Not Much to Do: The Village is based on the writing of Terrence Dawes, Nothing to Do. Dawes, a recent MFA graduate in Film Production from Concordia University, also holds a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.

In his essay Nothing to Do, Dawes explores the late 60s television show The Prisoner, the critical question being the investigation into the development of narrative and its Proustian powers of mnemonic identification; creation of identity itself through narrative conceptions of time. By using Number 6, The Prisoner, as his paranoid subject, Dawes explores the many tangents associated with the process of narrative construction such as landscape, millenarianism, and tourism:

“Portmeirion, the site of the filming of The Prisoner, was designed by Clough Williams- Ellis between 1925 and 1975 on his own private peninsula in Cardigan Bay, on the coast of Snowdonia in Wales. It was visited as a tourist resort by many including Noel Coward who used Portmeirion as a retreat at which he wrote Blithe Spirits during the war, because he felt people needed to laugh during such times of horror. Williams-Ellis was an environmentalist who felt that the ‘beauty of landscape was being ruined by modernity and that the development of a naturally beautiful site need not lead to its defilement’.

Utopian visions of tourist landscapes are an attempt to recapture a lost Arcadia whether it’s the recreation of 19th century Prince Edward Island in northern Japan, the invention of the Anne of Green Gables mythology on P.E.I itself, Portmeirion or Disneyland. These utopias, while offering narrative idealizations of the past, also contain the past as well as the viewer within its own narrative constraints.”

Portmeirion’s fictional name in The Prisoner is The Village, a name more recently used by Thomas Kincade for his gated community, created in the likeness of his own paintings (see America’s Most Profitable Artist by Susan Orlean, New Yorker, Oct 15 2001.)