These days, any Tom, Dick or Harry can set up a production company and make a radio programme for the BBC. Back in 1951 that wasn't the case. One Harry who did manage it, however, was the mercurial Harry Towers, an independent producer who in that year persuaded Orson Welles to travel to London to reprise one of his most famous screen characters, another Harry – Harry Lime – from Carol Reed's iconic 1949 film The Third Man. Around 50 episodes were made and this week some of them were given an airing on BBC Radio 4 Extra (The Lives Of Harry Lime, daily, 6am/8pm).
Borrowing either knowingly or unknowingly from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, released a year earlier, each episode started with Welles narrating from beyond the grave. "Harry Lime had many lives and I can recount all of them," listeners heard him recount in that famously stentorian voice. "How do I know? Very simple. Because my name is Harry Lime."
As well as scooping the rights to the character of Lime, Towers bagged the music too, and so to underline the prequel conceit, each episode also started with Anton Karas's famous zither score curtailed suddenly by the gunshot that kills Lime in The Third Man.
Episode one, See Naples And Live, found Lime in the Italian city plotting to liberate a valuable necklace from its wealthy American owner. It was filled with horrendous cliches of the "Johnny Foreigner" sort and Lime's flirtations with the woman's attractive personal assistant were far clunkier than the jewellery he was trying to snatch. But the rest of it zinged along pleasantly enough. In the second episode, A Ticket To Tangiers, Lime is in Paris – "down on my luck, way down, scraping the bottom" – when he sees a small ad inviting him to the notorious Moroccan port. It was, as he observed drily, "one of the only cities left where they don't want me for what's known as questioning."
Proving that fiction and fact do sometimes go hand in hand, Towers would end up in New York where, a decade on, his own life would take on some of the character of Greene's famous creation: in 1961 he jumped bail from the US on an FBI-related vice charge and was later accused of spying for the Soviets into the bargain. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he teamed up with legendary horror director Jess Franco to make films like Venus In Furs and Count Dracula, which starred Christopher Lee. It's a CV of which Harry Lime would have heartily approved. A curio, then. But it's always a pleasure to hear that old rascal Orson Welles on the wireless.
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