George Markstein was born in Berlin in 1929. His family fled Germany in the thirties. He became a journalist and was a correspondent on a US military weekly running the London desk. In the sixties he became a story consultant and story editor initially at ABC television and subsequently at ATV where he became Story Editor of Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan. George had heard of a British military intelligence facility for compromised agents who were deemed a security threat. Here they were left to cool off before being returned to the field or retired. This premise became the basis of Markstein's origination of The Prisoner - the story of an unnamed agent who resigns his post, is kidnapped and finds himself interred as 'Number Six' in 'the Village' where everyone has a number and no one can escape. The Prisoner established classic Markstein themes of the state versus the individual and the paranoid nature of the intelligence world, something which is very much still with us today.
