Secret Agent Man

Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the United States, and Destination Danger and John Drake in other non-UK 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 programme and wrote many of the scripts. Danger Man was financed by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.

The idea for Danger Man originated with Ralph Smart, an associate of Lew Grade, the 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 (albeit 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 impacted 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)

In the United States, CBS broadcast some of the original format's episodes of the program in 1961 under the Danger Man title as a summer replacement for the Western series Wanted: Dead or Alive. Under the Secret Agent title, the same network aired the entirety of the second and third series in 1965–1966.

Fleming went on to assist in pre-production on the 1964 American series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as well as the Eon Productions series of James Bond films.

The first series of 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 series (seasons 2 and 3), which aired several years after the first, the episode's length was increased 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.