Listening to James Bond at the BBC (Part III: You Only Live Twice)

So far, I've listened to eight James Bond adaptations produced by BBC Radio, in a series begun in 2008 and still ongoing (a ninth came out earlier this year). These are narrated by Martin Jarvis and star Toby Stephens as Bond, and you can read my commentary on them here and here.

But back in 1990, the BBC did a one-off starring Michael Jayston as Bond, written and directed by Michael Bakewell (who also adapted the excellent BBC Lord of the Rings, fact fans). Curiously, they adapted You Only Live Twice, so the play is the culmination of a rivalry between Bond and Blofeld we never heard begin and revenge for a killing we never experienced. I've no idea why someone decided the sole James Bond novel that needed adapting was the closing installment of a trilogy. The closing moments of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with the death of Tracy, are dramatized for us as a prologue, however.

Like the BBC adaptations of 2008 onward, it's a pretty straight adaptation. Some condensation, of course, but otherwise no real liberties are taken with the original plot. This means that it lives or dies on the quality of the source material... and You Only Live Twice is the fourth-worst James Bond novel. We're told Bond is self-destructive, but mostly he sits around and listens to other people give him lectures on Japanese culture. The fact that he's been asked to infiltrate the citadel of the man responsible for killing his wife is still a mind-boggling coincidence. And, unfortunately, on radio the defeat of Blofeld is even more glibly easy than it was with Fleming's tense prose.

Michael Jayston plays Bond. I think he does a good job, but he doesn't have much to do. He's snobby when he needs to be. I found him his most effective when he's being charming to Kissy Suzuki; for the first time, personality comes through. I would have liked to have heard him in an adaptation of one of the better Bond novels, like From Russia with Love or On Her Majesty's Secret Service; I suspect he would have done much better than Toby Stephens in those. (Stephens is almost never charming.) I did like Ronald Herdman's Blofeld, and James Laurenson's Dikko Henderson was suitably ridiculous.

You might not be surprised to learn that only one Japanese character is (as far as I can tell) played by a Japanese actor. Sayo Inaba (who had a starring role in the 1980s BBC sf programme Star Cops) plays Kissy Suzuki, but most everyone else is white, including Clive Merrison in the principle Japanese role of Tiger Tanaka. (British telefantasy mainstay Bert Kwouk is also in it... but he's Chinese. Close enough?) I would say this wouldn't fly today, but Sophie Aldred was putting on a Chinese accent in Big Finish's The Avengers: The Lost Episodes just a couple years ago!

Overall, this is a curio. It won't really give you anything you can't get from the book, except for the trivia that only one actor has played both James Bond and Doctor Who. (Jayston played the Valeyard, the "amalgamation of the darker sides of [the Doctor's] nature, somewhere between [their] twelfth and final incarnation" in 1986's The Trial of a Time Lord.)