Articles about the late Michael Bakewell struggled to contain his career high-points. He had, after all, been the BBC’s first Head of Plays, appointed in 1963 to add a touch of class to broadcasting. He arrived at the television wing after almost a decade directing radio for the “Third Programme”, and continued to oversee radio adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and the acclaimed radio version of The Lord of the Rings.

Bakewell was a hands-on director, often taking a partial credit for the scripts. Surviving footage of him at work shows him pushing his actors to wring every nuance from their words, vitally aware that in radio, words are often all they have. In the mid-1970s, shortly before his radio triumphs with Holmes and Frodo, Bakewell was roped into an unusual job, replacing the audio of a Japanese television programme with believable English dialogue.

“We thought at first the thing was undubbable,” he told Nationwide. “The only way to get it at was to do it in what I can only describe as, kind of, English Oriental tradition, somewhere in between Fu Manchu and The Goon Show.”

The programme was The Water Margin, based on the manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, itself inspired by a classical Chinese novel. An entire generation of British children grew up listening to Burt Kwouk’s cod-philosophical voice-overs, and puzzling at some of the weirder churns of dialogue made to match the lip-sync. NTV’s Monkey soon followed, making Bakewell the go-to guy for difficult Asian dub-jobs.

A few years later, he was hired by Manga Entertainment to oversee their early cartoons for grown-ups, often punched up with questionably racy dialogue. His output was sometimes dismissive, giving trash like Dark Myth and Mad Bull 34 little better than they deserved, but also with some real gems among the classier releases. Roujin-Z, with an ADR script from George Roubicek, was a superb job, as were Bakewell’s English audios for the Patlabor movies. Even his throwaway projects have often gained a certain cachet – Cyber City Oedo 808 has come to be something of a classic because of its sweary dub, scripted by John Wolskel.

Budget cuts at Manga coincided with Bakewell’s brush with bowel cancer, leaving much of the later-period 1990s Manga Video dubs either bought in from America or flung together at a lower-rent outfit. In semi-retirement, he turned to writing, leaving a clear mark on Manga Entertainment’s style and library in its heyday. Anime News Network lists literally dozens of anime dubs to his credit, entirely unmentioned in his mainstream obituaries.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #235, 2023.