What have you been listening to?

BBC Radio 4’s adaptation of Live and Let Die.



I love these James Bond radio adaptations—as I’ve written before, Toby Stephens may well be my second-favorite Bond (after Sean Connery). At the very least he gives Daniel Craig, my other possible second favorite, a run for his money. I like how Stephens depicts the hard-edged side of Bond without coming off as emotionless or cruel. (I think Stephens is an excellent actor—and perhaps an underrated one, with how little I see any mention of him.)

This adaptation is not one of the series’s best: It’s almost a little too light, a little too comical. (The adapter minimizes Felix Leiter’s injuries in the book—that’s the right choice, but Felix doesn’t seem to get injured much at all, which reduces some of the book’s forcefulness.) And the adapter deemphasizes my favorite elements in Fleming’s book, the voodoo and the treasure hunt.

Unfortunately, too, I thought the actress playing Solitaire did a rather poor job, which particularly stands out juxtaposed with the fine performances of Stephens and of Kevin Daniels as Mr. Big.

As with the M.R. James adaptation I reviewed above, this is still fun. But the best episodes of this series—“From Russia with Love,” “Dr. No,” and “Goldfinger” stand out in my mind—are splendid.