Back in July I spent a week at my mother's, accompanied by my 13-year-old son. It's always a strange experience for me, spending time with my Ma, because of all the usual difficulties & contradictions of being a son, particularly an eldest one. Therefore, of course, the presence of mine only compounded matters. One interesting aspect - and one I have yet to mention to my psychotherapist - is that while I was there I found a virtually-complete set of VHS tapes of Patrick McGoohan's legendary 1960s TV series The Prisoner in a charity shop, and, of course, bought them for a quid a copy.

The psychotherapist bit - The Prisoner - comprenez ???

Anyhow, I've been working my way through the series, which only ran to 17 episodes, ever since. A number of things have struck me, principal of which is the fact that, even tho' I cannot have been more than 8 years old when I first saw it, The Prisoner made a huge impact on me. But secondly, it's clear that the series, in its resistance to closure and easy explicability, is akin to the drama of Samuel Beckett, a great literary hero of mine, whose work eschewed easy psychologising in favour of the physical demonstration of daily obstacles facing human beings in their search for comfort and familiarity, with the clear implication that this might well be the sine qua non of being human.

Hmmm, that was yet another overlong sentence, but ya know whadda mean, dontcha ? Let me know.

Almost forgot - a great piece of "Prisoner" analysis in someone else's webpost:

http://killthesnark.blogspot.com/2006/05/patrick-mcgoohans-prisoner.html

READ IT !