23. When any woman enters a room, all the men present stand up. When greeting a woman a man (except for a Communist) removes his hat or at least touches the brim respectfully.

24. John Drake never carries a firearm. He can disable four or five armed villains with his bare hands, not unlike Walker, Texas Ranger. While one baddie is being subdued all the others jump around harmlessly in the background while waiting their turn to be bashed.

25. Most elderly women are dear, sweet things who serve tea with milk, lemon, sugar, and knockout drops.

This bit of fun shouldn’t suggest that Danger Man / Secret Agent is cartoonish. The series features well-developed plots, characterizations, and settings, and is always predicated on an ethical sense wholly lacking in the James Bond cartoons.

When in one episode Drake realizes that an evil man he has captured has been murdered by his own agency, he angrily confronts his boss. Drake sternly reminds The Colonel that if the English government is going to act like the Soviet government, then there is no moral ground for the country’s existence. This scene may be the impetus for the ongoing theme of The Prisoner: “Why did you resign?”

Danger Man / Secret Agent presents intelligent, ethical, and artistically staged stories that, unlike most twaddle from the Ministry of Truth, respect the viewer. And, in addition to the many other excellent qualities of Danger Man, there are lava lamps.

-30-

THE PRISONER Fact #13

#6 does not have a line of designer fashion clothing.

THE PRISONER Fact #12

#6 never eats finger-food.

THE PRISONER Fact #11

#6 was hired to play a game of chess with Death in one of those grainy black-and-white Ingmar Bergman films. #6 kept checkmating Death in three or four moves, spoiling the film's narrative flow, and so was sacked.

THE PRISONER Fact #10

#6 often regaled the other prisoners in THE VILLAGE with crude jokes about a quite impossible relationship between #2 and Rover.

THE PRISONER Fact #9

Yes, #6 catches the swine flu. He catches it, has a few quiet conversations with it, and persuades it to attack #2.

THE PRISONER Fact #8

#6 never dines in restaurants featuring old license plates hanging on the walls.

THE PRISONER Fact #7

An unfortunate incident occurred on the outer perimeter when #34, a former Vatican superspy, tried to surrender to Rover in Latin.

THE PRISONER -- Fact #6 About #6

#6 is a STAR TREK man, and would not bother A, B, or C-ing to the galaxy next door to see a STAR WARS anything.

THE PRISONER Fact #5

#6 is okay with corgis but is at heart a dachshund man.

Little Known Fact #4 About THE PRISONER

#6 hides his Winnie-the-Pooh books unders his pillow. If #2 ever finds out...

Fact #2 About THE PRISONER

The control room staff don't give each other Secret Pal gifts.

Little Known Fact #1 About THE PRISONER

#6 finally realized he could intimidate Rover by glaring at him in that head down / eyes up way he uses in the opening.

The Prisoner

Mack Hall

By the time we finish with him, he won't know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity.

-- Number 2 in The Prisoner

Once again America has changed governments without any violence other than the occasional storming of a parade-route porta-potty by unrestrained hordes of liberal arts majors who had to let their magna grande cups of lattepuccinis go. A young man who was raised in a little log cabin in Hawaii now lives at the ritziest address this side of Buckingham Palace, and America goes on and on. How do you like them apples, General Lord Cornwallis?

President Obama will now wake up every morning for the next four years realizing that he, and he alone, must in the name of the Land of the Free face unspeakable horrors that would cower a lesser man, said horrors being Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.

On the occasion of an inauguration it is a custom for almost everyone within reach of a keyboard to tap out an open letter telling the new President how to run the nation. It is a custom of the new President to ignore said open letters because, after all, he got elected and the rest of us didn’t.

Even so, I will now exercise my First Amendment right to be unread.

Dear President Obama:

Avoid the exotic foo-foo pooches; get a nice brace of beagles for the kids. Don’t do a Lyndon Johnson and pick ‘em up by the ears.

Keep your Blackberry. Don’t let people push you around about that.

If you keep channeling Abraham Lincoln, Joe Biden’s going to start thinking more and more about how to call in the boys in the white coats.

Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – what were you thinking? I got two words for ya: Lady Macbeth. Watch out for floating cutlery.

Could you please make Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton co-ambassadors to Estonia, and then accidentally forget to budget return tickets?

I’ve always wondered – is the Surgeon General a real general?

Get out into the country often. Walk in the woods in all seasons. Go fishing. Go hunting. Sit around a campfire and smoke cigars and enjoy a little of Scotland’s one gift to civilization with some guys who don’t wear suits.

About Vladimir Putin -- anyone who looks so much like Dobbie-the-House-Elf is not be trusted.

I love the new wheels. Is the engine a hybrid?

Telephone Rush Limbaugh and ask him if he’s registered to vote.

You do know that global warming is a fraud, right? Always remember that big coat you wore for your inauguration.

Don’t even imagine that you are The One to the guy who had to clean out those 5,000 one-holers.

You are now The Man. Be The Man. Be General Patton, not Doctor Phil. A great nation requires a great leader, not a therapist. You are now the Commander-in-Chief, not a Chicago politician.

Don’t be a prisoner of the closed Byzantine rigidity of the insider sub-culture. Don’t believe what your briefcase-carriers tell you. Listen outside The Village.

Be seeing you!