Where Cult TV Began...

August 26, 1976

Fifty years ago this week, one of the most important repeat broadcasts in television history was under way. If that sounds like an over statement, bear with me. Back in 1976, the idea of cult television had barely taken hold. It was only a comparatively small number of diehard fans who cared at all about being able to see their favourite old shows again, and that potential fan community was scattered and disconnected. What they needed was something to bring them together.

As I’ve written elsewhere, 1976 was something of an annus mirabilis for anyone with an interest in old television series. There had been seasons of vintage repeats on both BBC and ITV, and the last stragglers of the late 60s ITC stable of action/adventure series were making what threartened to be their swansong appearances across the independent television regions.

On Saturday 10 July 1976, the Birmingham Evening Mail announced that the local ITV operator, ATV, would begin a repeat broadcast of Patrick McGoohan’s cult series The Prisoner later in the year. The Evening Mail had been instrumental in drumming up reader support for the return of favourite TV programmes, and a letter-writing campaign earlier in the year had led to a Saturday evening strand of selected repeats of vintage American series. Now, in response to the amount of interest the season had generated, ATV were promising home grown material. On Thursday 26 August, at 11pm, the repeat run of The Prisoner got under way. ‘Now see if you can follow it’ said the Evening Mail’s television column for the evening.

I was all for it. Back in July, I’d caught an episode of Danger Man whilst on holiday in Wales. Ironically, we’d driven right past the entrance to Portmeirion without knowing it was there or being aware of its significance. A school friend cautioned me that The Prisoner was strange and incomprehensible, and didn’t show much interest in the upcoming repeats. He’d formerly shared my enthusiasm for vintage television, and his muted response to the Prisoner repeats would mark a cooling phase in our relationship. He left school the following year, aged 16, and I never saw him again. By that time, however, a new name was on the scene: Tim Beddows. A classmate of my brother, two years younger than myself, I’d known him on and off for the past four years, gradually becoming aware that he shared my interest in pop culture icons like James Bond. In early 1976, I’d advised him to watch an afternoon repeat run of the ITC series Strange Report. Now, we were both primed and ready for The Prisoner. And we weren’t the only ones.

That 1976 repeat broadcast transformed the show’s reputation, both here in Britain and further afield. Until now, it had been remembered (if at all) for the controversy surrounding its final episode, and its first repeat run in 1970 had passed off largely unnoticed; certainly without attracting any attention. It was the letter from viewer Dave Barrie of Cheltenham, read out on air after the final episode of the 1976 repeats that lit the fuse. By spring of the following year, the nascent Six of One – the Prisoner Appreciation Society – was already organising its first gathering, in Portmeirion (where else?) In a pre-internet age, The Prisoner was, slowly, going viral, its reputation spreading largely by word of mouth, and acting as a lightning rod for like-minded individuals, many of whom were equally enthusiastic about other vintage television series.

The Prisoner wasn’t the first TV series to spawn a cult, nor the first to have its own appreciation society. Doctor Who preceded it by a few months, with its own appreciation society founded in May of 1976. The first true televisual cult was, of course, Star Trek, whose fans had granted it a reprieve from cancellation through an organised letter-writing campaign – but that was in the United States, where weight of numbers really counted. Here in Britain, the audience for cult television was much smaller: but the arrival of two key fan networks in the space of a year told its own story.

Evidence of the growing interest in The Prisoner, from late 1976: even before Dave Barrie's letter to ATV,
this Evening Mail article highlighted McGoohan's appearance in that week's episode of Columbo, Identity Crisis.

For me personally, the 1976 repeat run of The Prisoner put the seal on my friendship with Tim Beddows, which was to endure until his untimely death in 2022, aged just 59. By the following year, my diary was regularly recording his visits to our house, often armed with off-air audio recordings of Prisoner episodes and others. When I should have been revising for ‘O’ levels, I was spending evenings listening to Tim’s tapes, nattering about old television, and anything else that caught our imaginations. But if The Prisoner meant something to me, it was far more significant for Tim. His enthusiasm for the series spurred him on to begin collecting vintage television episodes on film formats – 8mm and 16mm – several years before domestic video recording was widely available. Ironically, he never discovered any 16mm prints of The Prisoner, but no matter – he later came to own the entire series in its 35mm broadcast format, including some of the very same physical prints that had been used for the ATV repeats back in 1976.

Tim’s passion for collecting and preserving archive television and film led to the formation of the Network DVD label – the first company that really took the business of archive TV releasing seriously. Without his efforts in locating and restoring rare and missing episodes, there woule be huge gaps in the schedule of broadcasters like Talking Pictures TV, whose roster of programmes owes a huge debt to his tenacity in tracking down vintage material and building an audience for it.

The cult fascination of The Prisoner led in time to a wider reappraisal of vintage televisual material. Gerry Anderson’s series were revived on ITV and, later BBC, to huge acclaim. Series like The Champions, The Baron and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) all saw complete repeat runs for the first time in fifteen years. Physical media releases began to appear, initially on VHS, then later, when the new format emerged, DVD.

As DVD arrived on the scene, it was finally possible for a label like Network to release complete box sets of series like The Saint, whose sheer volume of episodes was unsuited to the bulky VHS format. Tim wasn’t the first to release The Prisoner on DVD… indeed, he had to fight to convince ITV to let him have it. But unlike earlier releases, which simply made the best of the available material, Tim invested in a full restoration, which ultimately received the blessing of McGoohan himself. When Tim was invited to California to meet him in 2009, it was the culmination of a journey that had endured over 33 years. And it all got started on a Thursday evening back in August 1976.

Cult TV would, in time, have found its level, its audience, and taken advantage of the new physical media as they appeared. But that 1976 repeat of The Prisoner did something that few other TV series have ever achieved, rescuing a vintage item from obscurity to claim its rightful place in television history. It brought together fans whose weight of numbers would gradually convince broadcasters that old television series shouldn’t just be gathering dust on archive shelves, but were a serious commercial proposition. Today, cult television isn’t just the preserve of a few nerdy fans gathered in pubs and suburban living rooms – it’s a whole industry.

Back in the 1970s, the idea that anyone could own their own physical copy of any television series was more or less unthinkable. Today, it’s taken for granted. The Prisoner, and Tim Beddows, both played an important part in making that happen.