A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode eight — Many Happy Returns

The first half of this episode is dialogue-free! This episode of The Prisoner, that is, not this episode of A Degree Absolute!, though that's the sort of formal experimentation we'd be game to try. Anywho, Number Six awakens in an inexplicably raptured Village and opts for the seaborne escape route, where starvation, pirates, and intrigue await. As does Georgina Cookson, on whom Glen has developed a serious crush.

PLUS: Listener mail!

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode seven — with "I Am Not a Number" author and "Repo Man" auteur Alex Cox

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SPOILERS AHOY for the entirety of the 54-year-old television series The Prisoner! You've been warned! Save this episode for later if you haven't yet seen the whole series!

Lifelong Prisoner fan Alex Cox joins Chris to talk about his 2017 book I Am Not a Number: Decoding the Prisoner, and What It's All About.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode two — The Chimes of Big Ben

Our abstract-art-and-seafaring-adventure-packed “The Chimes of Big Ben” episode of A Degree Absolute! makes a fine companion on your sunny-day run or walk or bike ride or desperate escape attempt via art-boat!

Number Six attempts to escape The Village with the help of a newcomer named Nadia and a "basically primitive" abstract art project with a hard-to-overlook nautical vibe. He also finds out where The Village is.

Unequivocally.

Indisputably.

Maybe.

Featuring the first of the great Leo McKern's appearances as Number Two!

and now, A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode one — Arrival

Creator/star Patrick McGoohan listens to our 2021 podcast about his TV show on a Zune in this 1967 photo.

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Four years and seven score ago, Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon suggested to me we do a podcast deconstructing The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s short-lived, long-tailed allegorical spy-fi TV series that flummoxed and infuriated viewers with its final episode decades before The Sopranos or LOST or Mad Men would do the same. We are neither of us men of haste. We dragged our heels about doing it for so long that its initial news hook — the 50th anniversary of the series, which ran for 17 episodes in England in 1967-8 and in the U.S. the following summer — came and went, only to be replaced by a far more dire one. We’ve all been more or less confined to our homes for a year and counting.

Like the show’s mysterious title character, Number Six, we are all vexed by circumstance and desperate to escape. Unlike Number Six, we are friendly and personable to people of any and all genders. But you’ll be the judge of that, we hope. You’ve heard Glen & me share the studio on a number of episodes of Pop Culture Happy Hour over the years — I’m still not thrilled that he called me “sconce-jawed” that one time on the Man of Steel episode — but this the is first All-New, All-Different, All-Glen, All-Chris podcast, and its senses-shattering first episode is available right now.

Ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary individuals, I give you… A Degree Absolute!