John Drake is a special operative for NATO, specializing in security assignments against any subversive element which threatened world peace. The series featured exotic locales from all ...
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Drake investigates the suspicious death of a NATO agent, Tony. Drake believes Tony was murdered while investigating a group of gun smugglers, and looks to his house and fiancée for clues. Drake's ...
A corrupt Arabian government is selling opium directly to wholesalers, and secret agent John Drake hopes to halt their trade. He visits the country and strategically befriends Captain Aldrich, an ...
Secret information has been leaking from the US embassy in Vienna. John Drake plants a fake document with one of two people who knew of the info, US agent Logan, who locks it away in a safe. When the...
After resigning, a secret agent is abducted and taken to what looks like an idyllic village, but is really a bizarre prison. His warders demand information. He gives them nothing, but only tries to escape.
Stars:
Patrick McGoohan,
Angelo Muscat,
Peter Swanwick
An elite department within Interpol, Department S inherited those cases which the other member groups had failed to solve. The brains of the group was Jason King, a hedonistic maverick who ... See full summary »
Stars:
Peter Wyngarde,
Joel Fabiani,
Rosemary Nicols
Two worlds collide when the titled Englishman, Lord Brett Sinclair, and the Bronx-raised, self-made American Danny Wilde, reluctantly join forces to right wrongs, and to protect the innocent.
Stars:
Tony Curtis,
Roger Moore,
Laurence Naismith
John Steed and his new accomplices Purdey and Gambit find themselves facing new and deadly dangers in the bizarre world of espionage. Mixing fantasy with a darker edge, the trio face ... See full summary »
Craig Stirling, Sharron Macready and Richard Barrett were agents for Nemesis, an international intelligence organization based in Geneva. Their first mission as a team was to investigate ... See full summary »
Stars:
Stuart Damon,
Alexandra Bastedo,
William Gaunt
John Drake is a special operative for NATO, specializing in security assignments against any subversive element which threatened world peace. The series featured exotic locales from all over the world, as his assignments frequently took him to Africa, Latin America, and the Far East.Written by
Marg Baskin <marg@asd.raytheon.ca> UPDATED U.N. Owen
"Danger Man" heralded the public's interest for spy fiction in the entertainment industry. This was a year before "The Avengers" and two years before James Bond (a role which was offered to Patrick McGoohan). See more »
Quotes
John Drake:
[Opening titles narration]
Every government has its Secret Service branch: America, CIA; France, Deuxieme Bureau; England, MI5. NATO also has its own. A messy job? Well that's when they usually call on me, or someone like me. Oh yes: my name is Drake. John Drake.
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It has been reported that a foreign (non-UK) syndicated version of this series incorporated the American "Secret Agent Man" opening credits used for the later series "Danger Man" (1964), thereby tying the two series together. This has yet to be confirmed. See more »
There are so many things Ralph Smart got right in the earliest Danger Man, it's almost a pity he couldn't stick to the commercially problematic 30-minute format. The stories are taut, clever Cold War mystery-thrillers. Within the hurried time constraints it isn't all plot as Smart finds room for characterization and texture, even to interject some interesting ideas and questions. A lot of this is done by way of the mercurial Patrick McGoohan but Smart had no shortage of talented collaborators in directors and actors.
McGoohan's early performances are fluid yet quirky. While he projects a kind of reserved elan, he also draws on a trove of itchy, improvisational mannerisms that allow us into more than a few nooks--not all of them pleasant--of John Drake's anxious cynicism. (McGoohan is to the TV spook what the late Jeremy Brett was to Sherlock Holmes: a perturbable, high-strung exotic, haunted but smirking.) I prefer him here to the more celebrated Prisoner, in fact, where he's customarily arch and lacks the variety of situation and emotional register. His narration is another treat, delivered in one of the most delectably ironic voices in dramatic TV history.
The writing bests most on TV, then or now. The tone in the better scripts is wry, veering toward acid, with more than a hint of melancholy. This is not the Cold War as a stage for Kennedyesque moxie, and certainly not the idiotic glamorization found in Bond, but rather as in Le Carré, a stage for the peeling away of deceptions that are as likely to originate at home as in dens abroad. This is not to say it isn't above the occasional stereotype; see, for instance, the leering North Koreans in the episode The Honeymooners. But a mark of this generally very humane work is that it more typically treats nationalistic conceptions of the enemy with skepticism, and even pits Drake in frustration against his own morally ambiguous NATO bosses. Nor is the day always won, and some seeming victories prove Pyhrric. How refreshing this is to watch in 2007, for obvious reasons.
The production design, fairly cheapo and simplistic, never detracts (charmingly, old file inserts make do for exterior locations) and in fact the studio sets somehow hold surprise delights: here a gloomy early 60s facsimile of a Munich street recalling Carol Reed's chiaroscuro in The Third Man, there the lobby of an International Style hotel with its sexy mid-century modernism. That it's all in gorgeous high-contrast black and white only deepens the interest: shadow play for shadowy deeds.
A word too about the memorable score by Albert Elms, particularly his incidental music. The understated jazz is part and parcel of the sensibility here--aloof and insinuating. There is so much intelligence pulsing through Elms' music and the series as a whole that it seems vaguely unlikely; watching this work, I can't help but admire its virtues while ruing what's become of the medium.
Danger Man in this early incarnation is grown-up art on TV, the likes of which in the U.S., anyway, we rarely hope to find today outside of HBO, practically its last refuge. A treasure.
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There are so many things Ralph Smart got right in the earliest Danger Man, it's almost a pity he couldn't stick to the commercially problematic 30-minute format. The stories are taut, clever Cold War mystery-thrillers. Within the hurried time constraints it isn't all plot as Smart finds room for characterization and texture, even to interject some interesting ideas and questions. A lot of this is done by way of the mercurial Patrick McGoohan but Smart had no shortage of talented collaborators in directors and actors.
McGoohan's early performances are fluid yet quirky. While he projects a kind of reserved elan, he also draws on a trove of itchy, improvisational mannerisms that allow us into more than a few nooks--not all of them pleasant--of John Drake's anxious cynicism. (McGoohan is to the TV spook what the late Jeremy Brett was to Sherlock Holmes: a perturbable, high-strung exotic, haunted but smirking.) I prefer him here to the more celebrated Prisoner, in fact, where he's customarily arch and lacks the variety of situation and emotional register. His narration is another treat, delivered in one of the most delectably ironic voices in dramatic TV history.
The writing bests most on TV, then or now. The tone in the better scripts is wry, veering toward acid, with more than a hint of melancholy. This is not the Cold War as a stage for Kennedyesque moxie, and certainly not the idiotic glamorization found in Bond, but rather as in Le Carré, a stage for the peeling away of deceptions that are as likely to originate at home as in dens abroad. This is not to say it isn't above the occasional stereotype; see, for instance, the leering North Koreans in the episode The Honeymooners. But a mark of this generally very humane work is that it more typically treats nationalistic conceptions of the enemy with skepticism, and even pits Drake in frustration against his own morally ambiguous NATO bosses. Nor is the day always won, and some seeming victories prove Pyhrric. How refreshing this is to watch in 2007, for obvious reasons.
The production design, fairly cheapo and simplistic, never detracts (charmingly, old file inserts make do for exterior locations) and in fact the studio sets somehow hold surprise delights: here a gloomy early 60s facsimile of a Munich street recalling Carol Reed's chiaroscuro in The Third Man, there the lobby of an International Style hotel with its sexy mid-century modernism. That it's all in gorgeous high-contrast black and white only deepens the interest: shadow play for shadowy deeds.
A word too about the memorable score by Albert Elms, particularly his incidental music. The understated jazz is part and parcel of the sensibility here--aloof and insinuating. There is so much intelligence pulsing through Elms' music and the series as a whole that it seems vaguely unlikely; watching this work, I can't help but admire its virtues while ruing what's become of the medium.
Danger Man in this early incarnation is grown-up art on TV, the likes of which in the U.S., anyway, we rarely hope to find today outside of HBO, practically its last refuge. A treasure.