Danger Man

Danger Man (US title: Secret Agent)
First season titles
Format	Spy drama
Created by	Ralph Smart
Starring	Patrick McGoohan
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of episodes	86
Production
Running time	30 min. (1960–62; 39 episodes[1]); 60 min. (1964–68; 47 episodes[2])
Broadcast
Original channel	ITV
Original run	September 11, 1960 – January 12, 1968

This article is about 1960s TV series. For the band, see Dangerman (band).

Danger Man was a British television series broadcast between 1960 and 1962, and again between 1964 and 1968. This series featured Patrick McGoohan as secret agent John Drake. Ralph Smart created the programme and wrote many of the scripts. The show was broadcast under the titles Secret Agent and Destination Danger in non-UK markets.

Production history overview

There has never been a full explanation of the relationship between Smart and McGoohan. McGoohan has never spoken about Ralph Smart in any detail. They did have face-to-face meetings at the beginning of the project, at which time they fleshed out the character of John Drake.

According to Andrew Pixley's notes to the CD Danger Man Original Soundtrack, Ian Fleming was involved with Ralph Smart to bring James Bond to television. (Casino Royale had been a one-off live TV play in America a few years before). Fleming dropped out and was replaced by Ian Stuart Black, and a new format/character to be called "Lone Wolf" was developed. This evolved into Danger Man. (Fleming, meanwhile, subsequently assisted in pre-production discussion on the American series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., coming up with the name Napoleon Solo for that show's protagonist and, according to the show's 2008 DVD release, the working title of the series was Ian Fleming's Solo.)

The degree to which McGoohan changed Smart's original ideas is unclear. However, Smart evidently agreed to the changes and continued to be enthusiastic about his creation.^{[citation needed]} Danger Man was financed by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.

In the United States, CBS broadcast some of the original format's episodes of the series under the Danger Man title as a summer replacement for the Western series Wanted: Dead or Alive. Years later, under the Secret Agent title, the same network aired the entirety of the second and third seasons. The two final episodes of the series are often presented as the European cinema film feature Koroshi (released directly to television in the US). "Secret Agent Man" is the title of the series' American-broadcast theme song, though often mistakenly applied to the series itself. This theme was written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, and recorded by Johnny Rivers.

Program overview

The first season's episodes ran 30 minutes each (with commercials) and portrayed John Drake as working for a Washington, D.C.-based intelligence organization, chiefly acting on behalf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.The reference to NATO in the opening titles of the first season was dropped part way through production. However he often went on missions well out of NATO jurisdiction; assignments frequently took him to Africa, Latin America, the Far East. In episode 9, The Sanctuary, Drake declares that he is an Irish-American.

He sometimes seemed at odds with his superiors about the ethics of the missions. Many of Drake's cases involved aiding democracy in foreign countries and he was also called upon to solve murders and crimes affecting the interests of either the U.S. or NATO or both.

Beginning with the second season (which aired several years after the first), episodes were increased to 60 minutes (again including commercials) and Drake underwent retconning and became a British agent (though he identifies himself as Irish in one episode) working for a secret British government agency called M9, though his mid atlantic accent persists for the first few episodes in production. Other than the largely nominal change of employer and nationality, Drake's mandate remains the same: to undertake missions involving national and global security.

Pilot episode

The pilot was written by Brian Clemens, who later wrote for the series 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.^[3]

Early history

The series succeeded in Europe, making McGoohan famous. However, when American financing for a second season failed, the programme was cancelled. The U.S. broadcast of that first season in the early 1960s is not well remembered. Indeed, the A&E DVD first-season release wrongly suggests that the series was never broadcast in the U.S.

After a two-year hiatus, two things had changed; Danger Man had subsequently been resold all around the world, whilst repeat showings had created a public clamour for new shows. Also, by this time James Bond had become popular, as had ABC's The Avengers. (In the seventh episode of the first season, McGoohan's co-star was Lois Maxwell, who became famous in the Bond movies as Miss Moneypenny.) Danger Man's creator, Ralph Smart, re-thought the concept; the second season (1964) episodes were 60 minutes long and had a new musical theme, "High Wire". Drake re-gained his British accent and did not clash with his bosses at first. In the U.S., the revived Danger Man was re-titled Secret Agent, as a CBS summer replacement programme, given the theme song "Secret Agent Man", sung by Johnny Rivers, which became a success in itself. In other parts of the world, the series was titled "Destination Danger" or "John Drake".

Theme

Unlike the later James Bond films, Danger Man strove for realism, dramatising credible Cold War tensions. In the second series, Drake was an undercover agent of the British external intelligence agency (called "M9" instead of the actual MI6). As in the earlier series, Drake found himself in danger with not always happy outcomes; sometimes duty forced him to decisions which led to good people suffering unfair consequences. Drake didn't always do what his masters told him to do.

Character development

Developing a rule established in the first season, Drake was rarely armed though he engaged in fist fights, and what gadgets he used were credible. In fact, most were off the shelf, and their appearance in the series spurred sales of such commercial items as the folding binoculars featured in the American title sequence and the sub-miniature Minox camera.

• Unlike James Bond, Drake was often shown re-using gadgets from previous episodes
• Among the more frequently seen were a miniature reel-to-reel tape recorder hidden inside the head of an electric shaver or a pack of cigarettes, and a microphone that 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

Agent Drake uses his intelligence, charm, and quick-thinking rather than force. He usually plays a role to infiltrate a situation, e.g., 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 disk jockey, precise clerk, compulsive gambler, or impeccable butler.

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 don't 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, also unlike Bond, never romanced on-screen with any of the women, as McGoohan was determined to create a family-friendly show.^{[citation needed]} Drake uses his immense charm in his undercover work, and women are often very attracted to him — but the viewer is left to assume whatever they want about Drake's personal life. McGoohan denounced the sexual promiscuity of James Bond and The Saint, roles he had rejected, though he did play romantic roles before Danger Man.

The only exception to this rule was 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 the Hampshire character. Drake was 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 only scripts to directly address Drake's loneliness in his chosen profession.

John Drake was not blind to the attraction of the opposite sex, often commenting on the prettiness of his latest associate. The implication was always that it was impractical for him ever to launch any liaison. It was also the fact that many times the women in the show turned out to be femmes-fatale, and heavily involved in the very plots Drake was fighting.

Although the villains often were killed, Drake, himself, rarely killed. In the entire series he only shot one person dead, and that was in one of the last half-hour episodes from the 1960 season (another shooting occurs in alter episode, "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove", but it is revealed to be a dream). Yet The Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Television, by Ron Lackmann, claims Danger Man was one of the most violent series ever produced. Drake was almost never shown armed with a gun. The 1960 episode "Time to Kill" centered around Drake's hesitancy to take an assassination mission, while 1964's "Fair Exchange" revealed that he keeps a handgun in his apartment. The first 1964 episode, "Yesterday's Enemies", introduced a "cleaner" who completed the mission to Drake's horror.

Co-stars and guest stars

In many episodes of the second series, Drake unwillingly answered to 'Hobbs' (Peter Madden), a sinister superior officer always seen fiddling with a knife-like letter opener. In the earlier half-hour series he had an equally edgy, but more good-humoured relationship with Richard Wattis, as his superior, 'Hardy'.

Each episode had major roles for guest stars, many of whom went on to star in their own shows

• Paul Eddington (The Good Life, Yes Minister, and Yes, Prime Minister)
• John Le Mesurier (Dad's Army)
• Anton Rodgers (Fresh Fields and May to December)
• Wendy Craig (several TV series, including Butterflies)
• Jean Marsh (Upstairs, Downstairs), and
• Susan Hampshire (Forsyte Saga, The First Churchills, The Pallisers)

Later history and transition to The Prisoner

The fourth season consisted of only two episodes, "Koroshi" and "Shinda Shima", the only two in any of the series photographed in colour, as with earlier ITC series two parters such as The Baron and The Saint it was intended that these episodes would cut together as a feature for cinemas in Europe. Whilst "Koroshi" retains a strong plot-line and sharp characterisations, "Shinda Shima" was a pastiche of contemporary Bond movies. 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 were aired in the UK as filler during a hiatus of The Prisoner in 1968, they had in 1966 been re-edited together with a short linking sequence and new titles into a feature film for the cinema circuit in Europe and other countries titled Koroshi. Another, unused, fourth season script was reworked as an episode of The Champions while, according to The Prisoner: The Official Companion by Robert Fairclough, the Prisoner episode "The Girl Who Was Death" was based upon a two-part Danger Man script that had been planned for the fourth season.

Secret agent John Drake and Prisoner Number Six

It is debated by Prisoner fans whether or not John Drake of Danger Man and Number Six in The Prisoner are the same person. Like John Drake, Number Six is evidently a secret agent, but one who has resigned from his job. Moreover, in the surreal Prisoner episode "The Girl Who Was Death", Number Six meets "Potter", John Drake's Danger Man contact. Christopher Benjamin portrayed Potter in both series. As has been previously stated, "The Girl Who Was Death" was an adaptation of an unused Danger Man script.

The first Danger Man season includes four episodes which use footage filmed in the Welsh village of Portmeirion, which later became the primary shooting location of The Prisoner series. This dramatic overlapping is complicated by reference books, such as Vincent Terrace's The Complete Encyclopedia of Television Programs 1947–1979 referring to The Prisoner as a Danger Man continuation. Terrace postulates that John Drake's resignation reason is revealed in the "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling" episode, which is a follow-up to a mission assigned to Number Six before he was sent to The Village. Richard Meyers made the same claim in his 1981 book, TV Detectives. He further stated that this connected directly to "an episode of Secret Agent never shown in this country [i.e., the United States] with John Drake investigating the story of a brain transferal device in Europe." (A. S. Barnes and Company, p. 113).

It is claimed that Patrick McGoohan's insistence that Number Six is not John Drake is because actors do not own the characters they portray — producers and writers do, under copyright law. Danger Man creator and producer Ralph Smart owned the "John Drake" character. Thus McGoohan would be obliged to deny any resemblance between the two roles. In truth, Patrick McGoohan visualised himself playing two different characters, which is why he made the denials.^{[citation needed]}

Pop culture references

Danger Man has remained part of pop culture consciousness. Author Stephen King alluded to John Drake's cool in his novel The Shining.^{[citation needed]} The band Tears for Fears referred to the character in their song "Swords and Knives," and Dead Can Dance titled one of their songs "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" after a Danger Man episode. There also is a quick reference to the show in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date".^{[citation needed]} On UK screens, it was parodied by the Danger Mouse cartoon series.^{[citation needed]} The American theme song has appeared in countless movies and TV shows, including during the climax of the first Austin Powers movie.

In 2000, the UPN network aired a short-lived spy series entitled Secret Agent Man. Due to the similarities in titles between this series and the American edition of Danger Man, Secret Agent Man, a series with no relationship to the McGoohan program, is often erroneously referred to as a spin-off or remake of Danger Man.

DVD availability

All four seasons of the series are now available on DVD in Europe, Australasia and North America. The three seasons of hour-long episodes were released by A&E Home Video under the title Secret Agent a.k.a. Danger Man in order to acknowledge the American broadcast and syndication title.

However the episodes retain their original Danger Man opening credits, the first time these have been seen in the U.S. (The US "Secret Agent" credits were included as an extra feature.) The first season of half-hour episodes was issued by A&E sometime later as Danger Man. A&E subsequently released a single-set "megabox" containing all of the one-hour episodes; a revised megabox, released in 2007, added the half-hour episodes, but was no longer in print by early 2009.

In Britain, Network DVD released a 13-disc "Special Edition" boxed set of the one-hour shows in June 2007. Extra features include the edited-together movie version of Koroshi and Shinda Shima, the US Secret Agent opening and closing titles, image galleries for each episode, and a specially-written 170-page book on the making of the one-hour series. Umbrella Entertainment has released DVD sets in Australia.

Production Notes

Marathon House 2009

• The title sequence of the 30 minute episodes of Washington was a composite of the Washington Capitol in the background and the Castrol Building (complete with London Bus stop) in the Marylebone Road, London as the foreground. This building is now Marathon House converted from offices to flats in 1998.

Episodes

Episodes were usually not aired in production order. Broadcast order varied widely between UK and US.

Season 1 (1960–1962)

Broadcast as Danger Man both in the UK and US

Although aired over the course of 18 months, these 39 episodes are considered one season.

Season 2 (1964–1965)

Seasons 2 and 3 were broadcast as Danger Man in the UK and Secret Agent in the US.

Season 3 (1965–1966)

Season 4 (1968)

These two episodes were broadcast in the US as the European cinema movie version, Koroshi, and mark the series' transition into full-colour production. The show's abrupt cancellation, coupled with production and broadcast of The Prisoner, resulted in these final two shows airing in the UK early in 1968, when they were broadcast as fill in episodes for The Prisoner which had fallen behind the scheduled UK transmission dates, replacing advertised Prisoner episodes that were not yet ready for broadcast. In fact they were originally intended to be broadcast after the finale of The Prisoner in the UK. Some parts of the UK, as well as the US, never saw the episodes in their original form until their DVD release.

Original novels and comic books

First issue of the Gold Key Comics series.

Several original novels based upon Danger Man were published in the UK and US, the majority during 1965–66.

• Target for Tonight — Richard Telfair, 1962 (published in US only)
• Departure Deferred — W. Howard Baker, 1965
• Storm Over Rockall — Baker, 1965
• Hell for Tomorrow — Peter Leslie, 1965
• The Exterminator — W.A. Balinger, 1966
• No Way Out — Wilfred McNeilly, 1966

Several of the above novels were translated into French and published in France, where the series was known as Destination Danger. An additional Destination Danger novel by John Long was published in French and not printed in the US or UK.

The adventures of John Drake have also been depicted in comic book form from time to time. In 1961, Dell Comics in the US published a one-shot Danger Man comic as part of its long-running Four Color series, based upon the first season format. This is particularly notable for showing Drake as having ginger hair, a trait shared with Patrick McGoohan, but which was unseen as Danger Man had been made only in monochrome at that time. In 1966, Gold Key Comics published two issues of a Secret Agent comic book based upon the series (this series should not be confused with Secret Agent, an unrelated comic book series published by Charlton Comics in 1967, formerly titled Sarge Steel). In Britain, a single Danger Man comic book subtitled "Trouble in Turkey" appeared in the mid-1960s and a number of comic strip adventures appeared in hardcover annuals. French publishers also produced several issues of a Destination Danger comic book in the 1960s, although their Drake was blond. Spanish publishers produced a series titled 'Agent Secreto'. The Germans were particularly prolific, using 'John Drake' and a picture of McGoohan, as the cover for hundreds of 'krimi' magazines.

References

External links

• British Film Institute Screen Online
• Danger Man (1960–61 series) at the Internet Movie Database
• Danger Man (1964–68 series) at the Internet Movie Database
• Danger Man Website
• Ralph Smart & Danger Man