Quality of mailings at an all-time low.

If the immoral behaviour of the people running the Society has not stopped you from wanting to join, you are probably still wondering what you will get for your money.

A £20 payment will give you membership to the Society for 1 year. In return, you will receive 4 packages (sent every 3 months). Each mailing contains a magazine, some additional leaflets and perhaps a badge or postcard. Any occasional events held by the Society have required extra fees to be paid (all previously free Society events have been cancelled).

The current magazine ("Free For All") is poorly produced and written. With no colour photos whatsoever, the magazine is mostly filled with self-referential nonsense. Recent articles have included a 2 page article on Six of One's PO Box, and a 5 (yes, 5) page poem. There is very little content concerning The Prisoner TV Series (and a proportion of that seems to be cribbed from earlier articles).

Members have received little or no information regarding the plethora of merchandise and events that are created outside of the Society. (Click HERE to read more about this aspect of the Society's deplorable behaviour). Any Prisoner-related "news" is, of course, likely to be out of date by the time you receive your mailing.

Perhaps the fairest thing to do here would be to compare "Free For All" with the previous Society magazine, "In The Village", produced during the Society's heyday.

Number of different contributors of articles in ITV26: 9
Number of different contributors of articles in FFA1: 6
Number of non-coordinators contributing articles in ITV26: 8
Number of non-coordinators contributing articles in FFA1: 1
Number of different contributors to letter's pages in ITV26: 14
Number of different contributors to letter's pages in FFA1: 0
Number of Local Groups advertised in ITV26: 13
Number of Local Groups advertised in FFA1: 0

As you can see, ITV wins hands down on every aspect. The quality of the editing of the magazine has also dipped dramatically since Dave Healey quit the Society. We are all entitled to make mistakes occasionally, but the misspelling of an actor's name (in this case Norman Mitchell) in a piece detailing the date of his death is quite unforgivable (FFA Issue 1):

Teething troubles with the first issue perhaps? As you will see below, things had got no better by Issue 5 of Free For All (Summer 2003):

Number of different contributors of articles in ITV26: 9
Number of different contributors of articles in FFA5: 6
Number of non-coordinators contributing articles in ITV26: 8
Number of non-coordinators contributing articles in FFA5: 2
Number of different contributors to letter's pages in ITV26: 14
Number of different contributors to letter's pages in FFA5: 4
Number of Local Groups advertised in ITV26: 13
Number of Local Groups advertised in FFA5: 1

In FFA5, over 50% of the magazine was written by The Langleys.

Things still hadn't improved by issue 10 of Free For All, which included such things as a 1/4 page feature about a new map of Ipswich, a photograph sent in by a Max Hora of Hereford of an inflatable penguin called Percy sitting in a no.2 chair at Max's brother Rex's house, a photograph from Playboy magazine sent in by Bruce Clark of a model sitting in a no.2 chair, several pages filled with images of past magazines, adverts, video sleeves, no.6 models, countless plugs for the section of a 601 website where you can pay for various things and arguably the worst piece of literature ever printed about The Prisoner, in which they say that describing The Prisoner would be like trying to describe Africa as the episodes are so different:

".....as are, no doubt, the many Affrican (sic) states and provinces. Just as some episodes bear no relation to others, north and south regions of the continent are equally dissimilar." FFA 10, April 2004

We understand, based on the running costs of "In The Village", that each magazine costs approximately £1.50 to produce. Plus postage of around £1 per mailing. This adds up to a total of £10 per year. What happens to your other £10 no-one knows, as Six of One refuse to divulge their accounts and bank balance. Perhaps it is due to the economies of scale (IE it costs more to produce because the print-run is smaller). If this is the case, it is yet another example of the Society's dwindling membership.

So even if you are so morally bankrupt that you still want to join, you hardly get your money's worth, do you? You are a Prisoner fan, though, so are there alternatives? Yes! Click HERE.

Click HERE to return to the main page, where details of many other dirty deeds can be found.

This page updated 29/4/2004