Yesterday I posted the first of six fifteen-minute TV monologues made by Orson Welles for the BBC in 1955. Today, in a fit of orderliness, I’m posting the second. The subjects at hand in this episode are critics and voodoo and I’ll leave it to OW to spin the tale for you. I’d never heard of these shows until I read about them in part three of Simon Callow’s projected four-part Welles biography, ‘One Man Band’. This volume covers Welles life in Europe from 1947 through 1965 and is by far the best (and most comprehensive) Welles bio available. Apparently the BBC was keen to do more of these marvelous little anecdote sessions but Welles lost interest after the sixth episode and, without informing anyone, went off to Paris leaving the producers in the lurch. This paradoxical behavior of Welles’s has been often discussed–needing money, needing projects, getting money and projects and then abandoning them–and no conclusion as to its reasons have yet been reached that are anything near satisfactory. I sometimes wonder if those of us who wished Welles had completed more work than he did are, in fact, wishing for something that we ultimately don’t really want; part of his legend is his unruliness, and a better organized OW might well have robbed us of the magic and mischief that he brought to everything. Those qualities are on full display in these simple and spellbinding fifteen-minute monologues..