The perambulations Tour Honchos have taken have found another acorn in the vast forest of Anglo-American culture, alighting upon Roger Delgado in an episode of ‘The Third Man’ from 1964. It’s a curious series this, part of that class of “international-man-of-mystery” series which fell across the late 50’s and through to the early 70’s, but in a sense ‘The Third Man’ was the most international of all. Although it was made for the BBC, it was clearly a co-production with snough American backing so that many episodes were made in the US, and, for those episodes at least, featured American based casts.
Delgado appeared in four episodes of the series, each time as a different character, and twice in the last season alone–not an uncommon practice at the time. In ‘A Little Knowledge’ he plays Luis Mendoza, brother to a Spanish crime boss, but one with a lot of style and a moral code to reinforce it. Delgado was often cast as the Foreign/European sophisticate, a posture that would serve him well right into 1971, when he jumped out of a camper-van at a circus in Terror of the Autons …..
And made history.
