THE LOTUS SEVEN AND THE PRISONER (continued)
That was back in the Eighties, when The Prisoner was namedropped constantly by every hair-gelled hipster and pretentious sixth-form Socrates in the land, me included.
But in that prehistoric, early VHS era, none of us had actually seen it...until 1983-4 when Channel 4 finally screened the entire series. In the split second it took McGoohan's Lotus Seven to scream down that runway, from distant dot to dramatic full-frame image, I was transfixed. I didn't even know what a Lotus Seven was. But I knew I had to have one. One day. By hook or by crook.
That The Prisoner itself lived up to the promise of its explosive opening credits was a bonus. And the subsequent revelation that the Lotus Seven remained in production as the Caterham Seven, thanks to a certain Mr Graham Nearn who was, at that very moment, seriously considering making a Prisoner replica...well, some things are just meant to be.
Fast forward 20 years and I'm sitting in Graham Nearn's living room in Whitstable, Kent (his house, by one of fate's stranger twists, is on the same street where I grew up. You never truly escape The Village. But that's another story...). Graham's own Prisoner Seven, bearing the original car's KAR 120C registration, is parked outside. Next to it is mine: number 19 in the limited edition of 47. Like I said, the show made quite an impression.
I want information. And I'm hoping Graham will help me get it. His association with The Prisoner goes right back to its filming in the mid-Sixties, when Caterham Cars was just starting out.
"McGoohan wanted a car for the series and so he went up to Lotus (then at Cheshunt)," he recalls, "Lotus were trying to get him into the Elan. But the Elan was in the Avengers, so he didn't want that. He saw the old Lotus Super Seven demonstrator KAR 120C sitting in the corner and said: 'That's the car!'"
But Lotus, cash-conscious as ever, sold the original KAR 120C, a Cosworth 1500-powered Super Seven Series Two, to an overseas buyer with several episodes left to shoot. Lotus had by then stopped selling the Seven which put Caterham, its sole agent, on the spot. McGoohan's production company, Everyman Films, needed a replacement double-quick. So Caterham resprayed a secondhand Seven, a 997cc Ford 105E Anglia-engined car with Elan wheels and red interior, over a weekend and, paint barely dry, Graham delivered it to the Borehamwood studio on Monday morning, where he watched, bemused, from the wings as Leo McKern was lowered into a steaming hole in the floor; one of many memorably weird scenes in the fantastically unfathomable final episode Fall Out.
Graham even landed himself a fleeting walk-on part as the mechanic who returns McGoohan's Lotus. "They couldn't get the scene coordinated because the actor couldn't drive the car. So they said I could," he says. If you look carefully, Nearn is the bloke in brown overalls buffing the bodywork outside No 1 Buckingham Place, Number Six's London residence. "My fee was something like ten pounds a day," he recalls, "But I said 'Look, I'm really not bothered about the money but what I'd like is a photograph of me with McGoohan and the car'".
"McGoohan was a very dynamic sort of guy. He was directing as well as acting and writing and at the very end of filming they were in a hell of a state. His budget had gone, he was thrown out of the studio and I remember we were filming in Trafalgar Square on a Sunday night under car headlights. That's the pressure he was under. He was wrapping up the whole thing and he said 'Graham, we've got to do that photograph, haven't we? I didn�t have to prompt him. So we stood by the car and did the shot.
"It all happened beautifully really because I picked up this (Lotus) concession deal in '66, and this was all going on about the same time. And I obviously flogged the photograph to death in all the publicity."
In 1973, the Seven's celebrated creator Colin Chapman handed over the manufacturing rights and Caterham Cars graduated from concessionaire to car manufacturer. For the next decade and a half Graham's dream of building a limited edition replica of Number Six's Seven bubbled away under the surface like a Rover balloon anticipating the next Orange Alert.
"It wasn't something people asked us to do. I don't think there was a particular demand for one," he admits. "But it was simply that people would come up at the motor shows and ask 'is that the Prisoner car?' And they still do now. The Prisoner is very much an integral part of the nebulous goodwill of the Seven."
It was a question of waiting for the right moment. And with the economic gloom of the Seventies receding and the renewed interest in The Prisoner prompted by the Channel 4 repeats, the tail-end of the Eighties seemed as good a time as any. In 1987 Jools Holland, then presenter of Channel 4's The Tube and a card-carrying Prisoner fan, created his own tribute to the show, an affectionate spoof called The Laughing Prisoner, co-starring his showbiz chum Stephen Fry as Number Two. Once again, Graham Nearn provided a Seven. This time it was a Caterham Supersprint demonstrator with a yellow nose cone and a Cosworth-tuned Ford Crossflow 1700 under the British Racing Green bonnet. Not an exact replica, it had a black interior in place of the original car's red trim and 'phone-dialler' Compomotive wheels in place of the Elan hubs on the original Series Two Lotus.
The Laughing Prisoner in the can, Caterham gave the KAR 120C lookey-likey to the now sadly defunct Performance Car magazine, who despatched it to Portmeirion (the Italianate North Wales holiday resort used as the location for The Prisoner's mysterious 'Village') with writer Kevin Blick at the wheel. His story, '6s and 7s' appeared in the July 1987 issue, was a clever homage to the show, riddled with cryptic, Prisoner-esque non-sequiturs. The scene was set for KAR 120C's comeback.
So Graham Nearn set about obtaining Patrick McGoohan's blessing. "For a while I�d been thinking we could do this but it all hinged on McGoohan," he says. "It took a while to track him down. I just rang various studios and asked around and stumbled across someone who gave me McGoohan's home number. I rang and this voice said 'Yup?' "'Is that Patrick McGoohan?' "'Yup!' "So I ran by him what I'd thought of doing and he said 'Yeah, yeah, OK. It's one of the all-time great cars,' he said (Nearn does a fine impression of McGoohan's clipped mid-Atlantic accent, by the way). Like a Ferrari or a Maserati; it's unique. Love to do it.'"
They met in LA in the Summer of 1988 and sketched out the endorsement deal over breakfast at the Biltmore Hotel. "When a guy's that wealthy, what are you going to offer him?" says Graham, "So what I offered him, apart from a royalty deal which was of no consequence, was a car. And I got him back to England for the motor show. It was the first time he'd been back in England since the series."
That was the Birmingham Motor Show in October 1990, where McGoohan officially launched the Caterham Prisoner Edition Seven. The car was equipped with all the basic Caterham concessions to modernity, such as a roll bar, indicators and de Dion suspension but finished with styling touches lifted from the mid-Sixties Series Two Lotus Super Seven. Every Prisoner car had an all-red interior lined with red Wilton carpet, 15-inch 'Prisoner' alloys cast specially by Caterham to resemble KAR 120C's Lotus Elan wheels, a Penny Farthing badge in the boss of the leather-bound Moto-Lita steering wheel and black weather gear with white piping. Retro ornamentation included a liberal splash of chrome; on the instrument bezels, rear numberplate lamp, windscreen wiper stalks and headlamp stoneguards.
Unusually for a limited edition, buyers could order Prisoner cars to their own specification; an decision driven by profit, no doubt, but one that made every vehicle individual, appropriately enough. That freedom of choice even extended to engines. Although most of the early Prisoner cars were 1700 Ford Crossflow-powered Supersprints (starting price £16,951), a few had Cosworth 1600 BDR engines. Later cars had 2.0-litre Vauxhall HPC units and even, like Graham Nearn's car, Rover VVC power plants.
Caterham was concerned about fakes (a few knock-offs duly surfaced in Japan) and to this day Graham Nearn is reluctant to divulge the exact shade of green paint used. But genuine cars had a 'PRI' chassis number and came with a certificate of authenticity signed by McGoohan. And screwed to the dash of each car was a plaque embossed with McGoohan's signature and its edition number. McGoohan's own car (Number Six, naturally) was shipped over to Caterham's Massachusetts-based US distributor Chris Tchorznicki in kit form to sidestep import restrictions.
Chris screwed together the Supersprint in his workshop and personally delivered it to McGoohan...who immediately gave it away to his son-in-law in Virginia.
"Patrick said he'd meet me in Richmond, Virginia, so I put the car on the trailer, drove down, and we met him at the airport for the handover," recalls Chris, "He looked dreadful, really bad. He'd just flown in from Europe but even so he did not look well. But he liked the car. I've still got slides of him driving it through the streets of Richmond. He seemed really surprised at how much more civilised it was. He said 'You could drive this car every day!'"
Perhaps over-ambitiously, the deal with McGoohan conceived a production run of up to 500 cars. In the event, only 47 were ever made. The last one produced was Graham Nearn's VVC-engined car, built in 2001.
"I thought I'll build that and we'll use all the stuff up," he explains, "It kind of died really, I suppose. Would we make another one? Well, never say never!"
Back to that underground car park in Westminster. It's Abingdon Street car park, the actual one used in The Prisoner's opening credits. I've driven here in my own Prisoner Seven to rendezvous with three other owners, Gavin Hamson, Mike Greene and Guy Feld, and Prisoner expert Dave Lally, who's volunteered to guide us around the London locations used in the series (KAR 120C never actually appeared in The Village, but then if you've read this far, you probably knew that already).
We must be quite a sight: four green and yellow clones blatting in erratic convoy through the near-deserted streets of West London early on a Sunday morning. But I wonder what Number Six would have made of us? Suddenly the voice of Graham Chapman pops into my head. No, not Colin Chapman or Graham Nearn but the late, great Monty Python Graham Chapman.
"You're all individuals!" It's the famous line from Life of Brian.
"Yes, we're all individuals!"
Be seeing you...
SPECIFICATIONS
Engine: Caterham 1700 Supersprint (Ford Crossflow) 1,691cc, with twin Weber 40DCOE carburettors
Power: 135bhp (101 kW) @ 6,000rpm Torque: 122 lb ft (165Nm) @ 4,500rpm Transmission: Ford Sierra V6 five-speed Brakes: 9in front discs, 8in rear discs (de Dion cars)
Weight: 1,300lb (590kg) Performance:
Top speed 111mph, 0-60mph: 5.6 sec
Cost: Second hand prices start around £10,000
Patrick McGoohan on the Seven (from the Certificate of Authenticity issued with each Prisoner car)
"Back in 1966 when we were preparing The Prisoner series we needed a car for our hero. Something out of the ordinary. A vehicle to fit his personality. The first time I saw the now-familiar Lotus Seven KAR 120C, I had that certain feeling. It sort of looked me straight in the eye. I test drove it. This was it. A symbol of all The Prisoner was to represent: standing out from the crowd, quickness and agility, independence, individuality and a touch of the rebel...
"Many people now know there were two versions of the car in the series, the second being a replica of the original Lotus demonstrator produced by Caterham Cars and used in Fall Out, the final episode. The Seven has been associated with The Prisoner ever since and I am delighted that it remains in production today as the Caterham Seven. There have been many unofficial replicas over the years so now it's fitting that Caterham Cars should be producing an official, limited edition Prisoner replica. This they do with my blessing, I am sure you will enjoy your new acquisition. Be seeing you, Patrick McGoohan."
FREE INFORMATION
Caterham Cars www.caterham.co.uk
Woodcote Sports Cars www.racecar.co.uk/woodcote
The Unmutual www.theunmutual.co.uk
Sevens & Elans www.sevenselans.com
Steve Landes www.steve-landes.com
Six of One www.sixofone.org.uk
THANKS
To all of the above and Gavin Hamson, Graeme Batt, Guy Feld, Mike Greene and, of course, Graham Nearn.
©Richard Fleury 2005. A version of this story originally appeared in Octane Magazine.
