Establishing a Bond.

One of the great seasons of my childhood was that autumn of ’99 when ITV did their 00 Heaven season on a Wednesday night – hunkering down with my dad, working our way week-by-week through the Bond oeuvre. It was great, it was an education in the ways of the world, the great places and the beautiful people.

A Bond film if nothing else teaches you that there’s a world out there, even it is full of bad guys intent on destroying it. Luckily none of them are left alive by the end of the piece, making the world that little bit safer.

There’s an easy charm about Connery, something quite likeable. He slaps a woman around in a way that makes you think she deserves it, he’s not as fairytale as some of the chaps to follow. In some ways he’s the most terrifying Bond for being so unselfconscious about it all. Of course Roger was the complete opposite; you were unable to take him seriously as a deadly assassin.

Lazenby was underrated, but he was a brute, like Craig is – you find it hard to accept him as a connoisseur and an intelligent sleuth. With Brosnan he was always so cool and quippy that you wonder what part of his job he took seriously, what motivated him. That’s the thing with Bond that you never quite get pinned down – why the hell does he do all the hell that he does?

Which is why Timothy Dalton is probably my favourite Bond – there’s such a bitterness to him, an edge, he brings you closer to understanding, but not quite. I don’t think Fleming ever really understood what motivated Bond because he never knew himself – writing those books seemed like more of a catharsis for him than anything else, that kind of fantasy of what might have been.

And of course, it goes without saying that it’s all totally unrealistic.