The Prisoner: Here's the new 'Village'

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The African town chosen by the producers of AMC/ITV’s reboot of Patrick McGoohan’s cult The Prisoner is a stunning match in many ways for the Italianate Welsh show-village where the original was filmed. Swakopmund is a resort town abutting onto the Atlantic coast, and boasting a German-colonial architecture that makes it quite clear that the new production, despite abandoning William Clough-Ellis’s Portmeiron in North Wales, is keen to maintain a level of visual fidelity to the original ITC series.

With a resident population of over 28,000, Swakopmund is rather more densely populated than Portmeiron, which remains in effect a holiday village to which non-resident tourists have limited and paid access. Besides possessing a bell-tower very familiar to both Prisoner fans and visitors to Portmeiron, the African resort is also situated very close to Swakopmund Airport, a boon to a production team a long way from home.

The long stretch of coast fronting the town will no doubt be necessary for political detainee No.6 (Cavalziel) to run from whatever vision the new producers have for ‘Rover’, the lion-roaring and lethal weather balloon that rounded up potential escapees in the original series.

On the AMC production blog, AMCTV.com's multi-media producer Philip Francis yesterday noted that the start of shooting has been –perhaps predictably, given the proximity of the Atlantic ocean – beset by gale force winds. He notes also that Swakopmund ‘is technologically about fifteen to twenty years behind. They've never even heard of Mac computers here.’.

Though previously reported that Ian McKellen was setting off for Namibia together with Jim Cavalziel and the rest of the cast and crew, Francis writes that Sir Ian will not be joining the production for another six weeks and says ‘we're all looking forward to it’.

Shooting AMC/ITV’s re-imagining of The Prisoner will continue until November, with the 6-part series due to air in 2009.

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