ORSON WELLES ONE MAN BAND SERIES

En route to the location we stopped off at the Dorchester for breakfast. It looked OK but flaked off over my shoulders spectacularly. “To grey up my hair I suggested Meltonian white tennis shoe fluid, which he used. “Orson did my make up – it was pretty heavy handed!” remembers Garden. ‘I’d give him the sack except we need the eggs’, grumbles Plumfield. Graeme Garden played a feeble old butler who does chicken impressions. Tim Brooke-Taylor appears as son Algernon, looking remarkably like Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, and behaves like an inbred upper-class twit, the type Monty Python Flying Circus would be sending up any day now. An unbearded Welles is outside a country mansion. One of the first things on which they collaborated was Lord Plumfield versus Welles, a typical send-up of the class system in England that was still going strong. We saw him the next day and agreed to write and shoot some stuff with him.”

ORSON WELLES ONE MAN BAND SERIES

He’d seen some of the first series and got our phone numbers. I remember saying ‘What a coincidence, I was expecting a call from the Pope’. He answered it, said a few words, put the phone down and said: ‘That was Orson Welles’.

We were watching the first programme of the second series in Graeme’s flat. “Graeme Garden and I made two series of a sketch show called Broaden Your Mind in 1968 and ‘69. He picked up the phone and got in touch with two writer and performers, who had established themselves as major television and radio comedy talents: Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. In 1969, Welles was back in London and had some ideas. Williams was unimpressed with Welles’ stagecraft but one of the rehearsals was filmed at the Hackney Empire for a film project. Kenneth Williams worked with Welles in 1955 on a stage play version of Moby Dick. But if he could afford it, there was a script, and actors. If all the world is a stage for Shakespeare, the world was Orson Welles’ film set. This often just featured him reading from Shakespeare or Moby Dick. Welles never travelled around the world without taking with him a film editing table and recording equipment if he suddenly wanted to shoot something at will. In some cases, there were pretty much complete films down there. When projects stalled what had been made was relegated to his archive, perhaps revisited a few years later and added to.

A lot of projects he funded himself, from his appearances in films, adverts or personal appearances. He began to earn a reputation for the number of abandoned projects which failed due to lack of interest, or lack of money. He never made anything with that impact or notoriety again. In the 1930s he scared gullible radio listeners in America with his adaptation of War of the Worlds and attacked powerful media magnates in Citizen Kane. ❉ Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor recall working with “a truly great man.”Īctor, director, writer, and with a charismatic personality as large as his appearance, Orson Welles had a huge reputation around the world.

Orson welles one man band