This is a transcription from a now-lost TV interview. My thanks once again to the fellow researcher and collector who kindly sent me the transcript.
Tonight (April 16, 1962)
He wore a dark blue belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down. Carefully, almost too carefully, he lit a cigarette, a cigarette with three distinctive gold rings, blended for him from a Balkan tobacco mixture by Morland’s of Grosvenor Street. With a look of cold, measured passion, he moved forward in his hand-made brown suede shoes. Deftly he slipped a point two five berretta out of its chamois leather holster, took aim and fired. James Bond, Secret Agent no. 007, had arrived. In fact, James Bond, as every addict knows, arrived ten years ago, bringing with him a smart-set world of iced vodka, martinis, Caribbean yachts, scent by Guerlain, Bentley Continentals, all the most expensive flesh pots. It’s also a world of naked flesh either in sexual collision or under sexual assault from weapons as varied as a carpet beater and the tail of a sting ray.
KENNETH ALLSOP: James Bond’s creator is Mr. Ian Fleming and the latest Bond adventure, The Spy Who Loved Me, is published today. Now Mr. Fleming, this new Bond book of yours, in fact it’s told by a girl, it doesn’t include any kind of death or violence until about half way through and Bond, himself, doesn’t appear until two thirds of the way through. Now do you think you’re getting a little bored with your hero?
IAN FLEMING: No, I never get bored with him at all but I think that if you write about a serial character, in the end you’ve got to find themes for the other end of the gin muzzle, so to speak, and I’ve tried in this book—I don’t know how successfully—to examine Bond from the view of somebody who got involved with him.
ALLSOP: Well, you said in a letter to the Guardian in exchange with an editorial they wrote about your books, you did seem rather to regret that you’d saddled Bond with what you called then his vulgar foibles and gimmickry. Do you still feel that you wish you hadn’t done this?
FLEMING: Well, Bond got himself involved. I’d meant him to be a perfectly straightforward instrument of Government, or secret government let’s call it, a blunt instrument who was extremely effective and efficient. I didn’t mean him to become a hero. He wasn’t supposed to be a hero. He was supposed to be extremely efficient.
ALLSOP: I know that some things in this new book of yours that I think are going to frustrate Bond’s admirers, you know. To begin with, there’s no refined torture of any kind, the sexes are very straightforward and, in fact, your only detailed mention of clothes is, I think if I remember rightly, the black matador pants of the heroine and her turtle neck sweater. Now I wondered if this might mean that you were aiming at a new market, perhaps the women’s market?
FLEMING: No, I’ve got no commercial intentions at all. I just write as I please. I like to write about James Bond because I like to write about his adventures. I’m not very interested in him as a character. I’m much more interested in the things that happen to him.
ALLSOP: This rather surprises me because now you’ve been said to have President Kennedy and Anthony Eden among your readers. Do you mean to say then that you’ve never consciously made James Bond the kind of top people’s hero?
FLEMING: No, very much the opposite, and I think that probably the sales figures of my books would show that. I mean that my Pan book paperback edition here and the New American paperback edition in America sold far more copies than my hardcover editions do and I don’t aim…
ALLSOP: That means a different kind of public altogether.
FLEMING: That means a different kind of public and I don’t aim at any particular public, I just enjoy writing these books. I mean, perhaps the zest that I put into them is too much for people or for some people but it is zest anyway.
ALLSOP: What I’m rather surprised about is your apparent dislike of James Bond. Now in your new book, I remember that you have a kindly policeman warning the heroine not to get involved with Bond and his words to her were that there’s a deadly quality common to professionals of both the criminal and detective type, so is this really as you see Bond in the end, just as a cold, useless instrument?
FLEMING: Well, I think you’ll find that if you talk to a policeman anywhere, you’ll find that they have a sort of love-hate relationship with their quarries, with the gangsters, and I think the particular man in this book, The Spy Who Loved Me, is merely expressing this love-hate relationship.
ALLSOP: Well, now, in a magazine published today, Mr. Fleming, you’ve been vehemently attacked. In fact, the editor, with a lot of examples, describes you as the nastiest and most sadistic writer of our day. Now do you simply shrug off this kind of criticism or does it upset you?
FLEMING: Well, I think the answer is that, of course, Today—this magazine Today—wanted to serialize my last book and I wouldn’t allow them to do so and presumably they’ve taken it out on me, as in the best journalistic sense one does, on me but I noticed in the particular issue of the magazine there’s a very dramatic picture of a man practically kicked to death and several girls in very slight costume and so and so forth, and I think it’s just the old journalistic gimmick, you know—or gimmick.
ALLSOP: Mr. Fleming, thank you very much.
Note: When the Daily Express rejected The Spy Who Loved Me for serialization, Fleming’s de facto general agent Peter Janson-Smith offered it to Today. But Fleming was still upset with how the magazine had published “The Hildebrand Rarity” two years earlier and told Janson-Smith to stop negotiations. And then, according to Andrew Lycett:
"On publication of The Spy Who Loved Me, Today’s editor Charles Stainsby wrote a signed article calling it ‘one of the worst, most boring, badly constructed novels we have read’. But this was only the point of entry for a protracted attack on, first, Ian himself, as the perpetrator of ‘the nastiest and most sadistic writing of our day’ and, second, his Establishment friends who promoted and peddled his wares. ‘It is all part and parcel of the strange nastiness which afflicts many of the Top People in Britain,’ opined Stainsby. ‘We stand firmly against all the things represented by Mr Fleming. We find his writings disgusting drivel. We deplore the manner in which they have been puffed. And we deplore even more the fact that a respectable publisher chooses to put his imprint on them.’
“This outburst led to an invitation to Ian to appear on BBC Television’s current affairs programme Tonight. There he openly alleged that Today had ‘taken it out’ on him because he had refused to allow it to serialize his latest book. This version of events was disputed by Stainsby who claimed he had never wanted to publish any extract from Ian’s book in the first place. He called Ian’s statement ‘extremely defamatory’ and demanded an apology which Ian, rather ignominiously, had to give.”
It seems to me that Today should have been the one to apologize! Putting aside this controversy, I find it interesting that The Spy Who Loved Me is the book Fleming gave the most interviews for. Presumably because by 1962 Fleming had reached the bestseller lists, and by the time OHMSS and YOLT were published Fleming had grown too ill too give many interviews.