Patrick McGoohan’s famous starring role in “The Prisoner” was predicated on his background as the spy who eventually tired of all the duplicity. The creators of “The Prisoner” almost certainly referenced McGoohan’s previous stint in a British television series designed with American audiences in mind. The program that debuted in 1961 as “Danger Man” was reinvented as “Secret Agent”; the jazzy score was swapped for Johnny Rivers’ jangling guitar theme and by the final episodes in 1966, “Secret Agent” went from black and white to color and serious to camp.
McGoohan’s character John Drake started as an American special investigator for NATO but morphed without explanation into a British agent. The character remained essentially the same—snide, self-assured and unruffled, quick with his wits as well as his fists. “Drake—John Drake” he identified himself, much like a better-known colleague by the name of Bond. And yet Drake wasn’t much of a womanizer and never seemed as entirely amoral. Little wonder he wanted out of the spy trade?
John Drake’s escapades in espionage have been issued in an 18-disc DVD set, “Secret Agent aka Danger Man: The Complete Collection.” Although the plotting was often a bit patchy, the series was swift and action packed, featuring a hero whose brusqueness was almost anti-heroic in terms of American television of the era. Drake drove a sports car convertible and kept a gun concealed in a bread loaf, a silencer in a flashlight and a radio inside a soap bar. In perhaps the most memorable episode, Drake infiltrated the on-air staff of a British pirate radio station in the North Sea, whose managers are sending coded messages to a Soviet submarine. Much of the jet-set fun comes from exotic locales such as Paris, Rome and Tokyo, where Drake, his colleagues and opponents drank and smoked like the cast of “Mad Men.” Those were the days.
