Denis Shaw Season Introduction: The Prisoner - Checkmate

With fear and trembling I start a series of posts which are by way of an experiment for both me and this blog. Over the past decade of blogging I have never really focussed much on the actors in these shows, in fact it bugs me like nothing else if an actor is one of the 'familiar faces' of 1960s TV and I can't work out where I've seen them or remember their name. Generally speaking I consider it to be one of the weaknesses of TV of this era, and means that it looks as if the world of TV was a very small village at best.

However this experiment I'm starting is to try to turn this on its head and see what happens if I focus on one of these 'familiar faces' instead of blanking them out, and blog a series of posts about their roles. This is really very strange, new ground for me indeed.

My first victim is Denis Shaw (1921 to 1971) who will be familiar to anyone reading this blog for playing a series of villains. One of the reasons I've picked him as my first is that his career exactly coincided with the peak junking era so I'm not sure how much of his actual television work (I suspect more film survives) I may be able to obtain and this may end up being a very short experiment indeed.

The other reason is that my interest was first aroused by the Free for All podcast about The Prisoner which contrasted his jolly persona as the shopkeeper with his real life personality where he sounds very much like the sort of person who could start a fight on his own in a room. I have read pages saying that he had the name of the rudest man in London, owed money to everyone he knew, was banned from so many bars in Soho that he had difficulty getting a drink, and of course there are all the allegations that he was an actual gangster and started fights in real life. Definitely a colourful character.

Born Douglas Shaw in 1921, according to IMDB his acting career began in 1938 in the films The Case of the Frightened Lady and General John Regan. He was a wireless operator in a Sherman tank on D-Day. Biographical information is rather lacking and tends to focus on the things I've already said, but he seems to have fitted in a huge number of roles given that he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 49. He will be familiar to every reader of this blog for playing relatively minor roles, usually as quite sinister characters.

He appears in two episodes of The Prisoner, Arrival and Checkmate, and the played the jolly shopkeeper who we all love. A clear contrast to his usual roles and to his real-life persona!

I have chosen Checkmate over Arrival because he has a slightly more involved role than in Arrival. He appears twice. The first is during the experiment to see which Villagers are prisoners and which are guards, in which ihis reaction to Number 6's demand to see his accounts clearly indicates that the shopkeeper is a prisoner rather than a guardian. Later, when Number 6 starts the revolt, the shopkeeper has the role of tying up Number 2's hands.

It's an interesting use of his character, because up to now he has seemed very much the face of the Village, handing out the inadequate maps and saying all the right things. Any consequences for this revolt are not made explicit however in Hammer into Anvil the shopkeeper is instead played by Victor Woolf who can obviously be relied on to ring up Number 2 and tell him what Number 6 is listening to. I have not seen any rumours online of real-world reasons for why Shaw didn't play the shopkeeper again in Hammer into Anvil, but I can definitely see the meeting of his personality with the notoriously temperamental Patrick McGoohan resulting in fireworks, so it could well have been that.

And that's it. That's his role. I have not expatiated at length about the episode (which is why I've used it as a sort of introduction) because you all know it and I've posted at length about it frequently. Going forwardI expect that I will talk more about the episode as well as Shaw's role simply because his tendency to have small roles will necessitate doing this to make what I have to say into a blog post.

Coming next: further posts about TV episodes in which Denis Shaw appears, probably his more accustomed rather sinister roles.

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