James Bond’s Forgotten Beginnings: Television Adaptations

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.