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JACK SHAMPAN & DAVID TOMBLIN
interviewed by
Chris Rodley
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This interview was given during the filming for "Six Into One - The Prisoner File"; a documentary transmitted after the final episode of The Prisoner was shown in 1984. The documentary used only a small portion of the interview, which is reproduced here, in full and with the permission of the original authors.
Two of the most important people on THE PRISONER, both technically and creatively, were David Tomblin and Jack Shampan. Both had worked on feature and television films for a number of years independently and both had worked together on many episodes of Danger Man.
Tomblin was a close friend of Patrick McGoohan and together they formed Everyman Films as a production company to make THE PRISONER. Initially Tomblin was to be the producer of the series but such was his enthusiasm and capacity to throw up imaginative ideas that McGoohan persuaded him to co-write the first episode as well.
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David Tomblin was also to write, produce and direct 'Living in Harmony' and originate, produce and direct 'The Girl Who Was Death'.
Jack Shampan created much of the "look" of the series. All the sets were basically his design and he or the art department under his direction created the unique and futuristic props, the fantastic interiors such as Number 2's office and painted the backdrops that re-created Portmeirion in the Borehamwood studios.
The interview took the form of a friendly discussion between the two men with an occasional question from Chris Rodley, writer and associate producer of 'The Prisoner File'. The scene is an enormous sound stage which had just been used in the film 'Return of the Jedi' on which David Tomblin had been First Assistant Director and Second Unit Director. Chris Rodley asks Jack Shampan when his involvement with THE PRISONER began.
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JS: At the time I was completing a film at Pinewood Studios and just about to go on holiday when Patrick McGoohan contacted me and said they'd like me to come and have a chat with them about doing a continuation of Danger Man. They were toying with the idea of calling it THE PRISONER and had some scripts already completed - about four I should imagine. I took them back with me after the meeting and while I was on holiday I prepared some thumbnail sketches and came back just a couple of weeks prior to you buzzing off to Portmeirion to do the location work. I collected an art department around me and we produced the working drawings of the main sets such as the living room (Green Dome), control room and so forth, then came up to Portmeirion to show you. Then we went back to MGM and had to really get cracking. I don't think people realise the amount of mechanism in sets such as the control room, which was in the "tank" underneath the stages. It was like a powerhouse, all done by remotes on a panel which operated the actuators, doors opening, things coming up through the floor, revolving and so on.
DT: What about the viewscreen? We reflected it into a mirror in the end to get the size or something, didn't we?
JS: Yes, we didn't have enough throw for the back-projection so we had to do it in stages, reflecting the image into an optical mirror and then back onto the screen, which was virtually the same principle used in small cinemas when they didn't have enough throw for the projector to get the right size screen. Going back to the mechanisms, we didn't have armies of people working to do all the clever stuff. They do it all on memory banks in TV studios now, but ours was set up virtually by one bloke. He was incredible.
DT: Remember how Rover started?
JS: When we discussed it they wanted a mechanised thing that didn't look mechanised, which could travel along and almost look like a creature.
DT: So we started with a go-cart and covered it with a sort of dome, but we had trouble with the exhaust fumes, and also the man promised us it would be able to go along the ground and it would go up walls. But after it kept falling off we changed our minds. Then Pat had the idea of weather balloons, which worked out pretty well. We did consider dropping the balloon out of it altogether at one time, but kept it in and strangely enough it worked...
JS: ... and everybody seems to remember it!
(The talk switches to 'Fall Out' and the designs for the cavern set)
JS: We'd been up top, all over Portmeirion, lots of interiors and exteriors, and now we show that there's an establishment underneath the whole Village. We used two stages - we could have stretched to three if we' had them. Everybody was so tied up with the project and nobody had given much thought to how we were going to complete the last...
DT: ... UNTRUE! (Laughs)
JS: Well, as far as I knew! Anyway, I was chatting to George Markstein one day, and he mentioned this ... how are we going to complete the final episode ... to make it pull together ... and I remembered that some years before I'd  worked on a film which was like a "Shangri La" where everything was underground, inside a mountain, and this was more or less the embryo of how the last episode started - from the set point of view, not the action.
(David Tomblin is asked about the "non-Village" episodes)
DT: I felt that there was a danger of the series becoming claustrophobic in one sense and was trying to think of ideas to get it out of the Village but keep it IN the village ... like the Western for example, and another one called 'A, B and C'... there were about six or seven that achieved that and gave it some fresh air and a different look, but I thought the Western was perhaps the most radical. My uncle here did a very good job with no money to build the little town. It was a French chateau originally, wasn't it?
JS: The exterior? Yes.
CR: Can you tell us something about the occasion when Patrick had to leave the series to go to America?
DT: Well, he got an offer to do a film called 'Ice Station Zebra' and it did clash with our programme, so I suggested that we transplanted his mind into another actor ... as part of the style of the Village anyway... to allow him to go to America.
CR: How long did 'Fall Out' take to shoot? It was a very complicated looking set.
DT: Yes ... it took rather a long time, longer than it should have done. We were all a bit punchy by that time but it was worth it. I think Patrick's a very good writer and a very good director. As it progressed and we got more and more into it (talking about the series as a whole now), being the man he is and being the person I try to be, we put everything into it. We worked seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, and tried to make every episode one thousand per cent. Eventually it became obvious we couldn't maintain the pace or the quality in the time that was left - the showing dates were fast approaching so it was then decided to finish at seventeen episodes.
CR: A lot of people talk about the quality of writing on the series - could you say something about the problems of getting good scripts and your own contributions in this area?
DT: Writing was a bit of a strange area for me because I'd never written before. Patrick came in one day and said "I've seen Lou (Grade), we've got the money, we've got the series ? so write the first story". So I got hold of George Markstein and we sat in a room for some time and eventually came up with "Arrival". I did find that when we interviewed writers, no matter how much detail you gave them, they came back with an entirely different story ? although this was only because the series was so different. So in the end, detailed storylines was the way to approach it to keep it all in the same sort of style.
CR: Were many re-writes necessary?
DT : Quite a lot, yes ... because people maybe got hold of the general idea, but because they hadn't seen any film at that time they were going off at tangents which didn't work to our conception.
CR: How did you locate the right kind of writers?
DT: Well, George Markstein is a fount of information. He knew all the writers, so he'd bring them in and we'd talk ? sort of suggest a theme to them. We did approach some very big writers but they said the money wasn't good enough, and why should they work that hard for that little money when they could sit at home in a warm study and write a book for fifty times that amount!
JS: On the technical side, we had the advantage of working with people we'd worked with before, you don't have to spell it out so much.
DT: That's true. A lot of people on The Prisoner came from Danger Man - or Secret Agent depending on which country you come from - so we had a team around us who knew the shorthand, which was a help.
CR: What did you think of the reception that the last episode got from the eight million or so viewers, some of whom were confused and some very annoyed?
DT: Well, that was understandable because most people were expecting a conventional ending, but it wasn't a conventional series, so the ending was in the style of the series...
JS: ... so you can make up your own mind...
DT: ... Well, yes - sort of like an abstract, and you can see things in it, make your own analogies.
CR: When was the idea conceived that Number Six was Number One?
DT: I think that in a strange way it went back to conversations right at the beginning of the series, that one needed a conclusion ? obviously. We had a lot of conversations and discussed various possibilities, and over that period of time all these things went into the mental computer and it came out at the other end ? not quite as we discussed but sort of?
JS: ... based on the embryo.
DT: Yes... there was an idea before we started, but it wasn't that precise.
CR: The series was made by a company called Everyman Films, which was basically yourself and Pat McGoohan. When did you first meet?
DT: we met in Portmeirion when we were doing Danger Man in 1960 and we sort of hit it off and decided we would form our own company and make our own things later. The Prisoner was the only thing we did but, who knows, we may team up again one day.
CR: Did you work right the way through Danger Man?
DT: No. They did about 88 episodes I think. I worked on about three-quarters of them - I directed the action unit at the beginning.
CR: How many films do you think you've actually made or worked on?
DT: Well, I only know that because I've just worked on a George Lucas film called "Return Of The Jedi" and to get permission to work in the States I had to write down every film I'd been on. I got to 478 and then decided that was probably enough to convince them that I had a reasonable amount of experience!
CR: Can you tell us how the visual style of the series came about?
DT: Well, it was influenced very heavily by Portmeirion wasn't it?
JS: Yes, but Portmeirion has a Mediterranean architecture, whereas when we came indoors it was all way out, futuristic ? almost going back to the days of Fritz Lang and "M" ? everything was stylised and symbolic. For example, the living space (Shampan always referred to Number Two's office as "the living space) ? all those lines going upward which symbolised a cage ? the title of the thing was 'The Prisoner', so everything was sort of in a cage. And then in the control room, the eye going round, you know, Big Brother watching all the time. Every bit of mechanism I suppose came from me, except for the symbol of the penny Farthing, which was the brainchild of you, or Pat.
DT: It was Pat. He was responsible more than anybody for the style of the series.
JS: Yes, So that was almost like a harmonising note, with everything futuristic yet with this thing going right back to Victoriana. Although it wasn't analysed in that sort of way, when you think of it in retrospect that symbol made everything look that much more advanced.
CR: What other things do you remember Patrick adding? Any other specific little touches?
DT: When we wrote the first episode, Patrick got very excited about it and then began to add touches ? he began to stylise it ? and it took on quite a different look. He was going sort of "over there" and I was trying to keep it "over here" because my sort of experience was heavily actionised, so between the two forces plus Jack's visuals the thing ended up the way it ended up.
CR: So Patrick's additions were the more weird or fantastic end?
JS: Well - dramatic.
DT: Yes, weird, dramatic, fantastic ... all those elements ... and once we got the style and feel and flavour of it we all contributed then. It was a series where everyone was heavily involved.
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