Abstract
This chapter analyses the neglected story of James Bond’s early life in television. There were numerous approaches to Fleming about adapting his Bond novels for television. In 1954 the American CBS network broadcast Casino Royale as a live TV drama, the first screen Bond, but for decades afterwards it remained a ‘lost’ programme. The novel Dr. No, leading to the first Bond film adaptation, derived from a pilot episode for a Bond television series that was never made. A cycle of 1960s British and American television series such as The Avengers, Danger Man and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. drew on Bondian iconography and narrative tropes. These were echoes of an absent television Bond, whose remediations illuminate questions of medium specificity, adaptation and genre.
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Notes
- 1.
Early versions of this chapter were presented as papers at the Association of Adaptation Studies conference, ‘Adaptation and Multiplicities’, Flagler College, FL in 2014, and at the ‘TV Drama: The Forgotten, the Lost and the Neglected’ conference, Royal Holloway, University of London in 2015.
- 2.
A film copy of the 1954 CBS Casino Royale was discovered by accident in 1981; see Anon (2009). It is currently available on a DVD release of Climax ! Mystery Theatre by TV Museum DVDs in the USA. Both complete and incomplete versions can also be seen on YouTube.
- 3.
The notion of the ‘Bondian’ to describe a complex interplay of narrative tropes, discursive tone and ideological currents is developed in detail in Bennett and Woollacott (1987).
- 4.
Letter from Fleming to his publisher Jonathan Cape, 6 October 1953, asking that all royalty cheques should be henceforth payable to Glidrose Ltd (F . Fleming 2015: 23).
- 5.
Letter from Fleming to Jonathan Cape, 18 September 1952, in F. Fleming (2015), pp . 17–19.
- 6.
Videotape was a cheaper medium for television production than film because tapes could be wiped and re-used, so many British videotaped dramas in the 1960–80 period became ‘lost’ unless film copies had been made for training purposes or overseas export.
- 7.
For a detailed discussion of US anthology drama series around 1954, including Climax! Mystery Theatre, see Hawes (2002), especially pp. 20–7.
- 8.
TV studio cameras in the early 1950s did not have zoom lenses, but instead a rotating turret with three different lenses mounted on it. Smooth movements into or out of close-up (as opposed to cutting to another camera and back again, to conceal a change of lenses) were accomplished by physically moving the camera further from or nearer to the action, as occurs often in Casino Royale.
- 9.
The term ‘film noir’ was not in general use until the 1970s and producers of Climax! and other thriller series on American television described programmes as ‘drama’ or ‘melodrama’ (Hawes 2002).
- 10.
Kinescope is known as telerecording in the UK. Because the moving interlaced lines of an electronic image from broadcast television could not be captured as photographic frames by a film camera, film recording of broadcast pictures required a special television screen and a shutterless camera synchronised with it. This elaborate and expensive procedure was used mainly for ‘transcribing’ programmes so that they could be exported as reels of film for showing on incompatible foreign television systems.
- 11.
Letter from Fleming to Michael Howard, 25 November 1955 (F. Fleming 2015: 98 –9).
- 12.
The lavish international settings of the film were a key aspect of the promotional discourses around it; see, e.g., Anon . (1956).
- 13.
- 14.
See letters from Fleming to Marlow , 1 June 1961, 14 June 1961, 3 July 1961, 12 July 1961 and 15 August 1961, in F . Fleming (2015), pp. 249–55.
- 15.
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Bignell, J. (2018). James Bond’s Forgotten Beginnings: Television Adaptations. In: Strong, J. (eds) James Bond Uncovered. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76123-7_3
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