If in a "Best TV show" poll The Prisoner happened to turn up at number six, Number Six, no doubt, would have considered it some conspiracy to make an assault on his sanity. "I will not be charted, collated, dissected, examined or classified" he would bellow, his head slightly down, yet his eyes still trained on you, festering with indignation before demanding, "By the way, who is at number one?"

It'll all be a trick, you know. He'll turn the tables on us all and the next thing you know Number Six will be in every position from Number One to Number Ten, while a bandstand of black and white minstrels sing a Louisiana blues version of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and some old bloke, laughing like a hyena, his blazer covered by a strait-jacket, is carried off in an ambulance painted like a bumblebee.

Or something.

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Top 10 Prisoner Number Two's

The Prisoner. So many people have spent so long analysing it. Was the Village run by the Russians or the British? Was Number Six John Drake from Dangerman?

Doesn't matter. In fact, when you watch The Prisoner in one go, you realise it quite often contradicts itself. So either McGoohan - who was The Prisoner both  in front of and behind the scenes, - didn't care, didn't know or simply didn't think it mattered, or he didn't bother letting the other writers he brought onto the show in on his secret.

Most likely it's the former. After all, it's well documented he didn't have Number One's unveiling in the final episode worked out until he came to film it.

But that doesn't diminish the show in the slightest. The Prisoner remains one of the most visually exciting, audaciously scripted, ingeniously plotted TV series ever. Although, much has been made of it's "Kafka-esqe" plots, many of the episodes were nothing of the sort; they were, in fact, exceptionally well written thrillers in which the only unanswered questions were ones concerned with the series' overall setting rather than any confusion   over the events in that particular episode itself. Just because an episode uses a couple of surreal images, has "Three Blind Mice" on the soundtrack and has the occasional shot from a weird angle doesn't make it "Kafka-esqe". It does make it refreshing and entertaining to watch, however.

Having said that, anyone who reckons they can follow "Fall Out" is obviously lying. No, the triumph of The Prisoner is that it raised issues about things like politics, education, policing and violence in a dramatic framework so extreme it never came across preachy, ham-fisted or shallow; which, when analysed closely, its underlying messages often were.

McGoohan wasn't exactly visionary in his thinking: he was, however, visionary in the way he presented those ideas. He simply created a very entertaining show that, in many ways, adhered to the comfortable, established, audience-friendly conventions of making quality TV in the 60s, but then had fun subverting those conventions. For most of its run, the surreality was merely aesthetic, only hinting at  the psychoanalytical interpretations that could be applied; if you didn't  want to look too deep you could still follow the plots while enjoying the  psychedelic packaging.

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Top 10 Final Episodes

1. Babylon 5 "Sleeping In Light" - Set in the year 2281, the old crew come together in their new roles to pay respect to the dying Sheriden & the scrapped station.

2. Sapphire & Steel: "Adventure Six" - A masterpiece of tension and intrigue. Sapphire and Steel are lured into a trap, ending up imprisoned for eternity in an empty void. Decidely odd, but chilling.

3. Blake's 7: "Blake" - In which Blake returns as battle-scarred bounty hunter and the entire cast, apart from a smirking Avon, are killed off (well, maybe).

4. The Prisoner: "Fall Out" - One of the most expensive pieces of TV ever filmed, "Fall Out" was The Prisoner's finest hour. The outrage caused by the unmasking of Number One caused McGoohan to flee Britain for good.

5. Quantum Leap: "Mirror Image"  - Does Sam Beckett ever get home? No. And it's rather sad, too. Turns out he'll carry on "leaping" forever.

6. Star Trek TNG: "All Good Things" - In which Picard journeys back and forth between an alternate past and and alternate future.

7. Deep Space Nine: "What We Leave Behind" - The resolution of the Dominion war, plus a couple of moving swansongs from some of the characters.

8. Star Wars: "Return of the Jedi"  - Everyone lives happily ever ever after & celebrates with Ewoks. Aaaah! Loses points for spawning "Caravan of Courage".

9. Twin Peaks - It's not often you watch a television show in which the bad guy wins. Killer BOB gets his claws into Cooper in, to be honest, a rather frightening conclusion.

10. The Avengers: "Bizarre" - Steed and Ms King go off into space in a rocket. No, really.
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And then there were those last two episodes: "Once Upon A Time" and "Fall Out". Now they were weird. The entertaining sideshow surreality now comes to the fore for wall-to-wall oddness. Viewers in the 60s were outraged. Even new viewers today can feel cheated. But imagine how much more boring The Prisoner would be if we all rewatched it knowing that the  Russians were his captors; or that Number Six was really called Ken and resigned because the pay was too low.
    
Be seeing you.

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