Listening to James Bond at the BBC (Part V: The Man with the Golden Gun)

Whenever I read a James Bond novel, I follow it up (in this order):

1. any film adaptations
2. any radio/audio adaptations
3. any comic adaptations

Thus, I have slowly worked my way through the BBC's radio adaptations of the novels, produced by Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres since 2008; I wrote up the first four (in my order, not the release order, which is wonky) back in 2017,  and then another four in 2019. Since then, one more has been released, of the very last Bond novel, so I am doing a quick write-up here to complete my thoughts on the series.

(I don't know if there are more to come. Each of the three remaining novels seems to have some kind of disqualifying mark. I think Casino Royale's rights are more complicated than other novels; The Spy Who Loved Me has very little James Bond in it; and the BBC already did You Only Live Twice, albeit back in the 1990s with Michael Jayston. That would just leave the various short stories of For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy & The Living Daylights. Some of them would make pretty bad radio, I think, but you could do some good stuff with "For Your Eyes Only," "Risico," and "Octopussy," at least.)

I don't love these as much as others seem to, mostly because lead actor Toby Stephens just seems to be "there" as Bond and little else. There's no charm, no danger, to his performance.

The Man with the Golden Gun by Archie Scottney (2020)

 

This is, thus, like most of them, okay. I like the actors who play M and Felix, even if I don't like Bond, and this has good parts for both. Lisa Dillon, who plays the "Bond girl" in most of these, is in it, but plays a different character, somewhat to its detriment; I didn't think Moira Quirk quite hit the right note. The big problems of the audio, though, are mostly the big problems of the book: Bond's brainwashing is resolved too easily, Bond has no real reason to not kill Scaramanga as soon as he meets him, and Scaramanga is a bit of low-rate villain. The novel does has a good action climax, but that gets truncated and becomes less effective on audio for obvious reasons.