Cult TV Blog

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . The main problem with The General is that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever on the face of it. A three year degree put indiscriminately into the minds of the entire Village population under the reluctant tutelage of a professor who has to be brought back from escaping? Even in the heady days of education in 1968 that would have been wild! What is going on is clearly not an education in the sense of a university degree because it doesn't feature the sort of intellectual experiences of finding things out, arguing, marshalling facts, getting incredibly drunk, and weighing up evidence which are the real point of a first degree. Rather, I would like to draw your attention to the actual nature of what is being taught, and I think the 'education' here is about society and how to live in society, with the key note being conformity. So far so Prisoner, but I must also just point ou...

Warning : this post includes mention of psychiatric treatments which some people might find distressing or controversial. In a recent post on  The Prisoner  I referred to this show and have since dug deeper about it and it's absolutely fascinating. The Hurt Mind was a whole BBC series intended to educate the public about mental health. There is vanishingly little about it on the internet, it doesn't even seem to be on IMDb, and I have no idea of its preservation status. You can see the only episode available online  here . It's about the then-current physical psychiatric treatments. I was in two minds about blogging about it both because I'm bound to get on my high horse and because in that state I'm bound to start saying things people don't like. But then I thought fuck it. Besides this show strangely offers some helpful background to my current posts on The Prisoner so I will tag it in with them. There's very little about this but there is this good summar...

I am soon having a new laptop so I'm going through my hard drive - this is a show I've had saved for ages but not really watched. Since it seems it's Unethical Medical Experimentation season on the blog, I'm going to write about this episode. I'm afraid that I'm going to drive a bulldozer through it, so will repeat my policy that I never write about a show which is a complete dud here so I am certainly not advising against watching this show. Actually this episode was written by Antony Skene who wrote A, B and C, which I've just written about in my last post. This is pure coincidence. Journey to the Unknown was an anthology series made by Hammer in conjunction with Fox. In common with other shows it was intended to be shown on both sides of the Atlantic and it was felt every episode had to have an American in the cast, in this case Stefanie Powers. I don't know what they were thinking because you know we do have a go at speaking English over here, I just...

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . Warning : this post includes mention of psychiatric treatments which some people might find distressing or controversial. One of the remarkable things about watching this show while assuming that Smith/Number 6 is a patient in a psychiatric hospital is that it literally turns the whole show on its head. Rather than being a tale of evil governmental control and manipulation, the authorities are (generally speaking that is, the special nature of The Village can't be overstated) on the side of kindliness and want Smith to get better. Smith thereby becomes the villain of the story - he rejects this kindly help at every turn, creates havoc in the hospital and all this is in addition to something he has already done to Seltzman! You may think that turning it round like this would be impossible with A, B and C because it is absolutely always seen as being about the authorities getting the reas...

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . Warning : this post includes mention of psychiatric treatments which some people might find distressing or controversial. How do you even begin with the sheer psychiatric richness of A Change of Mind? There is straightforward behaviour modification, which has already been mentioned in Checkmate and which I shall focus on when I get to Hammer into Anvil. The way the 'community' makes pretend decisions over other people is very much a caricature of the contemporary therapeutic communities movement, which I will focus on under The General. There is the whole thing about being disharmonious, which sounds about as much like having an Antisocial Personality Disorder as you could want, and which I'm going to focus on under Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling. Which still leaves loads of stuff for A Change of Mind! It seems to me to reference two psychiatric treatments, both in vogue at the...

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . Edited 30/5/22 to make the original post less unwieldy. It may seem as if the rest of the episode is not related to psychiatry but I think the whole rest of the episode shows a number of institutional behaviours. We see everyone concerned dealing with The Village as best they can, and surviving as best they can. This may sound like normal adult life where we're all struggling, but I think what makes it more institutional is that I think we see the sort of behaviours we see when you are unable to leave an institution and they authorities can't get rid of you. Nowadays we tend to forget how people weren't going anywhere in the old hospitals. The staff used to say that literally the only way people left was in a box and in that situation it creates a significantly different power balance to most modern healthcare. In addition to the abuse of patients by staff who had to be basicall...

The introduction and master post to this series of posts about The Prisoner can be found  here . Edited 30/5/22 to make the original post less unwieldy. Medication time! It is an indicator of how posh a clinic The Village is that the staff haven't been round to wake you to give you a sleeping tablet yet, but we've finally hit some medication. I am going to pick up on one apparently insignificant comment in the episode and give it a disproportionate importance because the subject was of disproportionate importance to mental health after the Second World War: it is the point at which Number 2 refers to Number 50 as being given one of the new super-strength meprobamates. Meprobamate is actually the name of a specific drug so this plural use is a little confusing,  unless it is intended to mean the catch-all group of anxiolytic drugs which do not belong to the other chemical groups of benzodiazepines and barbiturates. Meprobamate was a significant part of psycho-pharmacology in th...