Orson Welles appears only in silhouette, cigarette glowing, to introduce each tale before vanishing into the shadows he creates. The 26 episodes span from Dickens' unfinished detective story to Conan Doyle's neglected gems, with Joan Collins, Donald Pleasence, and Susannah York among the rotating players who step into these miniature mysteries. Anglia Television shot the entire run at their Norwich studios, giving regional British television a brief moment of gothic grandeur.
Welles wrote and directed his framing segments without credit, turning simple introductions into cinematic essays on fear and fate. He never acts in the dramas themselves, maintaining the distance of a storyteller who knows the ending but refuses to spoil it. The production values belie the budget constraints of early 1970s ITV, with candlelit drawing rooms and foggy London streets rendered in rich colour film stock rarely afforded to television of the period.
The series vanished into archives after its single season, becoming a collectors' obsession among Welles completists who prize his televised monologues as the purest distillation of his showman's art. Each episode runs exactly 50 minutes, the perfect length for a mystery that reveals its secret at the precise moment the viewer believes they've solved it.
Production Details
ITV1 / 1 Season / 26 Episodes / 1973
Created by: Orson Welles
Writer(s): Orson Welles, Wilkie Collins, Julian Bond
Main Cast
Orson Welles as Self - Host
Joan Collins as Jane Blake
Ian Bannen as Gregory Dean
Daphne Heard as Deborah Crabbe
Milo O'Shea as Father Crumlish
Patrick Magee as Sergeant Morris
Glyn Owen as Det. Inspector Cumberland
Rupert Davies as Lemerie
Susannah York as Countess Josephine
Dean Stockwell as Jerry
Alec McCowen as James Addishaw
André van Gyseghem as Judge
