The Wilde West

My recent article about Stephen Fry as the young Oscar featured a video of Oscar Wilde as a character in a short-lived TV Western series.

Surprisingly, it was not the first time this had happened.

Back in the 1950s in the series Have Gun, Will Travel (1957–1963) Oscar again fell foul of local baddies in Season 2, Episode 12 entitled The Ballad of Oscar Wilde.

Have Gun,Will Travel: The Ballad of Oscar Wilde

A theme of the Oscar Wilde west is that each man kidnaps the thing he loves, and on this occasion our Confucius plagiarizing “Englishman” (when he finally appears) is held captive in a cabin scattering bon mots, but needing to escape for the inescapable shoot-out.

Oscar is successfully returned, of course, but not before insisting that the insulting ransom be raised fivefold from the “measly ten thousand” being demanded, “in dollars, mind you”.

The episode, which stars Richard Boone as recurring hero Paladin and John O’Malley¹ as Oscar, first aired on December 6, 1958.²

Watch here: The Ballad of Oscar Wilde.

© John Cooper, 2018.

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Footnotes:

1. John O’Malley, the little-known Australian actor who played Wilde, died less than a year after making this episode. ↩︎
2. It was not quite the first appearance of Oscar as a character on screen. In Canada in 1955 Wilde was played by John Harding in The Return of Don Juan, an episode of ‘CBC Summer Theatre’. ↩︎