Around the World with Orson Welles

While based in London in the early 1950s, Welles fell in love with TV. Having recorded a series of to-camera monologues for the BBC, called Orson Welles’s Sketch Book, he embarked on a more ambitious series of travelogues for independent television. Taking in locations ranging from Paris, Vienna and Madrid to the Basque country and London itself, this series allowed Welles to develop his distinctive televisual language, combining a wry narratorial voice and self-reflexive use of technology with a voracious, romantic curiosity about the world around him. The series provoked its share of controversy thanks to one episode featuring a bullfight and another – unfinished but later reconstructed – in which Welles investigated the notorious murder of a British family holidaying in France. - Ben Walters