Why did you resign?

In the 1960s, Patrick McGoohan, in a series of riveting episodes of The Prisoner, enthralled a nation by refusing to explain to his menacing interrogators why he resigned from his job in the secret service. The series became a classic, and forty years on continues to attract devotees, who meet annually at Portmeirion, not far from where I now live in North Wales. The drama lay in the conflict between the intriguing schemes devised by the interrogators and the ingenious stratagems of resistance employed by the Prisoner. ‘Why did you resign?’ We never did learn why the Prisoner resigned, but it never seemed to matter.