A lot depends on who you ask.  In McGoohan's mind, it was a new series.  He would facetiously answer that they just looked alike.  If you asked George Markstein, who was a writer and script editor on the series, it was a continuation.  Creation was always a fine point too, between Markstein and McGoohan. 


McGoohan was tired of Danger Man/The Secret Agent and wanted to do something more experimental, while ITV wanted to continue the success and Lew Grade okayed the idea, as long as they kept a sort of spy framework to things.  McGoohan went to him to say he wanted to quit Danger Man and Grade was trying to talk him out of it and then asked if he had ideas for a new project and he pitched the Prisoner.  Markstein helped develop the basic concepts and formulate the writer's bible and wrote Arrival, which establishes things.  He had researched a WW2 Scottish camp that was used to isloate people who had strategic information and added those ideas to McGoohan's concept.

What clouds the issue are the inspirations for the series and a couple of episodes within the series.  Danger Man (The Secret Agent, in the US) shot at least one (if not more) episode at Portmeiron, the resort that was used as The Village, in The Prisoner.  The founder of the place was an architect, Clough Williams-Ellis, who had mixed different European architectural styles, giving it a kind of bizarre  stew of locales, which also gave it a feeling of existing anywhere.  There was also a Danger Man episode, called "Colony 3," which was set in a foreign spy school, designed to look exactly like and English village, where the instructors were prisoners of the Eastern Bloc, forced to train spies, while mixing together within this setting.  Markstein approached the idea that John Drake, the hero of Danger Man, resigns and goes off for a holiday, is kidnapped and wakes up in the village.

Many of the crew had worked on Danger Man and they felt it was a continuation of things and McGoohan played Number 6 much as he did John Drake.  Drake, generally, did not use a gun, was a righteous kind of person, and did not get into romantic entanglements with the women he meets (McGoohan had that in his contract, as he wanted to be different from Bond).  The series changed the nature of his organization several times.  Early on, it was NATO intelligence and he was an Irish American (with a Mid-Atlantic accent).  Then, he was working for M9, a British intelligence group and was Anglo-Irish.  These same traits were used for Number 6.

McGoohan has always maintained that Number 6 was definitely not Drake.  This gets murky for a couple of reasons, but more in the inference of fans, rather than implications by the series.

It's been a while since I watched it,; but, I seem to recall that the episode "A,B and C", in one of the dream sequences, has Number 6 referred to as either Drake or by a code name that Drake used in Danger Man.  The bigger source is "The Girl Who Was Death," which was an unused script from Danger Man, repurposed as a Prisoner episode.  Within the episode, he gets instructions from a man called "Potter," which was the name of a character in the final season of Danger Man, who relayed info to Drake.  He was even played by the same actor.

One of the licensed novels, Number 2, by David McDaniel, actually refers to Number 6 as Drake, though that could just be the author.  The Dean Motter and Mark Askwith comic book mini, Shattered Visage (which was officially licensed) refers to Drake as one of several identities for Number 6 (which is why I'm not certain about "A, B and C" using that).  It also links in other things, like Le Carre (Smiley is referenced).

There is a reason for denial of Number 6 being Drake, beyond conceptual; the character of John Drake was created by Ralph Smart, who originated Danger Man.  If the character was a continuation, then Smart would have to be financially compensated for his use.  He was not and ITV and McGoohan's Everyman films always denied any connection, other than McGoohan starred in both and they both involved the world of secrets.

McGoohan has said his idea for things came from the play, Moby Dick-Rehearsed, a two-act play written and staged by Orson Welles, in London, in which McGoohan was a performer.  It involves a theater company, in a minimalist set, who learn they have to rehearse a new play, based on Moby Dick, and have to improvise props and sets, as they rehearse.  It is a story within a story, as it is both an adaptation of Moby Dick, as a play, and the workings of the theatrical company, as they go through bizarre motions.  Also a big influence was a play by Bridget Boland, titled The Prisoner, which was also adapted into a movie, with Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins.  Guinness is a cardinal, in an unnamed Eastern European country.  He was held and tortured, as a prisoner, by the Nazis, during the war, and is now held by the communist regime that rules the country now.  Hawkins is the interrogator assigned to break him.  He knows that physical torture won't work, as the war proved that; so, Hawkins sets out to undermine his belief in his former institutions and his certainty in them, in his resistance.  They try to frame him with false charges but they fall apart.  Then Hawkins begins to use sleep deprivation, interrupting his meal patterns and other psychological techniques to break down his will, until he convinces Guinness that he became a priest out of vanity and for selfish reasons, to escape poverty, rather than as a spiritual calling.  He then confesses to all of the lies within the charges.

McGoohan has always been obtuse about the finale and the meaning of certain elements and the identity of Number 6 and Number One.  Number 6 is someone who was a party to secrets; but, he might be someone other than an agent, though his tradecraft would suggest he was involved in intelligence work.  The finale is very metaphorical and revolves around rebellion, in different forms, through the counter-culture (as seen in Alexis Kanner's Number 48), the servant who turns on the master (via Leo McKern's Number 2) and the individual who rebels to maintain his unique identity, personified by Number 6.  They tempt him with a final chance to solve a mystery, to pull him to their side, by meeting Number One.  The whole episode is very bizarre and dreamlike, so it is possible to view it as a dream, hallucination, or perhaps an after-life vision, as some have theorized (that Number 6 actually died in the preceding episode, "Once Upon a Time."  Thus, Number 6 finds that his opposite number, so to speak, is actually the other side of his own personality; that he was a prisoner of his own mind, his own neuroses and negative thoughts.

McGoohan also said that the series is really just an allegory of the struggle between the individual to maintain their unique identity and the demands of society, as a whole.  As such, people bring their own preconceived notions to the series, which is part of why the theories about it run the gamut from the Village being fascist, corporate or The West, to Number 6 actually being the person who runs the Village, checking up on how it is working (an idea that is part of the plot of "Hammer into Anvil."

This is a really interesting conversation with McGoohan, in Canada, in the 70s, with students and fans.


McGoohan also did an episode of Columbo, where he is a spy who has been embezzling the operating funds for a mission, for his own business purposes (his cover) and murders his contact to cover it up, leading to him sparring with Lt Columbo.  There are a few nods to the Prisoner (I believe he even says, "Be seeing you!") and he drives a Citroen/Maserati.  McGoohan did 5 episodes of the series, both in the original run and the later telemovies.

Really great show for the brain.  To bad that AMC/Sky remake was such bland pablum, wrapped in New Age/Self-Help mumbo jumbo.  What a waste of Ian McKellan (the only good part of it, for my money).

ps.  There is a great short story in the second Tales of the Shadowmen anthology (edited by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier), by Xavier Maumejean, called "Be Seeing You," which is about the origin of The Village.  It features Sherlock Holmes as The Prisoner, while the masters of the Village want to know about secrets that Mycroft Holmes entrusted to him.  Number 2's identity is very interesting and it does reveal who Number 1 is, and it very much makes sense, if you know your history.    Maumejean's stories were always fantastic, including one where Jeeves, of the PG Wodehouse Jeeves & Wooster stories, matches wits with Agatha Christies Hercule Popirot, in a Christmas bet.  I would have loved to have seen this adapted with Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie (Jeeves & Wooster) and David Souchet (Poirot).  It would make for a great Comic Relief special.