Denis Shaw Season: Danger Man - Are You Going to be More Permanent? and Conclusions
I started this series of posts on actor Denis Shaw's TV roles with his role in The Prisoner and end it with his role in The Prisoner's predecessor, Danger Man.
Are You Going to be More Permanent? is an episode which has a strange effect on me because it both bores me witless and also intrigues me.
It bores me for the completely personal reason that it is, to me, a pure example of what we might call a spy procedural and although the solution is dependent on Drake's charm this makes it a bit procedure-driven for me. I'm not sure that that genre actually exists, but I hope to start a new trend. The plot is a rather thin one, and it is essentially that Drake goes to Geneva as the controller of M9 to find out what has happened to the last two controllers. The three M9 agents in Geneva are suspects for whatever has happened to the controllers.
I have looked online and strangely can find no suggestion that this episode of Danger Man is echoed in The Prisoner episode A, B and C. Of course you may say that the only similarities are that there are three suspects and the world of espionage is involved, but that's exactly the sort of tie that makes connections between Danger Man and The Prisoner. There is also the presence of Denis Shaw, who has we have seen, reappeared in The Prisoner as the shopkeeper.
Here he plays a member of the world's least-regulated profession, namely an estate agent, and I have to say the role suits him down to the ground. Shaw gives exactly the right impression of a dodgy salesman trying to get the customer to rent a complete pup. He says that the house has been empty for six months but it's a place where you can really breathe and he points out the mahogany bannisters. Of course if he was any good he would tell the owner to get the whole place decorated and weed the wildly overgrown garden, but instead must either think his charm can get the run down place let or he just doesn't care. We've all come across an estate agent like that or two!
Conclusions
Having always avoided talking about the actors while I have been blogging, this series of posts is the first time I have changed tack to focus on one of the actors instead, and it's been an interesting experience.
One aspect of this has been that Shaw tends to play relatively minor roles and going through his TV roles has made me focus on the nature of these roles. They all tend to be rather unpleasant characters, which given that he was known as the rudest man in London, makes me wonder whether he was character acting!
I have been surprised at some of the relatively rare shows I have managed to watch for this, and impressed at how much of his work exists on published sources and the internet, given that the latter part of his career coincided with the peak of junking television. One of the more interesting parts of this experiment for me has been to make me watch shows I wouldn't otherwise watch, which I have appreciated. My only sorrow is that I would estimate I have blogged about less than half his TV work and the majority of the rest no longer survives. I have not touched any of his film work, since it's beyond the scope of this blog.
My other sorrow is that I don't feel I know Denis Shaw as a man or an actor any better at the end of this series of posts, and with the bare facts of his life and personality I could have guessed the nature of his television career. Again this may be explained by the small parts he tends to play.
This has been an experiment in blogging that I have definitely enjoyed and appreciated. I have a shortlist of other possible candidates for this treatment in the future now that I've discovered I can do it. Otherwise I suspect I'll go back to not talking about the actors in my normal blog posts, though, because I haven't changed my mind that if you're thinking about the actor they're distracting from the role!
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