Patrick McGoohan RIP:

As has been noted elsewhere Patrick McGoohan, 80, died a few days ago.

McGoohan achieved cult status as Number 6 on the short-lived series, The Prisoner. I watched the series in first run–as I recall as a summer replacement series. I found it awesome at the time up (“I am not a number; I am a free man!”) until its greatly disappointing finale. After that, I watched it in reruns a bit and did still like it. One of the things I loved best about the show was its opening theme, which I remember recording on a 5″ reel-to-real tape recorder. Now we have YouTube:

But I was a bigger fan of his role as secret agent John Drake. I watched him in the American import of the series under the name Secret Agent, which it was called in the US during the height of the James Bond craze. I preferred Drake to Bond, as it seemed more realistic to me, although the production values were completely back lot and sound stage. Drake was intelligent and suave.

Only later did I realize that the UK series was called Danger Man. Wikipedia has the following background (and more too):

There has never been a full explanation of the relationship between [Producer Ralph] Smart and McGoohan. McGoohan has never spoken about Ralph Smart in any detail. They did have face-to-face meetings at the beginning of the project, at which time they fleshed out the character of John Drake.

According to Andrew Pixley’s notes to the CD Danger Man Original Soundtrack, Ian Fleming was involved with Ralph Smart to bring James Bond to television. (Casino Royale had been a one-off live TV play in America a few years before). Fleming dropped out and was replaced by Ian Stuart Black, and a new format/character to be called “Lone Wolf” was developed. This evolved into Danger Man.

Ian Fleming was involved in preproduction work on an American series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., creating the name Napoleon Solo. [This explains why it was not exactly a coincidence that the mob character in Goldfinger was also named “Solo”–which caused the producers some concern given the overlap with the TV character.–RB]

The degree to which McGoohan changed Smart’s original ideas is unclear. However, Smart evidently agreed to the changes and continued to be enthusiastic about his creation.[citation needed] Danger Man was financed by Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment.

In the United States, CBS broadcast some of the original format’s episodes of the series under the Danger Man title as a summer replacement for the Western series Wanted: Dead or Alive. Years later, under the Secret Agent title, the same network aired the entirety of the second and third seasons. The two final episodes of the series often are presented as the television film Koroshi. “Secret Agent Man” is the title of the series’ American-broadcast theme song, though often mistakenly applied to the series itself. This theme was written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, and recorded by Johnny Rivers.

And only recently did I discover that Danger Man had two series runs in the UK. In the first Drake was–you won’t believe this–an American agent of Irish descent, who worked as a contract agent for various agencies, like NATO. This revelation so rocked my assumptions about everything I thought I knew about the world that I briefly considered becoming a communist. I already bought the Danger Man Soundtrack CD when I was visiting England, and the music is quite good. Now the entire Danger Man series is now available on DVD. Though some of the plots are pretty thin and predictable, the John Drake character is every bit as cool as I remembered.