Orson Welles Great Mysteries: A Time to Remember
Orson Welles Great Mysteries is another of those early seventies anthology series, made by Anglia Television and broadcast 1973-4. As far as I can tell the only role Orson Welles had was to introduce each episode and nothing else, so it’s rather misnamed. It’s not a series I know very well. I definitely had the box set of the first series at one point, and suffice to say it is no longer in my collection, which means I have not thought the series worth keeping. I can’t remember why, but the fact that I have never blogged about it suggests it really didn’t grab me, possibly related to the way I really don’t tend to get on very well with anthology series.
The first thing to say about it is that I am convinced its theme tune is used for another series around the same time but cannot place which series it is. This is the theme tune, and if it’s used for another series I’d be glad to get the name if you want to drop a comment:
From memory and judging from online reviews, this Cold War mystery is atypical for the series and the others may be more supernatural. I found it on YouTube under its episode name without the series name with the highlight that it stars Patrick Macnee.
The plot is that Macnee plays a businessman called Charles Foster who has two men suddenly appear at his office and insist that he goes with them. They take him to an army base where he finds a man he doesn’t initially recognise but who identifies himself to him as his Russian friend Mikhail Zigorin, whom he knew because they were together at the Siege of Berlin at the end of World War 2, and whose life Foster saved. Zigorin has defected to the West and Foster has been dragged to see him because there is some doubt as to whether the man actually is Zigorin. The episode revolves around a number of tests of his identity.
The second point I have to make is of course that a story featuring an ex-military man encountering a former officer with whom he has shared deeds of derring-do abroad at some time in the past, is a script straight out of The Avengers, just without Steed in his leading role, and of course Macnee is very much Steed in this episode. Actually I’m probably not being fair to the series because he was basically typecast as Steed for the rest of his life.
As I say initially Foster doesn’t recognise his old friend when taken to meet him. Then he is told that the army have doubts about his identity, don’t want to rely on any information he may give them in case he is a plant, and so they are reliant on him to help them verify the identity of the notional Zigorin. The rest of the episode is about the various tests they subject Zigorin to, to find out his identity. I can’t pretend here: frankly this is rather thin as a plot and as a mystery. It isn’t even very complex as a spy story, and so I won’t get a long blog post out of it and this story must be enjoyed very much as a suggestion of Steed after The Avengers and before The New Avengers.
I just have a couple of quibbles about the plot. One is that I have never worked in intelligence, but I would think the more natural way to assess intelligence received would be whether it is comfirmed by other intelligence than by the person of the informant: if intelligence completely contradicts intelligence from other sources it should surely be automatically suspect. I don’t imagine that the validity of intelligence would be assessed in the way it is in this episode. Secondly there is the problem that one of the ways used to decide the defector’s identity is one which surely the army could have done on their own without having to have Foster’s input.
So all in all, an unusual episode of this series, and one with definite Avengers contacts, but you have to suspend your disbelief and go with it.
I’m a bit chuffed that I’ve managed to write this post without disclosing whether or not Zigorin is who he claims to be.
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