The pre-eminent film in Sir Roger Moore’s non-Bond oeuvre was released in 1974, between Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.

I was born in 1978, so I was far too young to see Gold in its first flush of youth, let alone mine. So was my friend Tom.

But Gold was Tom’s favourite film when he was 12 years old, and he’s convinced me it should’ve been mine. What follows is his explanation of why:

Like many others born in the late 70s, Roger was the Bond for me. I was taken to see Octopussy in the summer of 1983 and that was it: an unconsummated love affair that continues to this day, despite Roger’s passing almost three years ago.

It wasn’t just the excitement and the impossible-to-describe plot. It was something about Roger himself. The underdog absurdity of this 56-year-old playing Britain’s top secret agent. The sheer amount of hair he had managed to retain. The measured pace of his movements, which John Barry conducted the incidental music to fit ... it all spun its web for me.

And so, naturally, I watched the rest of the canon. But by the late 80s, I’d seen all seven of his Bonds, again and again and again. I could quote the scripts, sing the songs, name the cinematographers. I read books about Moore – authorised and not – and mastered most of the dates of his various marriages. The usual stuff 10-year-olds get up to.

Biographies listed his other films. I hungered for them. But it was the 80s, and if you wanted to watch a film no one else did you had to wait and wait for it to appear on BBC2 at 2.35am on a Tuesday in March, then pray the video timer would work.

Was there any agony deeper than finding you had recorded either a blank screen for two hours or part two of the Joan Collins miniseries Sins? You only got one chance. You had to be ready. No mistakes.

Slowly but surely I found them: The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, North Sea Hijack, Escape to Athena, Shout at the Devil. But never Gold. Why? What the fuck was Michael Grade, or whoever was doing the scheduling, up to?

Then, finally, it arrived. Gold (1974). Thursday. BBC2. 11.45pm. “South African mining thriller.”

The timer was set. Somehow, it worked.

Somehow, the film ticked all the boxes.

Roger as a maverick mining engineer. An absurd plot to flood a South African gold mine in order to raise the price of gold and make a huge amount of money for a syndicate of villains. Roger sharing champagne and a bath with Susannah York. Intrusive incidental music, a couple of truly absurd songs and a climax at Pinewood studios. It was practically a Bond film, Roger-style. Except not many people knew it. It was my Roger adventure. It was private. I felt I had an edge over his other fans. I didn’t, of course.

Who does? This is the movies. We cherish our illusions. And now it’s 2020, and in the grip of a pandemic, locked down, we turn to our certainties, our treasures, our gold. By email, from stricken Manhattan to prostrate Hither Green, I asked Tom the question at hand: does Gold still shine?

The quick answer is: “No.” The longer answer is that it depends on your expectations. If you feel certain you are about to watch an execrable film, you will be pleasantly surprised: Gold is a perfectly serviceable thriller, with some tense moments and a genuinely exciting climax in the flooded mine at Pinewood.

One of the reasons the film isn’t as shit as it should be is that it was made, in no small part, by members of the James Bond team. Peter Hunt directs – he was editor of the early Bonds and directed On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. John Glen, later to direct five Bonds, edits and directs the second unit. The production designer is Syd Cain, who did From Russia With Love, OHMSS and Live and Let Die. Those guys are responsible for making two men and a dinghy floating around at Pinewood seem an exciting climax.

Then there’s Roger’s character, Rod Slater, a maverick, woman-chasing commitment-phobe ultimately prepared to die to save the mine (and its miners), which he almost does. There’s a suggestion a genuine relationship may be on the cards with Terry Steyner (York), whose evil husband has conveniently died a few minutes earlier and who is on hand to look after Rod in an ambulance.

It’s definitely one of Roger’s best non-007 performances. This was 1974, so he hadn’t established his Bond persona. Hunt pushes him to be as serious as possible. I certainly believe he’s a miner. And that he’s younger than his 46 years – he’s in good shape, the hair’s more tousled than usual and there’s a bit more sweat than Bond. And he gets quite badly injured at the end. Or at least his arms do.

My sense is that York fought hard to be more than just another Bond girl, making her character as strong as possible. There’s a great scene where she flies Moore back to the stricken mine in her plane (she’s rich) and he accuses her of being involved in the conspiracy. She’s outraged: she won’t take any shit from Roger. As it happens, she is involved in the conspiracy, but she doesn’t know that yet.

And the villain? We’re very much in the “speak quickly with a slight smile” stage of Sir John Gielgud’s film career but there’s a wonderful moment where one of the sub-villains tells him they’ve commissioned a survey that shows just how close the mine is to water but have cleverly replaced every mention of the word “water” with the word “gold”.

“Ingenious”, says Gielgud, without the smile.

There’s also the brilliantly intrusive score by Elmer Bernstein, a crucial reason the action sequences are so tense and exciting. The song Jimmy Helms belts at the start and the end is magnificently absurd too.

I truly think this is Roger’s best non-Bond. Others tout The Man Who Haunted Himself (1971), in which Roger does actually have to do a fair bit of acting, playing a good guy and his evil doppelganger. That probably is his best performance. At the end of his life, knighted, Sir Roger certainly thought so. But I think Gold is the better film. The bar isn’t high, but Gold is a perfectly enjoyable romp one could happily sit through, some warm self-isolated evening.

Gold was the film to which Tom introduced me 10 years or so ago, when we were writing for The Fitzrovia Radio Hour, a cultish thing that did reasonably well at the Edinburgh fringe. I loved it immediately, almost equally deeply. Over a curry, we took the plot, switched the action to Cornwall and named the whole thing Tin!

As an absurdist 1940s radio play, done on a shoestring budget, it worked surprisingly well. The man from the Sunday Times spotted the debt to Gold, and approved.

Tom’s work, I think, was done.