Photos courtesy of Bill Close.
Anyone remember The Prisoner? Patrick McGoohan’s short-lived television tour de force entertained and confused viewers across the globe late in the 1960s, initially airing Stateside on CBS. As Number Six, a man who knew too much, kidnapped and trapped in an idyllic village without bars, McGoohan’s otherwise-unnamed character fought against The Man for his physical and mental freedom … and won. (Or did he?) The show was more metaphorical than literal, and was designed to provoke discussion and debate. Many of its concepts and commentaries are as relevant today as they were nearly 40 years ago; they have outlived its creator, who passed in 2011. As a teenager with a wide punk streak running through him, tripping across reruns on PBS late at night in the 1980s, The Prisoner spoke to me.
The opening credits started with a clap of thunder, a blare of trumpet, and the doppler whoosh of a car being driven by at a great rate of speed, shown only in a series of blurry cuts. That car, a Lotus Seven, was only ever seen in the opening credits (and intermittently in the show itself), yet its presence spoke volumes about the character driving it. Rugged. Individualistic. A maverick—not one to settle for the ordinary. Good with his hands. And, presumably, in shape enough to fit behind the wheel. A Lotus Seven was good enough for the protagonist. Surely it would be good enough for a wanna-be like me?
The show started and ended, and Lotus itself stopped making the Seven by the early ’70s; attempts to modernize the original fell flat with the Series 4, and Lotus sold the rights to Caterham, a company that reverted to building Sevens in the Series 3 mold immediately. Interest in the car came back to life, and Caterham was a growing concern. In 1989, Caterham Cars launched a Prisoner edition Seven. It traded skinny rubber and steelies for modern alloys and low-profile radials, but the look was otherwise the same: BRG all over, a yellow nosepiece, red interior. Patrick McGoohan himself made a rare public appearance at the British Motor Show to introduce it. Rather than take the first one off the line, he accepted Number Six. Because of course.
The Prisoner continued to mean a great deal to me. In 2001, I took a portion of my honeymoon at Portmeirion, in Wales, where Prisoner location filming took place. My new wife initially agreed simply to indulge me, but she ended up falling in love with Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’ fairytale architectural splendor too. On that same trip, a chance drive past a sports car dealer in the UK got me standing next to a Caterham Seven for the first time … and claustrophobia kicked in just standing beside it. Even then, when I was younger, slimmer and more beautiful, my stubby legs, gorilla arms and wide torso suggested that I should be driving an Alfa rather than a Seven. Alas. As time went on, and as I continued to lose the war on the waistline spread, I expanded out of the dream of a Seven, or something Sevenesque. I had relegated thoughts of it to the coulda-shoulda-woulda column of my memory, and let it be.
Until not long ago, anyway. A while back, I got a call from a vehicle owner to pitch me shooting some car or other for Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car magazine. “Oh, and since you were here last, I got a Westfield,” he said. A Westfield, of course, is a cycle-fendered, Sevenesque beast. There are surely differences; just as surely, I don’t know what they are. I suggested the owner lob me a couple of pictures over the interwebs so that I could be sure that it was what I thought it might be. And it was. What he didn’t tell me was that it was BRG. With a yellow nose.
I do believe my heart skipped a beat.
Now, understand that I’m not one to get all goofy over the prospect of driving something I’ve fantasized over for decades. I’ve been lucky at my Hemmings gig to drive cars that I never thought I’d be able to even touch and photograph (much less drive) for all of our titles, but with that comes a necessary detachment: I don’t want to walk in with expectations that the car itself cannot possibly meet. I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment, and I don’t want disappointment to be conveyed on the pages.
And, honestly, color is the last thing to impress me on a car. One of my few car-related axioms (beyond buy something running) is simply this: It doesn’t matter what it looks like when you’re driving it. Aesthetics don’t sway me in the least—at least not when it comes to a driving impression. But this one? This was different, somehow.
The owner, a lifelong sports car owner, was encouraging. “You can fit, no problem,” he told me. Easier said than done, at just the wrong side of three bills. I tried the side without the steering wheel and pedals first; in case I needed to extract myself, there would be nothing impeding my way. And, while I’m not going to pretend that it wasn’t tight, I did slide in. (Atop the seatbelts. For now, anyway.) The size 12 clodhoppers went in so deep I didn’t touch the bulkhead. So far so good.
We switched seats, and I took the wheel, clambering in over the cut-down side and dropping down, sliding my feet forward. Oh heavens. I made it under the wheel with no problem, though my legs were slightly akimbo for wheel clearance. Once in, I discovered that I needed to ditch my shoes: My two Fred Flintstone feet covered all three pedals with normal footwear, which would undoubtedly lead to problems somewhere down the line. Into the puny trunk they went. The four-cylinder, 1600cc Ford engine under the hood runs its exhaust pipe down the driver’s side of the car, which meant that bracing myself on the ground to aid extraction would be impossible unless I wanted to incinerate my left arm. A lubricated hippopotamus on ice would be more graceful than me getting back out again.
The seats (tan, alas) were flat. Good thing, as my girth was trapped between the bodywork and the trans tunnel, with little hope of lateral movement. A rorty buzz of small-cube enthusiasm greeted me as I switched it on, and off we went.
Now, this part of the greater Phoenix metro area is largely a grid, I was around to check out some other cars to photograph, and the shop where those cars reside is about a mile up the street. Not a whole lot of time or space for cornering derring-do, to see or feel or hear what the tires are up to in a full power slide—but more than enough time to get a sense of acceleration, braking, and shift and ride quality.
And here’s the truth about it: I can’t remember an inch of it with any real clarity at all. It’s all a bit foggy, despite coming fresh from the experience and writing this. Everything is more of an impressionistic spatter, more Monet’s Haystacks than the realism of Breton’s End of the Working Day, more VHS tape recorded off-air than Blu-Ray clarity. I remember driving it like I was scared of it, which I probably shouldn’t have been, even though I was. I remember the immediacy of everything around me: an open car, low to the ground, can (and did) make 30 MPH feel like twice that velocity. Incredibly direct and communicative steering with zero slop, though no one would ever deign to call it light, a suspension that could tell you which side of a penny (farthing) you ran over in the street, and a glorious noise from the exhaust exiting about two feet beneath your left ear, climbing up tone by tone, note by note, chord by chord, octave by octave, as the revs and speed piled on; it fills your head as if you were in the echo chamber of a hardtop coupe. The incredulity that an engine so teeny, wearing similarly diminutive brakes, could offer such a kick in the seat and such immediate response, despite knowing damned well that the whole car weighs under half a ton. I recall the wind slapping me as I dared move through it, some shouted conversation with the owner riding shotgun, and driving through an unforeseen construction zone that saw the street slick with water (and, subsequently, the fenders and sides of the Westfield caked with mud). Alas.
With time, I could dissolve myself and become Number Six. I could see entering a parking garage, grabbing my ticket and driving under the gate arm before it raises, just because I can. I could see myself darting in and out of London traffic, with red double-decker buses and black cabs (and hearses…) unable to keep pace. I could see the effortless movement within familiar surroundings, fluid yet tactile. But not yet. Number Six’s relationship with his Seven was one of mutual agreement: just him and his car against … who, exactly? It’s never quite answered in The Prisoner, and at any rate, the car gets taken away first thing. My relationship with a Seven that’s not my own should continue to be one of respect—a how-do-you-do and a handshake rather than huddled in a corner whispering sweet nothings in its ear.
I’ve not yet been seduced. But I am intrigued enough to come calling again and take the conversation further.
from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/1yrz2EY
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