Back in March, just after the first lockdown was declared, I started going to the virtual pub every Saturday night with a group of six schoolmates. Most of us hadn’t spoken regularly for many years, so our weekly Zoom sessions were a precious opportunity to share our thoughts on work and parenthood, to swap anecdotes from our schooldays, and to confess our hopes and fears for the future.
We didn’t want to discuss our situations, it turned out. We wanted to escape from them. Within a month, real life was confined to the opening minutes of every conversation, and bonding over Bond accounted for the rest. Within two months, we were assigning ourselves homework. Every week we would watch a Bond movie, and then debate its merits over beers and vodka martinis. At first, we tried to vary the programme with non-Bond films – all right, then, Carry On Cowboy – but this initiative was killed off as quickly as the untrustworthy Spectre lieutenant in Thunderball.
No story seemed worth analysing unless it revolved around a secret agent who was recognised everywhere he went. No question was as compelling as whether Octopussy was too far-fetched: we didn’t mind 007 dressing up as a clown before deactivating a nuclear warhead, but the same film’s backgammon scene was beyond the pale. (“Bond takes over the position when the Major has all his men on the board,” complained one friend on WhatsApp. “By the time they get to the dice-flirting, he has 11 off. Pure bullshit.”) Our Bond-movie “book club” was launched, and it’s been going ever since.
What was it that attracted us to these films like the giant magnets in You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me? It could just have been their availability: where would ITV’s schedulers be without them? It could have been that we were middle-aged men, and therefore susceptible to their macho fantasies – especially when the actor playing the ultra-virile super-spy was even older than we were.
Then there was the pandemic factor. As we stewed in our flats and houses, we could experience Bond movies much as their initial audiences had: in awe of the sun-kissed exotic locations that we couldn’t possibly visit. And perhaps, on some level, we were comforted by the sight of a global apocalypse being averted by British competence. Edgy dramas were dispiriting in 2020, while comedies seemed inappropriately light. But colourful adventures in which the entire human race is threatened and then saved – well, you can see the appeal.
Even if it weren’t for the pandemic, though, Bond movies would be uniquely well suited to a weekly “book club”. Their sheer number puts them ahead of most of the competition – two dozen films spread across the decades, so that every one of them reawakens memories of where you were when you saw it first. And each of them is a perfect cocktail of familiarity and variation. It’s reassuring to know what you’re going to get, but you can enjoy spotting how the music, design, effects and politics have been rejigged and updated. You can, in short, delve deeply into their treasures (copyright: Bond, James Bond). And if you end up laughing at the fashions and wincing at the sexism, that’s OK, too. I can say from bitter journalistic experience that certain franchises are so revered that you can’t criticise them without risking life and limb – or at least some unkind tweets about your physical defects. But 007’s fans tend to be good-natured enough to admit that the rubbish back projections and rubbery reptiles make us love the series all the more.
Now that we’re running out of Bond movies, my only regret is that our schedule was as haphazard as the plot of Moonraker: Craig one week, Dalton the next. Early on, someone suggested that we begin with Dr No, and work through the canon in chronological order. But that sounded absurdly over-ambitious. There were 24 official Eon Bond movies, plus two unofficial ones, which would mean half a year of Zoom chats. There was no way the pandemic would last that long, was there?
On a similarly naive note, someone proposed that when coronavirus was done and dusted, we could all get together to watch No Time to Die at the cinema ... in November. Alas, our fortune-telling proved to be shakier than Solitaire’s in Live and Let Die. No Time to Die isn’t coming out until April, and normal life might not return until even later, so it looks as if we can do things properly: press play on Dr No, and watch the whole lot again. It’s either that or the Carry On films, after all.
