"My name is Drake. John Drake."

Very much a harbinger of the spy/adventure series which would dominate 60's television and movie screens worldwide, Danger Man was a slick, professional and exciting package that turned its coolly handsome Irish leading man into a near overnight international star.

Patrick McGoohan starred as NATO agent John Drake in this fast paced espionage thriller created by producer/writer/director Ralph Smart, who was also responsible for creating The Invisible Man, as well as making major contributions to other well established programmes from the ITC stable. At McGoohans insistence Drake never became involved with female company on an intimate basis and rarely involved in gunplay, preferring old-fashioned 'fisticuffs' when faced with a fight. Indeed McGoohan even turned down the title role in the Bond movies on the grounds that the sex was unacceptable because he was a married, practicing Catholic, and he felt the character of Bond was too immoral and wantonly violent.

The series was transmitted in America under the title Secret Agent, and the original 30-minute episode format was expanded to 60 minutes from 1964 onwards. Two 60-minute colour episodes were filmed in 1967 (Koroshi and Shinda Shima released as a 90 minute feature under the first title) for a projected fourth season, which was abandoned when McGoohan became involved in his next TV project -The Prisoner.

Boasting good writing and benefiting from a characteristically intense and charismatic performance from the always compelling McGoohan, Danger Man paved the way not only for the plethora of secret agent series which followed, but also laid the foundations for a genuine tele-visual phenomenon. Without the international success of the agent named John Drake, a former agent identified only by the designation of Number 6, might well never have arisen to enthral and perplex an entire generation of viewers.