The Prisoner

Maybe it is possible to describe the essence of an advert  … In so far as it is about using the viewer rather than finding imagination, so that the viewer becomes its instrument; or in so far as it is a kind of video tool for anaesthetising a mass audience, for purposes of merely occupying their time in a way useful to it rather than you, tv (advertising) is a kind of divorce.  It presents life as of a moment other than the one that is actually being occupied; just as a person might treat one thus.  You are not in their world; or you have ceased to be in their world.  It amounts to the same thing.  You are persona non grata; a person not in the world that is; in a place that isn’t because actuality has to be elsewhere.  One of the things that struck me about The Prisoner when quite by accident I happened on it, when it first came out, was that it incorporated the event of viewing television into its plot and made it a questionable and also a mysterious act.  The other resonance was the boundless mockery the series made of the concept of normality, rendering the ‘real’ as actually merely a kind of manipulative tool for enforcing passivity.  As a child I found all this subversively reassuring in the face of endless adverts and their contextless, storyless ’scenes’.

Tags: Advertizing, Imagination, The Prisoner, TV