Danger Man
Danger Man is a British television series that was broadcast between 1960 and 1962, and again between 1964 and 1968. The series featured Patrick McGoohan as secret agent John Drake. Ralph Smart created the programme and wrote many of the scripts. Danger Man was financed by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.
Series development
The idea for Danger Man originated with Ralph Smart, an associate of Lew Grade, head of ITC Entertainment. Grade was looking for formats that could be exported.Ian Fleming was brought in to collaborate on series development, but left before development was complete. Like James Bond, the main character is a globetrotting spy who works at first for NATO, in series one, and then for the fictional British intelligence service M9 for the remainder of the show's run. Like Bond, Drake cleverly extricates himself from life-threatening situations, albeit with gadgetry which is less
fantastic than Bond's, and introduces himself as "Drake... John Drake."
After McGoohan was cast, he also affected character development. A key difference from Bond traces to the family-oriented star's preferences: no firearms and no outright seduction of female co-stars.
Premise
The series revolves around the character of John Drake, a skilled and intelligent secret agent who takes on dangerous and complex assignments. From the series one voice-over:The line "NATO also has its own" is not always present.
The mention of the Deuxième Bureau as France's secret service branch in the 1960s was, however, incorrect. This organisation was no longer in existence, having been replaced by the SDECE at the end of World War II.
Drake's missions involve international espionage, dealing with threats to global security, which often require him to go undercover. Drake is known for his resourcefulness, intelligence, and ability to think his way out of difficult situations. Unlike many spy shows of that era, the show focused on the use of intellect, rather than violence, notably avoiding excessive violence and romantic entanglements.
Programme overview
The first series of 39 episodes ran 24–25 minutes each and portrayed John Drake as working for a Washington, D.C.–based intelligence organisation, on behalf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose assignments frequently took him to Africa, Latin America, and the Far East. They were filmed in black and white.For the second and third series which aired several years after the first, the episode's length was extended to 48–49 minutes and Drake underwent retconning. His nationality became British, and he was an agent working for a secret British government department, called M9, though his Mid-Atlantic accent persists for the first few episodes in production. These were also filmed in black and white.
Other than the largely nominal change of employer and nationality, Drake's mandate remains the same: "to undertake missions involving national and global security". In keeping with the episodic format of such series in the 1960s, there are no ongoing story arcs and there is no reference made to Drake's NATO adventures in the later M9 episodes.
Pilot episode
The pilot was written by Brian Clemens, who later co-produced The Avengers. In an interview Clemens said:
The pilot I wrote was called "View from the Villa" and it was set in Italy, but the production manager set the shoot on location in Portmeirion, which looked like Italy but which was much closer. And obviously the location stuck in Patrick McGoohan's mind, because that's where he shot his television series The Prisoner much later.
The second unit director on the pilot, according to Clemens:
... shot some location and background stuff and sent the dailies back to the editing room at Elstree. Ralph Smart looked at them, hated them, and called up the second unit director and said "Look, these are terrible, you'll never be a film director," and then he fired him. The name of the second unit director? John Schlesinger.
Cancellation and resurrection
When American financing for a second series failed to materialise, the programme was cancelled. The first series had aired in America each Wednesday, 8:30 to 9:00 pm, on CBS from 5 April to 13 September 1961. It was used by the network as a late-spring replacement for Wanted Dead or Alive, which had just wrapped its third and final series.After a two-year hiatus, two things had changed; Danger Man had subsequently been resold all around the world, with repeat showings creating a public clamour for new ones. Also by this time, James Bond had become popular, as had ABC's The Avengers. Danger Mans creator, Ralph Smart, rethought the concept; the second series' episodes were 49 minutes long and had a new musical theme, Edwin Astley's "High Wire". Drake gained an English accent and did not clash with his bosses at first. The revived Danger Man was broadcast in the U.S. as Secret Agent, first shown as a CBS summer-replacement program. It had a new U.S.-only theme song, "Secret Agent Man", sung by Johnny Rivers, which became a success in its own right. In other parts of the world, the show was titled Destination Danger or John Drake.
The fourth series consists of only two episodes, "Koroshi" and "Shinda Shima", the only two episodes of Danger Man to be filmed in colour. These two separate but related episodes were recut together as a feature for cinemas in Europe and for American broadcast, as done with two-parters from other ITC series such as The Baron and The Saint. Whilst "Koroshi" retains a strong plot-line and sharp characterisations, "Shinda Shima" drew heavily on contemporary Bond movies, principally Dr. No. When the episodes were completed, McGoohan announced he was resigning from the series to create, produce, and star in a project titled The Prisoner, with David Tomblin as co-producer and George Markstein as script editor. Markstein was then the Danger Man script consultant. A number of behind-the-scenes personnel on Danger Man were subsequently hired for The Prisoner.
The two colour episodes aired in the UK in the time slot of The Prisoner, which could not make its scheduled broadcast dates. The European cinema film feature version, Koroshi, did not receive theatrical release in the US, but instead aired on network television as a TV movie in 1968.
Character of "Drake"
Unlike the James Bond films, Danger Man strove for realism, dramatising credible Cold War tensions. In the second series, Drake is an undercover agent of a British intelligence agency. As in the earlier series, Drake finds himself in danger with not always happy outcomes; sometimes duty forces him to decisions that lead to good people suffering unfair consequences. Drake doesn't always do what his superiors tell him.Drake is rarely armed, though he engaged in fist fights, and the gadgets he uses are generally credible. In one episode, Drake says, "I never carry a gun. They're noisy, and they hurt people. Besides, I manage very well without." Although the villains are often killed, Drake himself rarely does the killing. An examination of all episodes indicates that, in the entire series, he only shoots one person dead, in one of the last half-hour episodes from the 1960 season. While another shooting occurs in "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove", it is revealed to be a dream. Drake is almost never shown armed with a gun, and the episode "Time to Kill" centres on Drake's hesitancy and initial refusal to take an assassination mission.. In Episode 53 "Such Men Are Dangerous," Drake shoots and wounds a shotgun-armed villainess with a captured pistol. Drake's uses of non-firearm deadly force during the series number fewer than a dozen.
Despite the lack of firearm violence, The Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Television by Ron Lackmann inexplicably describes Danger Man as one of the most violent series ever produced.
Drake uses his intelligence, charm and quick thinking rather than force. He usually plays a role to infiltrate a situation, for example, scout for a travel agency, naive soldier, embittered ex-convict, brainless playboy, imperious physician, opportunistic journalist, bumbling tourist, cold-blooded mercenary, bland diplomat, smarmy pop disc-jockey, precise clerk, compulsive gambler or impeccable butler.
Drake is often shown re-using gadgets from previous episodes. Among the more frequently seen are a small spy camera hidden in a cigarette lighter and activated by flicking the lighter, a miniature reel-to-reel tape recorder hidden inside the head of an electric shaver or a pack of cigarettes, and a microphone, which could be embedded in a wall near the target via a shotgun-like apparatus, that used soda siphon cartridges containing CO2 as the propellant, allowing Drake to eavesdrop on conversations from a safe distance.
As Drake gets involved in a case, things are rarely as they seem. He is not infallible—he gets arrested, he makes mistakes, equipment fails, careful plans do not work; Drake often has to improvise an alternative plan. Sometimes investigation fails and he simply does something provocative to crack open the case. People he trusts can turn out to be untrustworthy or incompetent; he finds unexpected allies.
John Drake, unlike Bond, never romanced any of the series' female characters, as McGoohan was determined to create a family-friendly show. McGoohan denounced the sexual promiscuity of James Bond and The Saint, roles he had rejected, although he had played romantic roles before Danger Man. Drake uses his immense charm in his undercover work, and women are often very attracted to him, but the viewers are left to assume whatever they want about Drake's personal life. The only exceptions to this rule were the two "linked" episodes of the series, "You're Not in Any Trouble, Are You?" and "Are You Going to be More Permanent?", in which Drake encounters two different women—both played by Susan Hampshire—and which contain numerous similarities in dialogue and set-pieces and both end with Drake in a pseudo-romantic circumstance with Hampshire's character. Drake is also shown falling for the female lead in the episode "The Black Book" though nothing comes of it; this episode is also one of the few scripts to directly address Drake's loneliness in his chosen profession. Many times the women in the show turned out to be femmes fatales, and heavily involved in the very plots Drake is fighting.