[conspire] The Prisoner (1967)

[Michael Paoli]

> From: "Rick Moen" <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] (forw) [Felton LUG] The Confidentiality of  
> Zoom Meetings
> Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2020 14:58:36 -0700

> One source of inspiration for my doing the latter was Patrick McGoohan's
> iconic 1967 ITV programme 'The Prisoner', where he plays a British
> secret agent kept in a whimsical-looking seaside town with pervasive
> surveillance to pry certain secrets out of him.  In episode 11, 'It's
> Your Funeral', he and other ex-secret agents are mentioned to
> have a pastime of monkeywrenching the town administration through
> 'jamming', revealing to the surveillance deliberately wrong but
> tantalising information to send them on wild goose-chases.  To quote the
> Wikipedia article:
>
>   This episode refers to "jamming" and "jammers", i.e. constant hoax
>   attempts to keep the authorities busy. The Situationist International
>   referred to some of its activities as being like "radio jamming" in
>   1968, the year after the episode was aired. Negativland claims to have
>   invented the phrase "culture/cultural jamming" in 1984 to describe
>   billboard alteration. "It's your Funeral" is perhaps one of the earliest
>   uses of the term jamming in a political context.
>
> It's about time for a 'The Prisoner' re-watch.  Wildly creative,
> maddeningly non-straightforward, sometimes hilariously off-target (e.g.,
> the episode about the computer), occasionally very prophetic -- and with
> some 1960s feet-of-clay aspects, e.g., more than a whiff of misogyny
> that also afflicted other iconic British series such as 'The Avengers'.

Yes, _The Prisoner_ (1967 - not to be confused with some other identically
titled works) - great (mini-)series, I've seen it many times.
I also recently stumbled across - and might be handy for those
doing shelter-in-place and looking for things to do / see ...
It's (also) available on ShoutFactoryTV:
http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/series/the-prisoner
I believe there it's free (as in beer), and/but includes ads
(I've watched some episodes of some stuff on ShoutFactoryTV, with zero
ads kicking in ... but I'd guess they're there sooner or later ...
maybe just 1st episodes of series are ad free? ... to get folks "hooked"?,
as what I saw ad free, thus far, was some 1st episodes of a couple
different series).