Secret Agent aka Danger Man: Find and Return

Описание: A woman is wanted by the British authorities on charges of espionage. Drake travels to the Middle East to find her and retrieve her passport.

Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the United States for the revived series, and Destination Danger and John Drake in other overseas markets) is a British television series that was broadcast between 1960 and 1962, and again between 1964 and 1968. The series featured Patrick McGoohan as secret agent John Drake. Ralph Smart created the program and wrote many of the scripts. Danger Man was financed by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.
Series development.
The idea for Danger Man originated with Ralph Smart, an associate of Lew Grade, head of ITC Entertainment. Grade was looking for formats that could be exported.
Ian Fleming was brought in to collaborate on series development, but left before development was complete. Like James Bond, the main character is a globetrotting British spy (although one who works for NATO rather than MI6), who cleverly extricates himself from life-threatening situations and introduces himself as "Drake...John Drake."
Fleming was replaced by Ian Stuart Black, and a new format/character initially called "Lone Wolf" was developed. This evolved into Danger Man.
After Patrick McGoohan was cast, he also affected character development. A key difference from Bond traces to the family-oriented star's preferences: no firearms (with a few rare exceptions, such as episode 26, "The Journey Ends Halfway") and no outright seduction of female co-stars (though Drake did engage in low-key romance in a few episodes).
Plotline.
From the first series voice-over:
Every government has its secret service branch. America, CIA; France, Deuxième Bureau; England, MI5. NATO also has its own. A messy job? Well, that's when they usually call on me or someone like me. Oh yes, my name is Drake, John Drake.
The line "NATO also has its own" is not always present.
Programme overview.
The first series of 39 episodes ran to 24–25 minutes each and portrayed John Drake as working for a Washington, D.C.-based intelligence organization, apparently on behalf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose assignments frequently took him to Africa, Latin America, and the Far East. They were filmed in black and white.
In episode 9, "The Sanctuary", Drake declares he is an Irish-American.
Drake is sometimes at odds with his superiors about the ethics of the missions. Many of Drake's cases involved aiding democracy in foreign countries, and he was also called upon to solve murders and crimes affecting the interests of either the U.S. or NATO or both.
For the second and third series which aired several years after the first, the episode's length was extended to 48–49 minutes and Drake underwent retconning. His nationality became British, and he was an agent working for a secret British government department, called M9 (analogous to Secret Intelligence Service), though his Mid-Atlantic English accent persists for the first few episodes in production. These were also filmed in black and white.
Other than the largely nominal change of employer and nationality, Drake's mandate remains the same: "to undertake missions involving national and global security". In keeping with the episodic format of such series in the 1960s, there are no ongoing story arcs and there is no reference made to Drake's NATO adventures in the later M9 episodes.
Pilot episode.
The pilot was written by Brian Clemens, who later co-created The Avengers. In an interview Clemens said:
The pilot I wrote was called "View from the Villa" and it was set in Italy, but the production manager set the shoot on location in Portmeirion, which looked like Italy but which was much closer. And obviously the location stuck in Patrick McGoohan's mind, because that's where he shot his television series The Prisoner much later.
The second unit director on the pilot, according to Clemens:
... shot some location and background stuff and sent the dailies back to the editing room at Elstree. Ralph Smart looked at them, hated them, and called up the second unit director and said "Look, these are terrible, you'll never be a film director," and then he fired him. The name of the second unit director? John Schlesinger.
Cancellation and resurrection.
When American financing for a second series failed to materialize, the program was canceled. The first series aired in America each Wednesday, 8:30 to 9:00 pm (Eastern Standard Time), on CBS from 5 April to 13 September 1961. It was used by the network as a late-spring replacement for Wanted Dead or Alive, which had just wrapped its third and final series.
After a two-year hiatus, two things had changed; Danger Man had subsequently been resold all around the world, whilst repeat showings had created a public clamor for new shows.