Patsy Crawford scribbling away
James Bond is in danger of becoming quite silly.
I may be plummeted from a hidden trapdoor into a deep pool of threshing sharks for saying that but let’s call a spade a card on a baccarat table.
James looks more shaken and less stirred as time goes by. Bond, in his many manifestations, has had a damned good run.
But we who over the years have travelled the high roads of Monte Carlo and the ski slopes of St Moritz with him have to admit his tuxedo is metaphorically moth-eaten these days, and his plot-lines battle to achieve credibility.
The Bond film franchise has become Midsomer Murders with bespoke tailoring.
Take away the high-powered cars with heat-seeking missile accessories, the luxurious compounds tunnelled into mountainsides and the yachts big enough to enclose Flemington race-course, and what do you have? Complicated murders and characters straight out of the DCI Barnaby playbook.
Nothing surprises anymore.
Back in the dark ages of Sean Connery, Q would hand James a fountain pen that doubled as a poison dart gun, and we’d shout ooh-aah, that’s clever.
Now Q farms out pens that, with the flick of a thumbnail, turn into anti-tank weapons, and we say ho-hum.
If M ordered James to blow up the Vatican, we’d take it in our stride.
We’re still getting a classy lot of Whitehall policy wonks and hiss-boo villains though.
Being in a Bond movie would be the best fun, even for actors as top of the range as Rory Kinnear and Ben Wishaw. These two could wipe everyone off the stage. The last time I saw them together was in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard 11.
Kinnear was a muscular Bolingbroke, Wishaw a wispy Richard and swirling around them was the cream of English acting.
In more recent James flicks, Kinnear gets to play an MI5-ish chap who appears every so often to report to M and not have any important lines.
Wishaw is Q, once again playing it wispily, doling out boy’s toys and warning James that if he presses the wrong button on his Saville Row jacket, he’ll obliterate London.
It’s a living and a darned good one, and whenever the pair want to get stuck into serious stuff, they always can nick off to the Old Vic and spruik glorious Shakespeare.
But as terrific as the casts have been and as bonkers as the plots have become, the biggest winner in all this has been Shirley Bassey. She roared into James’s life in 1964, singing Goldfinger (brilliant).
In 1971 it was Diamonds Are Forever (brilliant), then Moonraker (so-so).
At the recent BAFTA awards, she belted out two numbers and sounded as strong as she did back then. She’s 85, I kid you not. Her hair was jet black, her skin glowed, and her voice was magnificent.
If James got knocked out and Qs pens didn’t work, Shirley could always be brought on as a secret weapon.
One blast from that big voice would stop Dr No in his tracks.
