BBC Radio 3: Being Orson

[tadao]

BBC Radio 3 devotes its 'Essay' programme this week to 'Being Orson', in which five notable speakers will discuss various stages of his life and career. I've not always found BBC radio's Welles-related programmes to be particularly outstanding, but was probably 'spoiled' early by Simon Callow's 2 hour 'The Storyteller' in the Archive Hour strand some 15 years ago which combined research from his first biography volume with high quality transfers of audio material from the Lilly, and made an excellent introduction to me of Welles's radio career. I hope that with five episodes there'll be something of some interest here.

The programmes will likely go online soon after each one is broadcast, and remain available for 30 days. First of them, with Simon Callow, is detailed here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05s3k88

[Wellesnet]

Thanks Tadao!

[tonyw]

!5 minutes allow only for segments which, so far, are not too bad.

[tadao]

The BBC have made these available as mp3 podcasts, which may be more convenient (although at a lower audio bitrate) than the iPlayer, downloadable for keeps, and listed as being available online 'Indefinitely' beyond the 30 day limit of the iPlayer versions. http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/essay/all. Future Essay subjects will replace these at the top of the programme history, so for anyone listening in future weeks, month or years, scroll down or search within the page for 'Orson' and you should find them!

I thought these were a decent effort, I enjoyed Callow's episode most, revisiting Welles's first visit to Ireland without feeling like a rehash of that chapter from The Road to Xanadu. I felt the Shakespeare programme made a nice job covering a neglected area; the comparison between Welles and The Great Gatsby was intriguing but a bit of a stretch. The Kane edition felt like a solid starting point for those unfamiliar with the well-trodden subject matter but offering little innovation. David Thompson's repetition of the thesis of Welles as a self-saboteur in the final episode is old hat by now and won't find much favour here, and although he at least acknowledges that there are those who argue otherwise, he dismisses them without addressing any of those cogent counter-contentions.

The BBC will be rerunning the Charlton Heston episode of their 'Taking Pictures' compilation series on the centenary, I assume by chance of having reached that point in the series rather than judgement, the Welles episode already having been repeated relatively recently. So 'The Essay' is so far the only scheduled marker of the anniversaries across the networks I'm aware of this year, although the live current affairs or arts programmes may make mention of the centenary and/or celebrations on Wednesday.