Apartheid in The Prisoner: Free for All
It's a funny thing but I thought this episode would be an absolute gift for comparison to apartheid, so I'm astonished to find I'm having real problems finding any echoes of the South African system of the time in this show. Bearing in mind my hypothesis that, while it is possible to 'read' The Prisoner in all sorts of ways, and echoes of apartheid can certainly be seen in it, apartheid is not a primary interpretation of the show. Certainly in the case of Free for All, it is very clear that what is being shown here is quite different to the South African system, although I was expecting to find comparisons in terms of vote rigging and the way everything is predetermined. I think that probably Ian Smith's regime in the then Rhodesia would actually be a closer comparison to The Village, since there voting rights were given to all races on the basis of certain qualifications (naturally they tended to rule out blacks), rather than the entire system being se