Danger Man - Episodes
Several episodes are precursors of The Prisoner.
This is based on the original ITC press releases,
as posted on the Bravo Web pages,
plus Jon Poole's
plus watching the Bravo showings.
The order is that of first transmission, where known, or that of Bravo's listings and transmission order.
Warning - spoilers! The links are to plot details.
- View From the Villa
- PM conceived the concept for
The Prisoner while filming the episode in Portmeirion
- Time to Kill
- Josetta
- The Blue Veil
- The Lovers
- Girl in Pink Pyjamas
- Position of Trust
- The Lonely Chair
- The Sanctuary
- An Affair of State
- The Key
- The Sisters
- The Prisoner
- The Traitor
- Deadline
- Colonel Rodruigez
- The Island
- Find and Return
- The Girl Who Liked GIs
- Name, Date and Place
- Vacation
- The Conspirators
- The Honeymooners
- The Gallows Tree
- The Relaxed Informer
- The Brothers
- The Journey Ends Half-Way
- Bury The Dead
- Sabotage
- The Contessa
- The Leak
- The Trap
- The Actor
- Hired Assassin
- The Coyannis Story
- Find and Destroy
- Under The Lake
- The Nurse
- Dead Man Walks
- Yesterday's Enemies
- Colony Three
- John Drake is sent to a self-contained village where agents are being trained for infiltrating the U.K.
[More info]
This episode was a major influence on The Prisoner.
- The Galloping Major
- JD poses as a military advisor to find who's plotting against
an African Prime Minister at election time.
- Fair Exchange
- JD has a battle of wits with an Iron Curtain secret police chief
over a former colleague who has returned to kill her torturer.
- Fish On The Hook
- Battle Of The Cameras
- The Colonel's Daughter
- No Marks For Servility
- A Man to Be Trusted
- Don't Nail Him Yet
- A Date With Doris
- JD has to get an exposed & injured colleague out of a country (via a submarine, codename Doris)
- That's Two of Us Sorry
- Such Men Are Dangerous
- Whatever Happened to George Foster?
- JD discovers that a respectable millionaire businessman is funding a South American revolution
- A Room in the Basement
- A husband at Geneva airport is kidnapped and taked to the Romanian Embassy
- The Affair at Castlevara
- An old revolutionary returns from exile to die but is betrayed and sentenced to death.
The US & UK governments want him reprieved and use the threat of blocking NATO entry to try to achieve it.
- The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove
- John Drake has a road accident and then is blackmailed over a gambling debt... things get worse...
- It's Up To the Lady
- A Foreign Office expert on China who's under suspicion suddenly leaves the country.
- Have a Glass of Wine
- A junior spy skips to Burgundy and JD goes after her
- The Mirror's New
- You're Not in Any Trouble, Are You?
- A M9 agent is killed in Rome by a "Murder Incorporated" gang.
JD sets out to catch them by putting out a contract on himself.
- The Black Book
- Gen. Carteret's brother-in-law in Paris is being blackmailed and he makes
JD go over to sort it out. He finds it's a Russian clerk who's defected with a
book of secrets and is blackmailing many officials.
- English Lady Takes Lodgers
- The Professionals
- Parallel Lines Sometimes Meet
- The Outcast
- The Mercenaries
- Judgement Day
- Loyalty Always Pays
- Are you going to be permanent?
- A Very Dangerous Game
- Sting in the Tail
- To Our Best Friend
- Features an agent from the opposition who was trained at a
base like Colony Three.
- Dangerous Secret
- A very young Mark Lester (Oliver) stumbles into a virus research project gone wrong...
- The Hunting Party
- Two Birds With One Bullet
- Featuring a young Richard O'Sullivan
- I'm Afraid You've Got The Wrong Number
- The Man With The Foot
- The Paper Chase
- Directed by Patrick McGoohan and with a rare TV appearance by Joan Greenwood
- Not So Jolly Roger
- Set on a pirate radio station on a WWII artillery fort in the North Sea,
which is being used to transmit secrets.
- The Man on The Beach
- The Man Who Wouldn't Talk
- Say It With Flowers
- Someone Is Liable To Get Hurt
- I Can Only Offer You Sherry
- Koroshi
- Set in Japan
- Shinda Shima
- An electronics expert from the secret service's Q Division suddenly
resigns and goes to Japan...
John Drake takes the place of Mr. Fuller, a disaffected Citizen's Advice Bureau clerk
who's recruited to the Colony.
It's not situated in the former USSR:
The language and writing seen en route seemed to suggest Hungary.
After a train journey he and the fellow recruits are met by a London bus, which
takes them to Hamden New Town (which looks very much like the Milton Keynes
of 1964) - still being built.
The recruits are told there's a wilderness for 100 miles around.
Spies come to the Colony for 3 years training.
There are no locks on doors and rooms are bugged (just like The Village).
JD assembles a special camera based on his portable typewriter and
photographs all the people visiting his Citizen's Advice Bureau - the spies due to come to the West.
Mr. Fuller is recalled by Section 1 - actually by the agent within it who substituted JD's picture in the paperwork - which is how JD escapes.
The colony director fears Section 1 and possible interference.
JD discovers that respectable millionaire businessman & grandfather Peter Jones, now Lord Ammonford(?),
is funding a South American revolution to protect his business interests, via a cultural society.
He gets JD taken off the case and sent on leave, so JD investigates his background.
It turns out that George Foster was a chauffeur who abandoned his wife & children
to take over the identity of Peter Jones and then married an heiress.
The man works for World Travel (his real job being unknown to his wife)
and the couple are friends of JD, so he arrives to help out, along with two colleagues.
JD knows it's all because the man has vital secrets. JD makes plans against opposition
from the station chief. JD poses to the Romanians has having secrets to sell, luring their
station chief out and taking him to a basement, made to seem to be the British Embassy basement.
They blackmail the man to give them the info they need to break their friend out and proceed to do so.
The British station chief is furous until a delighted Foreign Office official arrives to
congratulate him. JD lets him have all the credit to save aggravation over his unofficial operation.
Ramon Torres, leader of the losing Republican side in a civil war 25 years earlier,
is due to die for alledgedly shooting hostages during the war.
JD joins up with a US agent to consider breaking him out, with help from
the underground resistance movement.
JD discovers a film showing it was General Ventura, now Minister of Justice, who massacred hostages
and uses it to help get Torres out. The resistance are no help as it was they who
betrayed Torres, wishing a martyr.
Ventura helps JD get into the prison as an orchestra musician, with a viola case containing
a mock-up double bass and cover: this is for Torres to pretend to be a musician on the way out.
John Drake has a road accident and the episode turns out to be a paranoid
fantasy, strongly reminiscent of some of the things forced on Number 6 in The Village.
A casino owner, Mr. Alexander, tries to blackmail JD with a fake I.O.U. and meanwhile
a Treasury financial investigating officer, Mr. Lovegrove (Eric Barker), is investigating JD.
JD keeps seeing Lovegrove's face on others.
Eventually JD recovers consciousness as he's put in the ambulance.
JD follows the expert's wife who's presumably joining him, with instructions from Commander Hobbs
to bring the man back (with assurances the man won't be prosecuted).
JD persuades the wife to lure the man back over the Greece/Albania border, in spite
of interference from the other side's local agent.
Upon return the Britain, policemen take the man away, making JD furious.
JD observes a young woman receiving British secrets and she then goes to Burgundy.
JD finds she was blackmailed to be a courier by the ringleader (Warren Mitchell).
A French Secret Service agent finds out and "turns" the leader, hoping to get copies
of all information passed in the future.
However JD takes the place of the pilot taking him to Paris.
Spy villages
These seem to be a recurring idea amongst film & TV.
A first-season episode of Mission Impossible, called
The Carriers, featured a mission to an Iron Curtain training village.
The Experts (1989, starring John Travolta, produced by James Keach),
featured a KGB training village called Indiana Springs which was still stuck
in the Fifties small-town USA style & matters.
Danger Man