Saving James Bond is Amazon’s toughest mission yet… I know why they have better chance of doing it than anyone
ALL week, James Bond fans have been rushing about, waving their arms in the air and saying that their hero will not be safe now that Amazon has taken creative control of the franchise.
Well sure, there is no doubt that the American streaming giant will have its work cut out because it hasn’t just bought the rights to exploit a character, it has bought a national institution.
Bond is our bulldog, our sweet chariot, our Spitfire and our 1966 World Cup squad all rolled into one.
He’s the Royal Family with a PPK, so no, we don’t want him to become a Moneypenny game show spin-off. Or a “her” for that matter.
They’ve also bought a hero who’s about as out of tune with the times as an episode of Rising Damp.
He is a little bit rapey, and he goes round the world murdering people simply because he doesn’t like the look of them.
Remember Locque in For Your Eyes Only? He was kicked off a cliff because he had octagonal spectacles. Or that guard at the beginning of Goldeneye.
He had his neck broken because he was in a lavatory cubicle that Bond wanted to use.
There are other reasons why the whole thing is out of date too.
Bond was often to be found at an exotic festival in New Orleans or Mexico.
These scenes were included because in the Seventies, the cinema audience only ever went as far as Bridlington or Margate. So a mardi gras was amazing.
Not any more. People go to Rio for the weekend these days. And even your granny has swum with a shark.
Bond is our bulldog, our sweet chariot, our Spitfire and our 1966 World Cup squad all rolled into one.
So what of the gadgets and the snazzy cars?
We could believe 50 years ago that this is what life was like at MI6, but we sort of know that these days the real-life Bonds are more like Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses, and that if they want a car, they have to rent a Vauxhall.
But do we want a farty Bond in a Corsa who doesn’t sleep with anyone and only ever arrests the baddies so they can be tried by the proper authorities?
No. We don’t.
Same haircut as Blofeld
However, in one important respect, the Bond movies of old are bang up to date.
I watched You Only Live Twice when it came out and remember thinking, “Right. I see. So this baddie hollowed out a volcano and filled it with space rockets and no one noticed?
None of the workers went home at night and told their wives what they’d been doing all day.”
It was the same story with Drax in Moonraker, the only Bond film I didn’t enjoy. Because they were asking us to believe that a businessman could become so rich, he’d have a fleet of his own spaceships.
And here we are in 2025, and that is exactly what has happened.
There really are people now who can do that.
And while I don’t want to be seen to be biting the hand that feeds me, one of them has exactly the same haircut as Blofeld.
Answers to the name of Bezos. Jeff Bezos.
Admittedly, Jeff’s a terrible name for a villain. But Elon isn’t. So maybe this could be the future of Bond.
Turn it all around.
The baddie becomes the star of each movie and 007 is an underpaid thorn in his side who rocks up occasionally in his Vauxhall Cavalier, with an enforcement notice from the council saying that he has 14 days to fill in the volcano, because it doesn’t have planning permission to be a moon base.
Would you watch that? Probably not.
So Amazon face some big problems. Finding an actor, deciding on the type of character 007 will be and sorting out plot lines that make him/her/them different from Bourne and Reacher.
And then there’s the biggest problem of them all. Bond is dead.
Still, if anyone can get round these issues, Amazon can.
Because it took a man with petrol in his veins out of a fire-spitting Lamborghini and turned him into a farmer. After that, anything is possible frankly.
Faultless Gene one up on Denzel
I’VE been trying to think if Gene Hackman ever starred in a bad film.
And I’m not sure he ever did.
Not even Denzel Washington, above, can claim that. Because he did The Siege.
Tastes batter dead
FOR centuries, the people of Belgium have dressed up like Druids and gathered at a festival to mark the start of spring, to drink live fish from a silver goblet.
And now they are furious because meddling animal enthusiasts have said it is cruel and must be banned.
Last week, many took to the streets waving placards that said: “I want fish.”
Yes, well so do I occasionally. And when the mood takes me, I pop down to the chip shop and buy one that has been pre-killed and cooked in batter.
I don’t just cruise around in my pond with my mouth open. Because that would be mad.
Night foul
FIGURES just in reveal that as many as 10,000 birds a year are being sliced and diced by Ed Miliband’s growing army of wind turbines.
To try to cut the death toll, boffins are now saying that these gigantic pheasant pluckers should be painted black instead of white, so they are easier to see.
Well that might work on a sunny day but what about at night? One minute you are an owl, cruising along, enjoying yourself and then you are two halves of an owl. And what about when it is winter? Or dusk?
I’m afraid you can paint them any colour you like, the fact is if you fill the sky with wildly spinning propellers, bird numbers are going to suffer.
LEWIS HAMILTON has said that before signing for Ferrari, he did spend some time worrying about how historically, Italy has been home to some fairly overt racism.
Interesting from a man who for the last 11 years has been racing for Mercedes . . .
Beeb’s Gaza boob
THE BBC was so proud of its behind-the-lines documentary on life in Gaza, it even trailed it on the evening news.
I saw Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone and, ten seconds in, said to my girlfriend Lisa, “Something’s off here.”
The hero of the piece, a child, was rushing hither and thither as wounded people were brought to a hospital but he wasn’t actually doing anything. And he seemed awfully clean and well fed.
When you’ve worked in television for 30 years you notice telltale signs that something is not real. Wind not making a sound on the mics.
Handily discarded teddy bears in the rubble. Kids pretending to carry stretchers. That sort of thing.
Anyway, just a couple of days later, it emerged that the kid in question was the son of a Hamas government official.
The agriculture minister no less.
And that smelled off as well because why would Gaza need someone to oversee its farmland? There isn’t any.
Then a clarification came along to say that actually he was the “deputy” agriculture minister. Sure he was.
Like those CIA types at the US embassy in Moscow were always “cultural attaches”.
Look, either the production company was duped and accidentally made a propaganda film for Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation.
Or it was so blinded by “river to the sea” pro-Palestine bias, it made like an ostrich and went ahead anyway.
But the fact is that at some point, the finished film ended up on someone’s desk at the BBC.
And despite the fishiness, they put it on television.
Did they check to make sure everything was kosher? Or do they not know what kosher means?