Broadcasting genius manqué … Orson Welles. Photograph: Cinetext/Allstar
When we think of Orson Welles and television, the impulse is often to smirk. The innumerable talk-show appearances, though reliably entertaining, couldn’t help yet seem sad in comparison to his earlier triumphs. And those ads for the likes of Findus frozen foods and Paul Masson wine were hard to take seriously equitable before viral video made us near with Welles’s contrary to reason on-set relationship with hack copy, which ranged from perfectionist quibbling to ostensibly drunken slurring.
- Me and Orson Welles
- Production year: 2008
- Country: UK
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 114 mins
- Directors: Richard Linklater
- Cast: Ben Chaplin, Christian McKay, Claire Danes, Eddie Marsan, Kelly Reilly, Zac Efron, Zoe Kazan
Fair enough. Such undertakings could hardly be counted among the highlights of any career, give permission to alone one that included Citizen Kane and Chimes at Midnight. But it’s worth bearing two things in mind in between chuckles. First, the proceeds from these appearances were invariably funnelled toward one or other of the vibrant creative personal projects to which Welles remained doggedly committed until his dying day, steady as they became harder and harder to realise; in this respect, they took the residence of cameo movie appearances in his unorthodox personal economy. And second, there was a point at which Welles seemed on the bank of creatively revolutionising television as he had theatre, radio and thin skin.
The nascent medium had piqued the artist’s interest posterior the war but he decamped for Europe in 1947, the year before television took root in the United States. He kept tabs on its development and, in 1953, the year it broke through in the UK, he in brief returned to the US to star in a rapturously received version of King Lear, directed by Peter Brook for CBS. In 1955, back in London, he got his the opportunity to flex his own creative muscles in front of the TV camera in Orson Welles’ Sketchbook, six 15-minute monologues for the BBC, which are being repeated as part of BBC Four’s Welles season this Christmas.
Although famous for the reason that a large actor in each sense, Welles was despite ever more comfortable during the time that a storyteller than performing in character, and in television he felt he had found an ideal platform. He saw it not as a vehicle for spectacle like film or theatre, but of the same kind with a colloquial form like radio, finished for his preferred role of hands-on narrator or personalised chorus, mediating between audience and rehearsal.
The Sketchbook testifies to this sensibility: addressing the camera directly, Welles makes eye contact with his viewers similar to he holds forth on subjects ranging from “the precious gift of stage fright” to state interference in private life, all the while doodling illustrative sketches on a horse. He fosters every intimate, even conspiratorial tone that makes him an impeccable embodiment of the medium’s current status as a guest in the front room – Peter Ustinov meets Rolf Harris, perhaps. To our digitally accustomed eyes, the one-to-one timbre of the programme comes most distant like a monochrome forebear of Skype or YouTube.
Even at this relatively young age – he turned 40 during the show’s run – Welles was accustomed to anecdotalising his early career, regarding at various points on his teenage debut at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, his sensational “voodoo Macbeth” production in Harlem and the notorious War of the Worlds radio broadcast. (A dinner party on Long Island, he reported, was kept up to speed on events by the butler, who delivered such politely apocalyptic nuggets as “I believe it’s interplanetary, sir.”)
Welles gives common episode excessively to a transporting version of the story of Bonito, a young bull befriended by a boy before being sent to the corrida, which was one time intended to form part of It’s All True, the famously abandoned South American documentary throw out that the film-maker undertook after The Magnificent Ambersons. This is perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to an idea of his intentions.
But Welles covers a promiscuous range of other subjects overmuch, glancing at Houdini and Rasputin, autocues and witch-doctors. The final episode concerns the expansion and abuse of bureaucratic and police powers; anticipating Charlton Heston’session Vargas in Touch of Evil, he insists that “it’s the [nature] of a policeman’s job that it should have life hard”.
The Sketchbook went down well, and a few months later Welles began a series of ITV travelogues recorded throughout Europe that greatly expanded his – indeed, everyone’s – televisual grammar. Shot in locations ranging from Chelsea to Paris, Vienna to the Basque country, Welles proved a sharp but humble interviewer and boldly experimented with over-the-shoulder shots and “noddies” (response shots recorded singly from an meeting then interwoven with the make liable’s answers), at the same time that well as location shooting, synchronised sound recording and handheld crime recreations. Although factually based, these were still a kind of storytelling, in the manner of personal essays.
The following year, back in the US, he teamed up by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s production company to make a half-hour studio-shot story, The Fountain of Youth, which remains a radical masterpiece of television calling. A playful and macabre distillation of his ideas concerning TV because a nimble storyteller’sitting medium, it placed Welles in the thick of his story, deploying lull photographs and illustrations, on-camera set changes and artful hale mixing to adorn a wry tale about vanity and ageing.
For convoluted reasons, the pilot was shelved and Welles’s chance of conquering the medium passed. He would sporadically work in TV again as a creator rather than performer-for-hire; approaching the end of his life, for instance, he made a pilot for a talk show of his own and devised a King Lear specifically for the straight-to-video market. Neither was commissioned. But his televisual grammar is still unmistakable in his widely known work. F for Fake, conceived for TV and hailed on its theatrical release as a new form – the essay film! – was in fact of a piece with his 50s travelogues, a personalised take on a broad cause to undergo, illustrated from a subjective sensibility. It was a brief like a sketchbook.
• Orson Welles’ Sketchbook start on BBC Four on 18 December. Ben Walters is the writer of Orson Welles (Life and Times).
