The Living Daylights

I was looking forward to this one. It should be a stone-cold classic: Dalton's 'proper' Bond movie, with some good chases, a real spy story and an authentically Flemingish 007 to boot. But something just isn't right - I'm not entirely sure what yet - and it renders The Living Daylights just a little flat.

This has surprised me because the film has long been a favourite of mine. Although I had seen both Never Say Never Again and AVTAK at the cinema, going to see TLD was the first time I felt and understood the electric tingle of anticipation as the gun barrel rolled across the screen in front of me. I've had the same feeling with every subsequent Bond film, despite the disparagement I  have had for many elements of the franchise in these posts, I know that makes me a incurable fan. Every time, sat there in the dark of the movie theatre, I am on the edge of something new - unlike the other Bond films, endlessly repeated on television, and then bought and re-bought on VHS, DVD and BluRay, what's about to happen is utterly unknown.

When we're faced with the prospect of a new 007, these feelings are exacerbated and, perhaps, also tinged with apprehension. This seems to have been on the minds of the makers of TLD, who not only keep us waiting for Dalton as the PCS unfolds, but give us three faceless Double-O agents who might be him, as if they are auditioning for the part before us. Cleverly, they are revealed in ascending order of Bondness. Number One is floppy-haired and rubbish, and gets caught in his own parachute before being paint-balled by a squaddie as part of the war games. Number Two looks more like Bond, a bit more rugged, darker, and at least has the dignity to be properly killed by a real baddy, but it's still a fail. Which leaves us with Number Three, who promptly dives onto a speeding Land Rover, kills the assassin, escapes stylishly and does sex with a lady on a boat. Yeah, we'll have him then, okay Cubby?

This introduction is a departure because it is very particular version of Bond that we are getting. There's no casino, or gadgets, or bow tie - the traditional Sixties accoutrements. This is the 'Special Ops' Bond, dressed to kill in commando black and, up to this point, we've barely seen him at all apart from the superlative PCS of Goldfinger. The reason, of course, that we haven't seen much of him is that Sir Roger of Moore has been so terribly old lately - so it's entirely logical that this new Bond should be drawn in sharp contrast to his immediate predecessor.

This is our first (and impressive) impression of the new 007, but as soon as we've logged it we're being offered a different - and more interesting - version. Once the film has properly begun we are back in the Cold War world of defections, checkpoints and proper old school secret agents. In short, we are back to something that rather resembles FRWL, but in the middle of all this is none other than the literary James Bond himself, extracted, by some odd Q-Branch alchemy, from the very ribbons of Ian Fleming's gold typewriter. For twenty minutes or so, the film is happy and able to run with Dalton's desire to get Bond back in character and it is absolutely the strongest section of the film. In fact we get the original short story, The Living Daylights, rendered with only the most careful and judicious updating.

The Daniel Craig movies have, so far at least, made much hay out of the dramatic opportunities offered by a version of Bond that more closely matches Fleming's creation, but here, momentarily, we get a delicious glimpse of what is yet to come. We see Bond as the 'blunt instrument', the killer sent to do a job, as he stands in the seedy apartment holding an enormous sniper rifle. But even has he stares coldly down the sights, 007 experiences an instinctive revulsion at his profession - partly because his hackles have been raised by his officious fellow agent, Saunders, and partly because his head has been turned by a pretty blonde - that causes him to spare his target. This is where Bond starts to become interesting. Arrogantly, he backs his instincts against his orders. Forgoing the easy kill, he employs his astonishing skill to shoot the gun from his target's hands instead. And then, accused of insubordination, he snarls his retort, unrepentant.

This is James Bond: a man of improbable abilities; a loner, distrustful of ideologies and communities, repeatedly forced to rely upon his own instincts; a man consumed with self-disgust at what he does; who is nonetheless addicted to the dangers of his profession; and who dulls the awareness of his own fragile mortality with voracious and unhealthy appetites.

This is the man that is sketched over the course of Fleming's stories and it is recognisably the same character that only Craig and Dalton have brought to the screen to any degree. But perhaps the reason why TLD feels a little insubstantial these days is because of Daniel Craig. He sells the powerful masculinity of Bond with his incredible physical performance: huffing, sweating, snorting, crashing - or even just rising out of the sea. Dalton nails the accidie in the opening section of TLD but, as the film leaves its source material behind, his Bond begins to look a little delicate in comparison.

More shockingly, Dalton's Bond is also undermined by his predecessor. Yes, good old Sir Roger. Love him or hate him, it cannot be denied that Moore has a wonderful way of gently selling a joke. Dalton is taking the character in a different direction here, but that doesn't mean he isn't required to try and emulate Moore's lightness of touch. He categorically fails. Specifically there are three egregious attempts at a 'comedy' double-take (for the record the lines are: 'We have a pipeline to the West', 'I've had a few optional extras installed' and 'We have a saying too, and you're full of it!') and they are painful to watch. If I remember correctly there's at least one more coming up in LTK (swordfish through the chair during the bar-brawl?) so that's something to look forward to, isn't it? Or if you'd rather reflect on past glories, two great Moore double-takes: TSWLM, Bond, driving the Lotus, notices the glamorous helicopter pilot who is trying to kill him; FYEO, running for his life, Bond realises that Melina's car is battered yellow 2CV. That, Timothy, is how you do it.

It doesn't help that the whole film begins to lose its bearings once Fleming's source material is out of the way. There are some impressive set pieces (Necros's attack on the MI6 safe house; the escape down a mountain in a cello case) but the story trying to thread these all together isn't good enough, being simultaneously too weak and too complicated. In the past we've been used to films where the plot centred on one thing: gold, diamonds, drugs or weapons for example. TLD throws all these in on top of each other like a game of 'one potato, two potato' and then compounds things by having a multitude of different factions fight over it all as well.

It is laudable that a Bond film would want to reference a real situation like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, although it's fair to say, I think, that recent events have rendered TLD more than a little quaint: the good old days, as it were, when the Russians were the baddies and James Bond could join forces with a radicalised Muslim Oxford graduate. But this film, following on from Octopussy, feels the need to try and reflect the deeper complexity of its times. So, we have bad Russians and good Russians once more. Very interestingly, the good Russians are loyal servants of the state - Pushkin - and the bad Russians are crypto-capitalists, in it for personal wealth. What the hell? We also have good and bad Americans - arguably for the first time: Whitaker, weapons-monger, is bad, and he too is a capitalist. In fact he's a rampant egoist, a brazenly conceited and self-serving individual, almost capitalism personified. The good Americans opposing him are the blank and featureless operatives of the Federal Government - almost literally actually, seeing as John Terry (no really) is a sure-fire winner of the 'Blandest Felix Leiter' competition. Admit it, you'd forgotten Felix was in TLD, hadn't you? He needn't have been. Leiter here is so flavourless, he makes Dalton zing. (There are, of course, no bad Brits. Even Saunders, our sniffy MI6 man in Bratislava, is shown to be a good egg in the end.) Add in the Mujahideen and Kara (an independent faction in her own right) and, well, things become really quite unnecessarily complicated.

Ah yes, Kara Milovy, the one with the cello. She's a bit of a step backwards really. The premise, that 007 is stringing her along to get to her boyfriend, is a strong one and has real opportunities for drama. The downside is that, as a result, Kara becomes a naive and, let's face it, wet character with rather too much in common with the likes of Domino from Thunderball. Worse though are the bumbling, 'hanging-on-the-gun-arm' tendencies she has (mucking about with the plane controls for example) which put her firmly in the vicinity of the hapless Mary Goodnight (TMWTGG).

Still, despite all my carping there's much to like about TLD. M, Q and new Moneypenny, Caroline Bliss, all get nice character moments and Dalton, even if he can't manage the brutal hunger of say Connery or Craig, works hard to rediscover Bond as a paid assassin with distasteful duties. John Rhys-Davies is winningly likeable as Pushkin and there's some proper cinematography going on too (specifically the shots of sunrise over a camel train in the Afghan desert). John Barry turns in his last soundtrack. It's tidy, with the elements of  a strong theme worked throughout, but the most notable thing about it is the synth drums that are laid over the action scenes. I wonder if that was him?

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: I've discussed this higher up, but this is obviously a carefully constructed PCS designed to introduce the new Bond. It's a good one too: a nice little mini adventure that still manages to set up the plot for the rest of the film.

Theme: Norwegian pop-rockers a-ha (I believe that's how you type it?) turn in a good effort, full of '80s synths, drums and no small amount of dark and rainy atmospherics. Binder's even able to manage a few images that reinforce this ambience, but mainly it is the usual girl-based nonsense and finishes, for no good reason whatsoever, with a woman killing time stood inside a giant champagne flute. But of course.

Deaths: Ooh, controversy. I made it 28 but I'm am forced to revise this down to 26. I counted four deaths during the attack on the safe house but in the next scene M gruffs "Two dead, two injured," so that's me told. Perhaps I should halve all my tallies on this basis?

Memorable Deaths: Saunders gets mashed up by a door. A Double-O falls off the Rock of Gibraltar. Necros falls off a Hercules clutching Bond's boot. Whitaker gets head-butted by the Duke of Wellington. Most memorable perhaps is Pushkin's faked assasination, which does involve a lot of blood and one comedy eye bulge.

Licence to Kill: 6. Not very high but then Bond does sit out the main Afghan/Russian battle behind the wheel of a taxiing plane.

Exploding Helicopters: 0. Another dry spell.

Shags: Technically, 2 (there's the odd-looking woman on the yacht in the PCS), but really only one and this feels like a deliberate de-tox for 007. Co-incidentally, TLD was the first Bond film to be made after the HIV/AIDS public information campaigns began. Go figure.

Crimes Against Women: As discussed, Kara is not the most empowered of Eighties women. She does get to call Bond the back end of a horse, but this is, perhaps, scant consolation. When she does assert herself, Kamran Shan hisses "Women!" and rolls his eyes in a manner we are presumably intended to find humorous. Bond cynically uses Pushkin's half-naked girlfriend to distract a KGB bodyguard and pats Moneypenny on the backside. Really! 007's eventual sexual harassment tribunal is going to make the Leveson inquiry look like peanuts.

Casual Racism: No particularly terrible examples but Bond does suggest to Kara that the Mujahideen will "save you for the harem". And there is, of course, the usual undeniable background racism of the series which boils down to this: foreigners are a rum lot.

Out of Time: James Bond smokes and that was controversial even in 1987. Q has produced something called a 'ghetto-blaster'. The Soviets are in Afghanistan, but we're exhorted to trust Gorbachev's reforming government: Puskin is absolutely a goody; Gogol, over drinks with M again, coughs up a visa for Kara.

Fashion Disasters: Dalton is the first Bond to make the smart-casual look work at all. Even so, he has an ugly plaid jacket during the safe house briefing. And Q gives him a pair of gizmo sunglasses that are even more shockingly obvious and ridiculous than the ones Roger Moore had.

Eh?: Maybe I stopped caring but I didn't spot very many odd things during this. It's possible that the convoluted double-crossing trade-up swap-shop of a plot does make sense, but I felt very little motivation to sit there and pay attention to it. Likewise the over-complicated instructions to Bond's key-fob/stun-gas/grenade: I'm sure it doesn't quite add up (which whistle does what when again?) but I can't care enough about it to meticulously check (remind of this when we get to the ballpoint pen clicking in GoldenEye).  >> All right, there is this: if the Army in Gibraltar are alert enough to pick off a Double-O agent, why don't they spot the 'KGB' assassin, eh?  >> Clearly still with money to burn, MI6 recreate M's office, complete with desk and phone, in the back of an RAF Hercules for one flight.  >> Is a cello still concert-worthy if it has a bullet hole in it? Presumably it is actually two holes too, unless the bullet is still rattling around inside? Either way, surely this would affect the resonance?  >>  According to Wikipedia there's some controversy about whether Bond's car is an Aston Martin Volante V8 or a non-Volante V8 saloon with Volante badges (it appears to flit between the two states, depending on whether it is is in the studio or on location) but really, Jesus, life's too short to care, surely?

Worst Line: See all the double-takes, above. Bond finishes off by surprising Kara in her dressing room after her concert. "You didn't think I'd miss this performance, did you?" It's funny/clever because he means a SEX performance. Ugh.

Best Line: There's a lovely moment when M blithely introduces General Gogol to Kamran Shah of the Mujahideen. I look forward to Judi Dench having drinks with Donald Rumsfeld and Ayman al-Zawahiri in Skyfall.

Worst Bond Moment: Those double-takes, sorry. And pulling a gun on a little kid and his mother. Awkward!

Best Bond Moment: Bond effortlessly hitting bulls-eyes at the fairground is a nice touch. The PCS is great and all the Eastern European bits are good for Bond. But really, TLD lacks any cast-iron brilliant bit of 007 magic.

Overall: Bond goes back to basics. It's a good, solid Bond film with some proper espionage, a Flemingy 007 and comparatively little sex or violence - in short it would be a good one to show to the kids if it wasn't for the stupidly over-complicated story. Excitingly, Dalton shows that he understands the character of Bond, even if he hasn't got the physical presence of other 007s. Never mind,  Moore didn't have it either and he made seven films so, on the basis of TLD, the franchise will be in safe hands for many years to come! Um...

James Bond Will Return: ... I expect! It doesn't say any more than that. Maybe they've not thought of a title for the next one, seeing as they've all but exhausted the Fleming ones? How about Licence Revoked! What? What do you mean nobody will know what 'revoked' means? Oh well. What? Licence to Kill? Are you kidding me? Why not just call it James Bond is A Spy? Or Martinis, Guns and Girls?  Yes, I am done now, sorry.

Actually, I'm not because I have...

TWO BONUS FACTS:  

1) TLD is the first Bond film to feature opera. Whilst they're in Vienna, James takes Kara to see The Marriage of Figaro and we get a sneak peek of the end of Act II. It's not the Staatsoper though - according to my sources they're at the "Schönbrunn Palace Theatre, occasional home of Vienna's third opera company, the Kammeroper", so now you know.

2) Yes, well spotted. That parrot taking up space in the MI6 safe house really is Max from FYEO. Presumably Bond brought it back lest it blab 'ATAC to Saint Cyrils!' to any passers by.

Saint George

St. George by Raphael

I grew up in a little town in a little country. Nothing ever happened in Salisbury whilst I was a child and it never appeared on the local news, let alone the national headlines. It had no minor football team to stage an improbable fairy-tale cup run. It never featured in TV dramas. Neither Antiques Roadshow nor Songs of Praise ever seemed to call. In short I had no way to tell if the rest of the country knew we existed at all. It might even have been that we didn't exist, and just received programming from a real world that carried on happily without us. Finally, when I was twelve or thirteen, a boy in my class won a Blue Peter badge. He went to London, to BBC Television Centre, and we could actually see him on the screen. Here at last was corroboration: I did live in the same dimension as all those other places on the television. Salisbury was real after all.

But even to this day I am completely thrown when I meet people who have heard of Salisbury. And if they say that they've been there it's all I can do not to scoff out loud, as if they're claiming to have somehow inveigled their way through the magic forcefield that shields us from the mortal realm.

All of which is a silly way of raising two ideas: 1) that one's home always looks different from the outside; 2) that we don't give any thought to what it looks like from the outside until we are forced to. Realisation can dawn in an instant or take years to seep in. And it can happen to a species as easily as it can to an individual, as the Apollo 8 mission proved in 1968 (left).

I've been looking at England from the outside now for many years - in fact, rather like a NASA probe, I seem to be moving further away - and an exterior picture has been gradually forming, as if the data were being beamed in from the depths of space, pixel by pixel.

But alongside the slow drip-feed of first Welsh and then American views on England, there have been sudden instances of insight. I've mentioned living in Wales before, but I must reiterate that I barely considered myself English before I moved there: I was British, of course, as was - I thought - everyone else. This was a long time ago - before Devolution - but I was left in no doubt, even by loving friends, that I was English and different, that in the past I had been the oppressor and that even in the present, on match day at least, I was still the enemy.

The English have no cultural memory of being oppressed. In a pinch, we might huff about the Norman Yoke but that is merely to clutch at the flimsiest of straws. And if ever we do wish to empathise with our downtrodden Saxon forebears, there's no way we'd be willing to give up all that we gained from the Conquest. No, we've never been oppressed but we still relish the way that the Plantagenet kings laid about them with sword and fire, crushing Welsh, Scots, Irish, French and even Saracens. It is these kings that we emulate when we send out our footballers wearing the three lions of Richard I; and when we fly the flag of St. George it is because of Edward III, who venerated courtly ideas of chivalry whilst he was cementing an English empire.

In England if we do admit to any of this then we are aren't prepared to see ourselves as the villains of the piece. We see Medieval battles, bashing the Scots or Welsh, as a bit of fun, like beating them at rugby perhaps. 'And look, they still have their own languages, don't they?' we might say, as if this mitigated against the centuries when children would be beaten, or worse, for letting slip a word of their mother tongue. The English were never required to face up to what we had done - there were never any recriminations. As Wales, Ireland and even Scotland were absorbed into this new United Kingdom of Britain, past grievances were swept under the carpet as we set about being beastly to the rest of the world.

It's an important distinction because I think we are much more aware of, upset by, and feel more guilty about what the British Empire did. The implications are still unwinding, all around the world, and we are involved in an ongoing series of complicated calculations, trying to see if our legacy can't be worked to be morally neutral. Yes, slavery, we think: terrible. But on the other hand, you know, Wilberforce and all that! We cling to the idea that we ended slavery thirty years before the USA because it makes us feel superior and less racist. Yes, India, we hmmm. Some bad things happened, but look we left peacefully and India's now a burgeoning superpower, the largest democracy in the world! Okay, we invented concentration camps, but we're not as bad as the Nazis!

The Second World War is seen as a huge make-weight when we're trying to get the scales to balance. Whatever terrible evil things we did, we think, the war against Nazism was a fire that scourged us of our empire and left Britain diminished but redeemed. As an historical narrative it is neat and tidy, but it is something we tell ourselves. I don't think it's how we're viewed in Kenya, or India, or America.

The view from the US is naturally shaped by the War of Independence. Britain, and especially England, is seen as a rump. Quaint, sure, but redundant. And it doesn't help that there's so much confusion about what exactly constitutes the UK, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland or the British Isles. In terms of political power, 'English' and 'England' are used for everything. As a result, 'English' and 'British' are used pretty much synonymously: to be English is to be British, and vice versa.

But culturally, as soon as one identifies oneself as Irish or Scottish, or even Welsh, one is distinct, not English and therefore not British. Tartan, Loch Ness and Braveheart are not British, they are Scottish. Tom Jones and male voice choirs are Welsh. St. Patrick despite being Romano-British and growing up in Wales, is the most Irishy thing ever.

I'm not complaining. Celtic Britain has its own distinct flavour and has excelled at marketing itself and its culture to the outside world. The English, happy to wave the Union Flag, have never felt the need to cultivate their own individual character.

We need to think about how we're seen from the outside. Even more so because of the looming possibility of Scottish independence. If it were to happen, the divorce would be messy and protracted; everything we share would be carved up over many years. But one thing England would certainly retain is the negative association with British imperialism. As far as the rest of the world would be concerned, Scotland would be left floaty-light, new and shiny and free from centuries of subjugation. And England, that old bully, would be merely more shrivelled, more decrepit, with its blood red cross and its fondness for chain mail armour.

This has turned in to a long rant but, as I say, we need to start thinking about how we're seen from the outside. Last week I read this excellent article by Greg Jenner - it passionately puts the case that St. George is a pretty useless rallying figure for a modern England. I think it is the case that our Englishness, because of Britain, because of empire, has long been a internal matter, something that we only thought about in terms of looking inwards. That won't do.

Brilliantly, St. Patrick's Day has been turned into a rolling global party. It may be, for most people, nothing more than an excuse for a beer but it is undeniably a world-wide phenomenon, a massive celebration and a big win for Irishness. In fact, its promotion has been a deliberate policy of the Irish government for twenty years with (thanks Wikipedia) four specific aims:

• To offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebration in the world
• To create energy and excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing activity
• To provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations
• To project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal.

I love that, especially 'those who sometimes wish they were Irish'. As an Englishman I look at those words with envy - who would ever aspire to being English? For a start, we're never going to be able to compete with the Irish when it comes to getting the world drunk with us. But if we possibly could, we should take those aims and try to emulate them. After all, we must have something special, something uniquely English, that the world would be happy to cherish with us? And of course, we do. As Mr Jenner and a great many other people have pointed out through the years, we have Shakespeare.

We needn't do much more than rename St. George's Day, (April 23rd, non-English people) as Shakepeare's Birthday. It's so convenient! (No, there's no evidence that he was actually born on that day but it is very likely and we are a lot less fussy about the 'Englishness' of a Palestinian Christian martyr who we currently share with Georgia, Portugal and host of other places.) But we can keep the flag, sure, why not. George can stay patron saint if you like because that's entirely meaningless anyway. But we should start celebrating Shakespeare on April 23rd. It's distinct. It's marketable. His works are glorious and rich and almost endlessly open to interpretation and exploration. Funny, sad, exciting; English history or universal human drama - it's all there. And best of all, it wouldn't just be happening on village greens and in Norman churches. It could be everywhere; English is spoken by over a billion people, more than any other language. Wheel out the ambassadors and the High Commissioners! Unleash the heralds and their fanfares! Put on a show and celebrate our most significant contribution to world culture.

If nothing else it would be chance to future-proof England. Scotland might go its own way. Anglicanism and monarchy, which we have set such store by for so long, might not last. Symbols lose their usefulness or become sullied. Too often English patriotism is an ugly, intolerant beast, mired in ignorance and the born from the fear that we are no longer the power we once were. To hell with that. Shakespeare offers us an England for all ages, for all the world, and something to look back at fondly, proudly, when we are far from home.

The Bear With No Claws

Before I crack on with Timothy Dalton, there's just time for a quick look back. Going through film-by-film is all very well, but some things only become apparent with an overview.

Love it or hate it, the Roger Moore era is all over the place. A mess of low budget thrillers, blaxploitation and kung-fu action fllicks, massive budget space epics and Cold War espionage movies, with a dash of Carry On. The tone seems to change with every film. What's more there are clear tensions running throughout this period. Should the films be small scale dramas or big screen blockbusters? Funny or cold? How violent should they be? How sexist should they be? How fantastic? How realistic?

Different directors tackle these issues in their own way. Guy Hamilton doesn't have any money to play with and tries to follow DAF with plenty of jokes. Lewis Gilbert is given loads of money and turns in two massive, escapist films that, perhaps, don't actually make a lot of sense. Finally John Glen gets his hands on the series, tries to go back to basics, recants and goes for humour and then ends up with a sort of a blend of everything. And throughout, Roger Moore keeps doing his thing, steady and reliable, a single eyebrow raised against all affrontery.

Here are the numbers.

Bond	007 Kills (Av)	Deaths (Av)	Shags (Av)	Helicopters (Av)
Connery	57 (9.5)	384 (64)	13 (2.16)	8 (1.33)
Lazenby	5 (5)	28 (28)	3 (3)	0 (0)
Moore	183 (26.14)	404 (57.71)	19 (2.74)	3 (0.43)
TOTAL	245 (17.5)	816 (58.29)	35 (2.5)	11 (0.79)

HTML Tables

They don't tell the whole truth though which is, again, that the Moore era is very erratic. For example, Bond kills just one person in TMWTGG, but in the very next film, TSWLM, offs over one hundred. Although Bond is killing more people during this time, less is made of it. Moore's Bond tends to dispatch baddies from a distance and very often their demise consists purely of an A-Team-style stunt jump in front of an explosion. And unlike Connery, Moore doesn't kill anyone with his bare hands - he's oddly distanced from even his most cold-blooded murders: both Fekkesh and Locque fall to their deaths, and in both cases Bond doesn't touch them, insulated from the crime by, respectively, his tie and a car door. When he shoots Stromberg, there's a twelve feet long dining table to act as intercessor.

The fractured nature of this period makes it hard to identify themes and track developments - especially in comparison to the Connery era which is very cohesive and has a strong narrative connection from film to film. Instead, the films of the Seventies and early Eighties are more individual adventures than they are episodes in a saga, and the franchise is easily distracted by passing fashions. But there is a slight storyline that progresses through these movies and it is revealing.

It's not there immediately. LALD and TMWTGG represent a false start for Moore's Bond as Guy Hamilton tries to find a contemporary niche for 007 to occupy. Both films explore western anxieties but it's all very domesticated: problems of drugs, race and energy are social ones, hardly within the remit of a governmental assassin. But starting with TSWLM the Moore movies reintroduce characters and plots that, at least, entertain the idea that the Cold War is an ongoing concern for audiences.

What's interesting is how the threat from the Soviet Union is downplayed and how right-wing foreign policy is gently affirmed. Over the course of these films the USSR is entirely co-opted, to the point where General Gogol will sip tea with M in Whitehall and even (in TLD) offer 007 the Order of Lenin.

It happens gradually. In TSWLM, the KGB is a credible and competent agency and Major Amasova repeatedly outwits Bond for our amusement. But the very idea of Anglo-Soviet co-operation, although novel at the time, begins the process of de-fanging the Russians. Their (and our) hideous nuclear weapons represent a threat to both sides, wielded explicitly, as they are, by a neutral third party. The idea that East and West must work together to prevent a nuclear disaster is hardly the subtlest of sub-texts, but we're already a long way from YOLT, where Britain is the voice of sanity whilst US and USSR get the wool pulled over their eyes by SPECTRE.

Moonraker avoids mentioning Russians altogether, but what's interesting is how it presents a much frostier than usual UK/US relationship. If we take Drax's poison plot as a metaphor for nuclear armageddon then Moonraker is almost a re-run of TSWLM, but with the CIA replacing the KGB. The rather extraordinary implication would appear to be that Britain isn't picking sides in the Cold War!

FYEO returns us to the nitty-gritty of a Cold War being fought on the ground, and presents the Russians as distinctly unfriendly once more. But they aren't the villains. The antagonists are gangsters from across Europe (Spanish, Belgian, East German, Greek) seeking to profit by selling British secrets to the USSR. Whilst it's not impossible that this is an attack on closer European cooperation, it's more likely that it is an unconscious attempt to show that Britain is in a league above these pettier nations - a major power that fashions a victory once Bond gets to deal directly with his Soviet opposite number.

As East/West tensions climb dramatically in the early Eighties, the Bond franchise finally gives us 'bad' Russians. General Orlov from Octopussy is the sort of villain one might have expected to come along sooner: an angry Soviet uniform, itching to let his tanks roll across Europe. But again, look at how the USSR is presented. Orlov is clearly a solitary maniac, frustrated by the reasonableness of the Politburo and watched over by 'good' Russians like Gogol, head of the KGB, who finally has the rogue General shot. He doesn't quite turn to Bond and say "Orlov's views and opinions are his own and are not representative of the USSR," but this is certainly supposed to be self-evident. Furthermore, it is Orlov's tanks that we are told to be afraid of, not his nuclear arsenal. Yes, his plan is to detonate a nuke on a USAF base, but his intention is to trick the West into nuclear disarmament so that a conventional war can be waged. The lesson we are supposed to draw from this is that 'our' nukes are good because they protect us, that unilateral disarmament would be a terrible mistake and that we must 'stay the course'.

These were, of course, the prevailing government policies of the day, both in London and in Washington, and perhaps it should come as no surprise that Bond's world should align so closely with them. But I do find it interesting that the nuclear threat is consistently ignored, underplayed or given a neutral context. Despite featuring in nearly all of these films, the Russians are, we are told in no uncertain terms, nothing to worry about.

In AVTAK they are almost entirely toothless, included it seems exclusively for their comedy value. In the PCS, Bond eludes their guards with all the blissed-out nonchalance of a Californian surfer dude. Although nurtured by the USSR, Max Zorin had escaped their doddery clutches in order to fly solo. Gogol and Ivonova get tricked very easily by 007 swapping their cassette. And KGB heavy Dolph Lundgren (yes, it is him) gets picked up and twirled about by Grace flippin' Jones.

This isn't the last we'll see of them - the KGB have one last hurrah to come in The Living Daylights (next) and a flashback flourish in GoldenEye - but throughout these films they and the wider Soviet threat have been thoroughly diminished on screen, as well as in the minds of the audience. It's pretty blatant propaganda, and overlaps only slightly with the realities of the Cold War in the Seventies and Eighties, but with every Martini, every quip, every raised eyebrow, Roger Moore's James Bond has gently pulled another claw from the paws of the Russian bear.

A View To A Kill

Okay, just let me say this. A View To A Kill is a lot better than you think it is. I know people can be quick to dismiss it: Moore is far too old, nearly sixty. By now we're bored with him. He shouldn't have made Octopussy, let alone this. Reviewers, like me, ploughing through the films in order, are impatient to move on, to get to the good stuff. But despite all that, we should not overlook AVTAK. There's much to admire here - including Roger Moore's last performance as 'James Bond as played by Roger Moore'.

To be fair, it's not his fault he carried on. Moore was sure Octopussy was his final Bond - but then he had thought the same thing after FYEO, and even Moonraker. Throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties a seemingly never-ending search was under way for a new James Bond. Some actors (like Michael Billington) were auditioned again and again. Future stars like James Brolin and Sam Neill were screen-tested. The implication is, apparently, that nobody could do it better and, like the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Moore was required to soldier on regardless. Broccoli did have his eye on a pair of comparatively young actors called Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton by now (Dalton had been first considered back in 1969 for OHMSS, then again during the late Seventies; Brosnan came to Broccoli's attention during the making of FYEO) but neither of them was quite ready yet. For whatever reason, Broccoli remained unsatisfied.

Unfortunately this is surely a Bond too far for Moore. Watching AVTAK, one can't help but scrutinise him, to wonder what construction work or emollient has been applied behind the scenes. I've even heard it said that Moore had had cosmetic surgery after Octopussy, which is neither here nor there, but just look at his eyes. Whatever de-wrinkling techniques have been employed, nothing could have been done about those; faded and washed out to a pale watery blue, they are the eyes of an old man.

There's always been a hint of play-acting with Moore's Bond, but here it is very much all play and little acting. This is especially the case in the scenes where he has to flirt with his (ahem, much) younger female co-stars. It's as if his age has become a joke in its own right, like in a Carry On film where Moore might be playing the doddery old man who doesn't know he's too old to be phwoaring at Barbara Windsor. Listen to the exaggerated "Ooooh!" he emits as he and Tanya Roberts finally get it on at the end - it's half Kenneth Connor, half Charles Hawtrey and it's the very last sound Moore's Bond makes. It doesn't help either that Moore has so many opportunities to try it on in AVTAK, as if the producers are trying to manufacture sexual charisma by draping him with women. It doesn't work, but it is not always sleazy either. There is actually something tender about some of these hook-ups: Bond even tucks Stacey up in bed after she falls asleep in her underwear. Connery's Bond, one feels, would at least have stuck his hand down her top whilst he was at it. In fact there's no hint whatsoever of the sadistic brute about this version of Bond. And (mercifully) without the awful jokes of Octopussy, Moore is left with nothing to do but play 007 with a straight bat. He's not showy, or mean, or troubled. He is, instead, just a charming old gent, a nice guy who rescues damsels and bakes them quiche; who plucks people from burning buildings; who, when confronted with a dastardly villain, shows his own goodness with a series of earnest and principled frowns. The end result is an uncomplicated, straight-backed and really rather sweet old duffer of a Bond. It might not be your cup of tea, but this is, if nothing else, an eminently likeable portrayal of 007.

(from l to r) Dull, Old, Mad, Psycho

I was pleasantly surprised by the women here, whom I had previously written off as, respectively, dull and mad. But that's not fair. Stacey may seem dull in comparison with May Day, and May Day may seem bonkers when compared to Stacey, but they both have many good qualities. Stacey is remarkable really in that she is one of those exceedingly rare 'ordinary' Bond women. She has a real job, a house, a back story, and even a legitimate reason to be involved in the plot. (The other Bond women from the Moore era, for the record: a clairvoyant voodoo priestess, an MI6 spy, a KGB spy, a CIA astronaut, a marine archaeologist and a circus-owning international jewel smuggler.) Stacey is a geologist working for the State of California. For the Bond films her character is like something out of a kitchen-sink drama. Even better, Stacey doesn't throw herself at Bond, or end up in a bikini for no reason; she's not patronised and she doesn't 'hilariously' make stupid girly mistakes like a stupid girly-girl. No, she's not particularly exciting. But she is nice, and competent, and she even gets to drive the fire truck.

Then there's May Day. Yes, Grace Jones does seem to be a prime piece of stunt casting and yes, what the hell is she wearing? But look past all that and she is actually pretty good. May Day's character may seem outrageous and absurd compared with Stacey, but don't forget that May Day is the film's henchman - stick her alongside Jaws, or Nik-Nak and suddenly she makes sense. At least she does have a character (unlike some) and it's a compelling one, too: a damaged woman in a weird relationship, brimming over with anger, frustration and pride, ultimately prepared to kill herself to get back at the lover who has betrayed her. As last minute conversions go, it's a damn sight more convincing than Pussy Galore's. And of course, Jones is amazing visually and physically - it's great for the series that May Day poses a real physical threat to Bond and she deserves to be considered as at least one of the most interesting and memorable Bond henchmen, if not one of the best.

And, hang on, who's that but Christopher bloody Walken! Even then he had a reputation for being able to play scary oddball characters and he is brilliant in this, making Max Zorin the best Bond villain since Scaramanga and easily one of the greatest of the franchise. Zorin, a left-over from Nazi breeding experiments and a genuine psychopath, is a more nuanced and compelling baddy than one might imagine from that description. Yes, he's unhinged and violent, but Walken gives him layers of self-control with which to cover up the madness, a reasonable jocularity that is all the more chilling for being a ruthlessly calculated façade.

It's just a shame then that his evil scheme is a bit, well, dull. For a start, Californian earthquakes are all very Superman I. And, yes, I know the world silicon chip market is important, but this is hardly holding the world to ransom. Who would mind if he just bought out Silicon Valley? Surely not the governments of Reagan or Thatcher (it's the Russians who seem happiest when the scheme is foiled after all - has MI6 been played?).

So, with that last comedy "Oooh!" still echoing in our ears, the Roger Moore era comes to an end. The Bond films in the Sixties were a phenomenon, but during Moore's tenure they become an institution - no mean feat considering how precarious the future of the franchise was in the early Seventies. For a long time it has been fashionable to sneer at Moore's movies and at his performances but I don't think that's fair. His films vary enormously, both in style and quality, and should be considered on their individual merits. The bad ones are awful, yes (Moonraker, most of Octopussy) but TSWLM and FYEO are absolutely brilliant. But good or bad, the series flourished during this time. The audiences were always happy to go back for Moore.

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: It's another mission for Bond, this time in some ice-bound expanse, and it's another neat little PCS. It's nearly brilliant, featuring, as it does, some nifty skiing, some snowboarding (which was unheard of in 1985) and even an exploding helicopter. But why in the name of Penelope Smallbone did anyone stick the Beach Boys over the snowboarding stunt? It's not actually even the Beach Boys, but a cover by a band called Gidea Park. (Google them, go on, I dare you.) BOND PRODUCERS TAKE NOTE: if you want 007 to impress us, whack the Bond theme over the top of what he's doing. Ta very much.

Theme: Apparently John Barry was a bit sniffy about working with Duran Duran but, goodness me, the resulting track does give the whole franchise a whacking great kick up the backside and a much needed injection of energy. The song was (very unusually for a Bond theme) a massive world-wide hit and suddenly, from this point, this is what a Bond theme is supposed to sound like. It may be a coincidence, but after several rather lacklustre efforts, Barry's score for AVTAK is a return to his previous high form; it's exciting, full of energy, and even manages something approaching grandeur during the escape from City Hall in San Francisco. Maurice Binder has also had a shot in the arm of something. It may be the same 'slowly gyrating girls' stuff as always but the visuals do look strikingly different thanks to all the neon and day-glo colours. Finally the Eighties have arrived.

Deaths: 66. It's not particularly high compared with some Moore films, but as is traditional the tally sky-rockets in the final act. Although here, instead of a climactic battle, we have a massacre as Zorin kills all the civil engineers and labourers that have been working for him in the mine. I counted 55 deaths on-screen during this sequence alone but surely there would have been more. It's the most gratuitous act of violence we've seen carried out in the series so far.

Memorable Deaths: Aubergine is stung by a poisoned butterfly up the Eiffel Tower. Grace Jones rides a massive bomb down a railway. Christopher Walken giggles and gasps as he tries and fails to hold on to the Golden Gate bridge. Reminiscent of Mr Solo from Goldfinger, an investor reluctantly 'drops out' of Zorin's air-ship board room meeting.

Licence to Kill: 5 - very low for Moore but then he is loaded with rock salt during the only gun battle.

Exploding Helicopters: 1! And a zeppelin! Get in!

Shags: 4! The record's gone thanks to a perfect storm cooked up by a) the need to have a conquest in the PCS; b) May Day being a bit crazy/desperate/into old men; c) a saucy hot-tub cameo from Fiona Fullerton; and d) Stacey Sutton taking pity on Bond in the very last few seconds. Four. That's more than Dalton managed in total isn't it?

Crimes Against Women: Not much. There's a poor 'women's lib' reference that sounds hopelessly out of date even for 1985. Bond is rather sleazy at Zorin's party but otherwise Moore is now all sweet and avuncular and not the callous sexual predator of LALD or TMWTGG. In the scene where Zorin and May Day spar there is an uncomfortable moment where it looks like Zorin is attempting a sexual assault. But then they are both fairly unusual, even by the standards of Bond villains, so it's not entirely impossible that this isn't 'normal' within the parameters of their (dysfunctional and damaged) relationship. If so, they really need a Safe Word.

Casual Racism: I can't remember the last time we saw a Frenchman (not counting Michel Lonsdale or Louis Jordan who aren't playing French, of course) but the character of Achille Aubergine is strangely unpleasant, almost repellent, which, given that he's only on-screen for about a minute, seems oddly deliberate. Dr Carl Mortner is your common-or-garden Nazi eugenicist. All the (good) American men are dull but worthy, as usual (and all appear to have moustaches - was that a thing in 1985?). For the first time we get some British stereotypes as Bond and Tibbett play Upstairs, Downstairs.

Out of Time: What's a Walkman?

Fashion Disasters: It's tempting to say 'everything Grace Jones wears' but it's a little obvious. Her thong/leotard thing is eye-watering though and her asymmetric sunglasses are merely pretty bad. Bond has sunglasses too, trick ones from Q, but sadly they just look like part of some odd prescription and make Moore appear, astonishingly, even older.

Eh?: Does May Day have superhuman strength? It's sort of implied that she is at least incredibly strong, but unlike (say) Jaws she doesn't have the physique to match (yes, she is obviously in top shape, but she's still very slight). >> Why does Zorin go in person to collect his assassin (May Day) from the scene of the crime? Is that not just a little bit of an unnecessary risk? >> Why does Zorin use his private residence, his 16th century French château, as a packaging and distribution factory for silicon chips? They're not manufactured there, it makes no sense! >> Gogol, 'doing a Zorin', is there in person to pick up one of his operatives. The man is the head of the KGB and he is driving through California with known Soviet spy (and internationally famous ballet dancer), Pola Ivanova. How? Either (as is hinted elsewhere during this period) East/West relations are dramatically better in the Bond universe than they were in real life, or US counter-espionage operations are non-existent (which would explain, perhaps, why James Bond has to keep saving them). >> Bond tricks Pola by switching cassettes, but how does he know she even has a cassette? >> I may be wrong but the film appears to muddle up state and city government: Stacey works for the Californian Department of Conservation but the office is based at San Francisco City Hall? (The real DOC is, sensibly, with the rest of the state bureaucracy in Sacramento). >> Bond uses a credit card to break open a sash window. Fair enough, except that this is achieved electronically and with a beep, rather in the manner of a sonic screwdriver. Why not just slip the catch with it? And who the hell is auditing Q Branch? >> Why does Bond break in? Why not just ring the bell? >> Why would Bond go back for the shot gun now that he knows it is not loaded? >> Bond cooks a quiche. Stacey says, "I had no idea you could cook!" Well, you've just met him, why would you think he couldn't? Bond replies: "I've been known to dabble." No you haven't! We've been watching for twenty years! The closest you've come to cooking is when you flambéed Mr Kidd in DAF! >> The baddies creep up to the house and kill nice CIA man Yip and then drive away. Why? Why not kill Bond and Stacey too? >> Bond steals a fire engine, gets chased through San Francisco, escapes and drives it to Zorin's mine. Except when he gets there it is a very different fire engine. Maybe, overnight, he ditched the first one and stole a second so as to evade his pursuers? >> Once again, Gogol turns up in M's office at the end of the film for a cosy chat. This time, he offers Bond the Order of Lenin to boot. Why? Was the USSR threatened by Zorin's plan particularly? Does the Governor of California not want to say thank you? >> Q, searching for Bond, is exploring Stacey's house with his Mars Rover. 1) How did it get up the stairs? 2) Why not just knock on the door himself?

Worst Line: May Day and Zorin gaze at nothern California as their airship approaches Silicon Valley. "What a view!" breathes May Day appreciatively. "To a kill!" hisses Zorin. Because that's a phrase isn't it, 'a view to a kill'. Whilst we're on the subject of dialogue, I have to record the first "shit" of the franchise, muttered by Stacey during the fire chase. It's immediately followed by the second "shit" of the series, which comes from the SFPD officer. I haven't gone back and checked, but I think these are the first profanities we've had so far. Back to the Future's full of them too.

Best Line: Again, not much in the way of a killer line, but the banter between Bond and Tibbett at least sounds like it was fun for the actors.

Worst Bond Moment: For sheer audience discomfort it has to be Bond in bed with May Day, but I'm not sure 007 would be complaining.

Best Bond Moment: Well it would be the snowboarding if it wasn't for the ersatz Beach Boys song. So I think instead it should be Bond carrying Stacey out of the burning City Hall - one doesn't often see a crowd cheering for Bond and the scenes here are reminiscent of other '80s films like Ghostbusters or Superman II.

Overall: This is a bit more like FYEO and bit less like Octopussy, but it's all very gentle (apart from when Zorin machine guns everyone to death). Moore's amiable old Bond is fun and familiar but all the edges have been knocked off of 007 and Fleming's original character has almost completely disappeared. Next time, (if there is a next time, see below) it'll be back to basics...

James Bond Will Return: ... Well, he'll just return, okay? Have some faith.

A Tiny Slice of Canada with a New York Chaser

I did something unnatural the other day. I crossed a land border into a new country. To some of you that won't sound like too much of a big deal, but to the English this is an alien concept. We prefer our international perimeters to be described by large bodies of water, and this partly explains why cries for Scottish, Welsh or even Northumbrian independence might confuse us. Why bother having a separate country if one can just walk there? Well, that's what you get for growing up in a cul-de-sac, I suppose.

Such rules can not be applied to the vastness of North America and, to be fair, the Niagara river that divides the USA from Canada is large enough perhaps to give even the most insular Englishman pause for thought. But after a plethora of road tolls on the way there, the border checks to get into Canada didn't really seem that much of a big deal. If anything, it was an unexpectedly convivial process. Not that this should in any way be taken as a sign that Canada isn't a 'proper' country: Americans take note, one doesn't judge a nation's greatness by how difficult or unpleasant it is to get into it.

On another occasion we might have fooled about with the idea of driving to the border from Texas, but it's not really feasible during Spring Break. Another time, perhaps. No, we flew to New York to stay with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere) and drove from there. A trifle of a drive, really, just four hundred miles or so. We took our time.

The road winds up through perfectly rounded hills, its path endlessly criss-crossed by shallow river-beds. The water is dark, winter-cold and dashed with pale rocks and stones. The hills are covered with countless bare trees so that their outlines are softened to a faint grey blur. When the land does flatten it is thick with fur-brown grass, like the countryside has its own winter pelt.

It was nice to be up in the North of the world again. A mixture of oddness and familiarity. I realised I miss even the subtlest of things: the low angle of winter sunlight; the way shadows pool up in the sharp valleys, in the lee of hills; it's an intricate landscape, chiselled and sculpted. There isn't much in the way of topography in my part of Texas and none at all in the city, of course. Even if you do get out west, the land is smashed flat, hammered into an expanse of grassy plains or beautifully desolate desert.

The road in to Ithaca, NY was vertiginous in comparison, rising up over the brim of yet another hill before plunging down into the city. We only stopped for dinner but I liked it. I didn't realise that it was the home of Cornell University, but I should have guessed it was something like that: there were too many cool-looking young people around for it to be an ordinary out-of-the-way small town. From there it was another hour or so, driving through the pitch dark between invisible finger lakes to Geneva, and then in the morning we headed for the border.

It is weird that America is so big. It is unhelpfully large, so much so that I can see, just a little bit, why there are crazy people here who are scared of the federal government or think that their state should be able to ban contraception or what have you. Even I had come to the point, I realised, where I was starting to think of the states as individual proto-countries. Texas is so different from New Mexico, let alone New York, that I had begun to think of them as distinct areas, mis-matched patches in an ungainly American quilt. And then I crossed a real frontier into a real foreign country and I was forced to squeeze the 50 states back into the small box in my head labelled "America", mixed and muddied together like poorly-managed playdough. And, having, done that, I had to try and come to terms with Canada, a country which looks just like America, but which has the Queen on their money.

So, yes, we did Niagara Falls. The horseshoe falls are the big ones and, to be fair, it is impressive. The falls are nagging, insistent, unrelenting. If you ever had to do anything like woodwork at school then I expect you've forced a rod of dowling against the wheel of an electric sander, pressing it forwards so that it is inexorably shwizzed into wood dust. Well Niagara is like that. Relentless and inescapable. No photo can do it justice because it is always thundering and always in motion, continuously dragging the eyes over and down, over and down, over and down until one gives up the fight and lets them rest against the white-out of the gently coiling mist.

The worst bit (or the best bit, depending on your inclination), is the part of the path that somehow goes around the top of the falls so that one is just a couple of metres from the very lip itself. I stood there, caught in a single rolling instant of time, watching the same water rush over and disappear into the event-horizon itself. The sunlight stabbed down, slicing through the water so that I could see just how deep it was at the edge. It also made the water shine, translucent like thick glass, so that I could almost see through the apex. But never for very long. Always the thunderous flow would drag me on with it and I'd be back again to the comparative calm of the lower river: the smoke-blue water giddily spinning and foaming; the mist falling as rain; the permanent rainbow; the hundreds of gulls, wheeling and diving, black against the whiteness.

In my imagination I had always seen it as being set in a wilderness, rather like the Grand Canyon. But no, it has two towns wrapped about either side of it: Niagara Falls, NY, which is rather rugged and a little decrepit in a post-industrial way, with a rather ugly shiny nub of downtown, and Niagara Falls, ON, which is a little tacky. It's got some nice buildings, some lovely houses but it also has a stretch of crap amusement arcades, wax work displays and over-priced pizzerias. For the deeper pockets, there's the casino - the upmarket end as it were. The boys went on a ferris wheel and then we went up the Skylon Tower. Both offered excellent views of the wider landscape and therefore options for escape.

We carried on to Hamilton, ON to stay the night with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere, did I say?). It was another of the most fleeting stops, but we had a lovely time. We got to shop in a real Canadian store and we got to walk along the hill and stare out over another Great Lake, Ontario. In the very dimmest distance we could see the faint skyline of Toronto.

Annoyingly this first trip was only a series of first impressions, but I like what I saw of Canada. It was suddenly exotic and exciting to see something other than the Stars & Stripes flying, and it was rather wonderful to see kilometers and French words on the road signs. But is this a kind of knee-jerk homesickness? After all, even New York feels like Britain after a winter in Texas. I don't know. It is nice to see that the USA, which can sometimes believe itself to bestride the whole world, doesn't even fill North America. And Canada is such a fascinating idea, a parallel-universe Bizarro America, tinged by another century or so of British rule. Having seen it for myself, I think I understand the country a little now, I have a better sense of how it plugs into the world. It's worth exploring properly and I hope that I will get a chance to do that one day.

We spent the whole day driving back to New York. Surprisingly, getting back across the border was a rather fraught affair, with lots of queuing and waiting and, at the end, a surly American border guard who rolled his eyes at us for trying to navigate the frontier at all. But after that we had a good day's drive. We had possibly the best hot dogs ever at a place called Ted's in Buffalo, NY  (America, for good or ill, excels at inexpensive, unpretentious and very tasty food) and then we ploughed on back down the road, through the hills and across the rivers, all looking much the same as they had on the way up, until the sunlight ebbed from the world and the galaxy of lights that is New York city rose up before us.

It is my ambition that one day I will be able to be blasé about New York City. I want it to be familiar and known, scoured of secrets and mystery.

It's unlikely to happen but we did get to spend a day chipping away at the mystique and I fixed down some of the things I half-remembered from previous visits. This felt good but of course there was no defence against stumbling into new unforeseen wonders or, worse still, foreseen ones.

For example, I knew Grand Central Station was impressive, but seriously? For the first time, I arrived in New York by train and it took a long while to get out of that building. I had expected it to be grand. I hadn't expected it to be exquisite and banded by its own blue vaulted heaven of sky and stars.

Once outside, we ambled. Battery Park to stare across at the Stature of Liberty, then back uptown. On a whim we poked our noses inside the Schwarzman building - the branch of the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street - only to find another palace. Like a Tuscan church its white stone and marble gives away to a beautiful interior of carved dark wood and luscious frescos. The Reading Rooms were full of people, studying and researching, their gaze split between page and screen - libraries aren't just for storing books, they are for helping knowledge and information to spread freely, regardless of the medium.

With the time we had left we took a walk along the High Line, an old elevated railway line that has been reclaimed as a public park. Initially I was underwhelmed: I hadn't come to New York city to encounter calm or quiet. But as we strolled along above the streets and the traffic I took to it. It's fun to share the space with other pedestrians, to see the backs of buildings and to enjoy the odd vantage points: a secret version of the city hidden away amongst the air rights, which is after all exactly the sort of thing I had been hankering after. Best of all, being an old train line, the High Line actually took us somewhere. Rather than walking around a park to end up where we had started, our stroll had taken us to our destination. Or rather the next in a series of destinations, a series that ended, finally, late that night with us rolling up to the door of our home, way down south.

Octopussy

It's not as bad as Moonraker, but it is almost nothing like FYEO. Octopussy returns the Bond franchise to familiar surroundings with a poor script, an ageing male lead and some unjustified nonsense where a taut adventure story should be. Presumably the criticism of FYEO had been that there weren't enough jokes, but goodness knows there are far too many here.

Like the Curate's Fabergé egg, Octopussy is good in parts. Despite everything, the sequence in East Germany works very well: it maintains tension and shows that Bond can still be relevant within the Cold War setting of the Eighties. This film is mostly rubbish though. And the problems start on the first line of the script.

At this point there are almost no more Fleming stories left to adapt: the producers have worked over all the novels (except Casino Royale, the rights for which are tied up elsewhere) and are now having to pick through the bones of the short stories. This worked with FYEO, when they had all the short stories to choose from - but now they are getting down to the dregs and, although they are having to produce a lot of original plotting, they still feel obliged to smear something of these lesser works on to the screen.

The producers settle on a vignette about an old soldier who stole some gold during the war. Many years later his crime is discovered and a man from London comes to tell him he's going to be court-martialed. The old soldier is devastated and the man, who's name is James Bond, decides to allow him to kill himself instead of facing disgrace. It's called Octopussy, because the old soldier has a pet octopus and commits suicide by provoking the animal to attack him. Whatever its merits as a short story, one does not spend a lot of time wondering whether the title is particularly good or pertinent - but as soon as the production team chose it as the title for Bond 13, 'Octopussy' had to mean something within the context of the film.

The problem of justifying a silly title is not unique to Octopussy. In Thunderball, the title is excused by being a blink-and-you'll-miss-it codename. Those of YOLT and OHMSS enjoy the fig leaf of being thrown into random lines of dialogue. And we mustn't forget QOS, the title of which perplexed almost everybody, gets no reference within the film itself, and only really makes sense if one is prepared to thoroughly digest the short story from which it is taken. But all these clumsy efforts are nothing when compared to Octopussy.

It is a terrible, silly title and EON's solution, to give it as a name to the female lead, is even more terrible and silly. We are faced with the prospect of Roger Moore and Louis Jordan having to call Maud Adams 'Octopussy' and keep a straight face, pretending that this a reasonable state of affairs. It isn't of course and the Bond series ends up pushed as close to resembling a Carry On film as it ever does. Lumbered with this baggage, the film now has to justify it. Who is this Octopussy woman? What is she like? Well with a name like that she'd obviously have to be an exotic Eastern madame, living on an island with her spandex-clad harem of lesbian jewel-smuggling circus acrobats or whatever that's supposed to be. I hope I'm not being unfair on Maud Adams if I suggest that her sincere efforts to sell this are about as convincing as Roger Moore's legs in the picture at the top.

I'd hate to single Adams out though - none of this is her fault and she even manages to imbue her ridiculous character with a quantum of dignity. And the unwarranted silliness infects the whole Indian portion of the film in which the story is daft, the characters are limp, the action is weak and the jokes are wearisome. I won't spend too long sticking the boot in, but I can't pass up mentioning a few of the larger problems with this section.

Quickly then - India is just the latest developing country to be treated as an exotic backdrop for some Bond japes. With its palaces, tiger-infested jungles, crocodile-infested lakes and streets crowded with beggars, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers and fakirs, this is an India only of the British imagination. A Raj-themed playground in which posh Brits can muck about without having to engage in any uncomfortable post-colonial soul-searching. George MacDonald Fraser (author of the Flashman books) was hired to write the Indian bits but there's no way of knowing if what appears on screen is his fault or if it was mangled by the producers into something less interesting.

Louis Jourdan strikes me as an odd choice to play exiled Afghan prince Kamal Khan. I can see that he has the easy sophistication that so often graces Bond villains, but his chilled urbanity is almost soporific. He's very much a mirror image of Moore's Bond in fact: suave and unflappable to the point of utter blandness. That's not to say that Jourdan isn't trying here, because he turns in a performance that is subtle and clever in places (there are some lovely nervous bomb-related glances, for example), but this is hardly the point of a Bond villain, where understatement is nearly always pointless. And Khan is such a boring villain! He has no grand scheme, no megalomania - he's just a posh petty criminal. It all seems rather a waste.

No the real villain of the piece is General Orlov, the deranged and off-message member of the Soviet Praesidium played by Steven Berkoff. He is an unusual baddy for a Bond movie: they are (as you know) nearly all private citizens of wealth and taste with impeccable manners. Orlov is a soldier and his villainous scheme is born of a frothing raging frustration. How he is supposed to know, let alone fall in with, Khan is unclear (nothing is made of the USSR invasion of Afghanistan for example) but it is an unlikely pairing to say the least. But never mind that because he is a great baddy here and a wonderful change from all the Draxes and Strombergs.

Orlov's plan is a great piece of Bond villainy too and provides Octopussy with its real saving grace: a brilliant twenty minute sequence through East and West Germany as 007 races after a nuclear bomb. Orlov wants to force unilateral nuclear disarmament in the West by faking an accident at a US airbase, leaving NATO without its deterrent. It's a wonderful example of how an evil scheme's very plausibility can raise the stakes and make it more frightening. Dropping orchids from space to sterilise the Earth? Who's going to worry about that? But Orlov's plan, with his bomb hidden inside a circus tent, brings the threat of nuclear death right into the reality of family outings.

The mechanics of the sequence, a long convoluted chase involving trains and cars and many fights, are excellent and the drama is well above average for a Bond film, with 007 cast as the secret agent who alone knows the truth of the conspiracy. It's a proper (albeit mini) Cold War thriller and it works so well, in fact, that it doesn't really matter, as the last few beeps of the countdown sound, that James Bond is a middle aged man in a clown costume.

It's impossible to ignore Moore's age in Octopussy. I'm not actually sure that the film, or his portrayal suffer very much because if it, but it can distract the attention if, like me, you are waiting for signs of decrepitude, knowing that his time is nearly up. Always a visibly relaxed actor, it's hard to tell if he's merely going through the motions here or not, but I doubt it. There is perhaps a slight loss of intensity compared with FYEO but that could be as much down to the excessive amount of jokes as anything else. Moore's still in good shape here for a man of 56 and, thanks to some hard-working stunt men, Bond is able to save the world once again. But this would have been a good time to call it a day.

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: For the first time in ages, Bond is on a mission rather than just getting randomly set upon or tangled-up in something. This is the one with the mini-jet hidden in a horse's backside. The aerial work is not unimpressive but, as spy-gadgets go it's rather ostentatious isn't it? Interestingly, the target here is South American military hardware - I'd always assumed it was supposed to be Cuba, but now (what with the polo references), as I write this I wonder if it wasn't supposed to be Argentina. That's a bit much isn't it? Let bygones be bygones and all that, I say. [Moore's biography claims it's Cuba, just so you know, but the credits refer explicitly to 'South American' troops.]

Theme: Raise your glasses, this is the last hurrah of that mighty lumbering dinosaur, the Bond Ballad. All Time High is yet another innocuous three minutes of blandness but from now on it's going to be MOR rock-pop numbers all the way. Meanwhile, Binder can't leave the gymnastics alone, even if somebody has bought him a laser pointer to play with.

Deaths: 44. Slightly below par but then everyone seems to be taking it easy this time.

Memorable Deaths: 009, dressed as a clown, crashes through the British Ambassador's french doors with a Fabergé egg in his hand. I'd say that was memorable.

Licence to Kill: 39 - it's high, but then Bond did blow up a large aircraft hangar full of South/Central American troops. Many of them were seen to escape but there were certainly some left inside - I've estimated 25. More unusually, Bond's kill tally is a very high proportion of the overall death toll: 89% in fact, fact-fans!

Exploding Helicopters: 0. Again. Next time though, eh? Must be one next time?

Shags: 2. (Magda, the 'bad' Bond woman here, must have the highest ratio of hair-to-body mass of anyone in the series.)

Crimes Against Women: Bond complains that having an island just for women is "sexual discrimination" and then stages a sort of Fathers4Justice style protest, going there in a crocodile-shaped submarine and shagging the boss woman. That'll learn them pesky women's libbers. He also uses government equipment to ogle a co-worker's breasts. Otherwise he's quite well-behaved. The production team make the most of Octopussy's all-woman outfit by ensuring that the costume designer makes their outfits out of very little.

Casual Racism: Bond is helped by a very stereotypical-looking couple of sausage-munching Germans. As for India, well, perhaps this is an apt point at which to mention the great work Sir Roger has done for UNICEF for many years.

Out of Time: Can't really imagine Bond being given a fountain pen these days. The Barbara Woodhouse reference is classic 1983. There were plans (apparently) for a Charles and Diana cameo à la FYEO but this never happened, luckily.

Fashion Disasters: The clown costume is surely an all time low for 007. Everything the women of the Octopus cult wear is highly suspect. There's an honest-to-goodness Nehru jacket for Jourdan and one last safari-suit for Moore.

Eh?: The Egg plot just disappears, but that might be because it didn't make any sense in the first place. Let's get this as straight as we can. Khan and Orlov are stealing art from the USSR and smuggling it out of the country. To cover their tracks they are getting fakes made and leaving them in Russia. 009 somehow gets involved with this and steals a fake Fabergé egg which then ends up in London with 007. But if this fake was made by Orlov then why is the original up for auction in London? If it is missing from the USSR, won't they notice it reaching £500,000 at Sotheby's? And why do Khan and Orlov need the original back? It's the fake that they end up buying and it's the fake that was stolen from them by 009, so... they're sorted then aren't they? When they do get the original back from Bond, Orlov smashes it thinking it's the fake - so where is the fake? Khan seems to know that it is the original that's been smashed but doesn't say anything and the fake is never seen again, not even in the pile of treasures that gets smuggled on the train. And finally, was the whole jewel smuggling operation thought up just to create a way to get the bomb into West Germany? >> If not, their smuggling operation is a LOT more complicated than it needs to be given that Orlov can just take the jewels to India in his helicopter. >> If Octopussy's circus is based in Europe, why do so many of its staff live in India? >> Famously, each clown's make up is unique, so how come there's another clown that looks just like Bond? And even if 007 has just nabbed a spare costume and miraculously accidentally copied another clown's face, then surely having two identical clowns would be blindingly obvious to the circus people? All of which misses the obvious point which is how come Bond - who is racing to defuse an atomic bomb, remember - thinks he has time to apply clown make up? >> This weeks top-ranking British intelligence officers off on a wander: M saunters around Checkpoint Charlie and Q is sent to India where he sits by himself on a river bank all night, keeping watch. >> There are obviously staffing issues in MI6 though as Q's right-hand man, Smithers, (from FYEO, keep track) is doubling up as a taxi driver to follow suspicious foreigners. >> Bond has about 8 seconds to climb out of that gorilla suit. >> But then he manages to get in and out of that ludicrous crocodile submarine too? >> If the lake is full of crocodiles, how did the assassins swim across? >> When Bond is trying to listen in on Khan, the bug picks up interference from Magda's hair-dryer - but why is she using it? Her hair's  not wet! She also spots Bond creeping about the house and doesn't raise the alarm. >> Is it really practical for the circus to put on two shows in one day in different cities? How long does it take them to take down/put up the marquee? And Karlmarxstadt (now Chemnitz) is a good way from the border with West Germany... >> When Bond is 'driving' the car along the rails he keeps wiggling the steering wheel for some reason. >> Why does Khan take Octopussy on the plane? What's he going to do with her? >> Why does the plane crash once Bond jumps out? Khan just seems to forget how to pilot it. >> Proving that the KGB are just as reckless with their top officers (or that Anglo-Soviet relations in the Bond universe are massively better than in ours), General Gogol visits M in his office for a chat. Which is nice.

Worst Line: Argh! Bond channels Barbara Woodhouse (and somehow quietens a tiger) by shouting "Si-it!". Reporting Bond's break-in, a USAF guard adds "And he's wearing a red shirt!" as if this was yet another crime 007 had committed. Worst of all though is Bond's quip, having just thrown a load of money at some impoverished Indians, as he pushes a wadge of cash into his Indian co-worker's hand: "That'll keep you in curry for a few weeks!" Stay classy, James.

Best Line: I didn't spot one. Let me know if you do.

Worst Bond Moment: Hmm.. The Tarzan yodel? The clown costume? The tuk-tuk chase? Probably that last one.

Best Bond Moment: There's a neat trick in the PCS where Bond escapes from a pair of guards by pulling the rip-cord on their parachutes. But the best bit - and you can tell it's the best bit because the Bond theme drops in - is where 007 swerves the Mercedes-Benz onto the railway and the wheel rims fit on the tracks just so.

Overall: With the clever use of the Cold War, the Germany bomb chase and Gogol's Internal Affairs subplot there's quite a bit to like here really. Imagine this with Dalton and with the Indian scenes completely rewritten and it would quickly begin to smarten up. Unfortunately, as it is, it's all a little too easy going and a little too pleased with itself. Remember: dishipline, 007, dishiplin!

James Bond Will Return: ... in From A View to a Kill (although they contrived to drop the 'From' at a later date - that's why the marketing department get paid the big bucks).

Paranoid Collage

The Internet, eh? Just chock full of STUFF. So much stuff in fact that you will never ever see it all. You won't even be able to wade through all the bits you want to see. Luckily there are people out there who are devoting themselves to organising, marshalling and curating content, sometimes even re-working it into something new, and directing it to your eyeballs.

Here's something you want to see, something that exemplifies this process. It's a collage of cover versions of Paranoid Android by Radiohead.

I know grumpy people (people anyway who are differently grumpy to me) who might say "Oh yeah, look! If you knit together all these mediocre homespun covers you end up with a version that is almost as good as that which was skilfully produced by the original artist!"

But that misses the point. Firstly, this is the point of the Internet: how wonderful that anyone can share their passion, their musicality, their personality in this way? How brilliant that their efforts could be combined so cleverly into a new and different and, arguably, wonderful version that includes contributions from so many people? How touching that people who will never know each other can collaborate on a larger project?

Secondly (and I can't stress enough how much you should click on this link), everything is a remix.