Catching Bullets E-Book

Mark O'Connell

• Herausgeber: Splendid Publications Limited
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

When Jimmy O'Connell took a job as chauffeur for 007 producers Eon Productions, it would not just be Cubby Broccoli, Roger Moore and Sean Connery he would drive to James Bond his grandson Mark swiftly hitched a metaphorical ride too. In Catching Bullets: Memoirs of a Bond Fan, Mark O'Connell takes us on a humorous journey of filmic discovery where Bond films fire like bullets at a Thatcher era childhood, closeted adolescence and adult life as a comedy writer still inspired by that Broccoli movie magic. Catching Bullets is a unique and sharply-observed love-letter to James Bond, Duran Duran title songs and bolting down your tea quick enough to watch Roger Moore falling out of a plane without a parachute.

Leseprobe

CATCHING BULLETS

MEMOIRS OF A BOND FAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark O’Connell is a comedy writer. He has written for a range of top comedy actors, directors and performers including the legendary Ronnie Corbett, plus numerous sketch shows, sitcom projects, stand-up acts, promos and online shorts. His work features on the BBC, Channel Four, Five, various Edinburgh Fringe productions and various comedy and film festivals. He has worked with leading comedy names, such as Jon Plowman, John Sullivan, Paul Mendelson, and Jonathan Harvey (who Mark featured alongside in a BBC3 The Last Laugh documentary about gay comedy).

Mark has won the Jerwood Film Prize for Skedaddle, the Lloyds Bank Film Challenge for Carrying Dad, one ninth of a BAFTA, repeat praise from Time Out and the Coen Brothers, plus a Five Star album from a local radio phone-in he has yet to receive. He was also chosen by London 2012 and BT to be one of the official Storytellers of the London Olympics.

Catching Bullets – Memoirs of a Bond Fan is his debut book.

He lives in Surrey with his partner.

MARK O’CONNELL

CATCHING BULLETS

MEMOIRS OF A BOND FAN

Published in 2012 by Splendid Books Limited

Copyright © 2012 Mark O’Connell

The right of Mark O’Connell to be identified as the Author of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Splendid Books Limited The Old Hambledon Racecourse Centre Sheardley Lane Droxford Hampshire SO32 3QY United Kingdom

www.splendidbooks.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form including on the internet or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from The British Library

978-0-9569505-7-4

Commissioning Editors: Shoba Vazirani and Steve Clark • Coordination: Annabel Silk

Designed by Design Image Ltd.www.design-image.co.uk Printed in the UK

SKYFALL 2012 Danjaq, LLC, United Artists Corporation, Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. 007 Gun Logo and related James Bond Trademarks 1962 - 2012 Danjaq, LLC and United Artists Corporation.

SKYFALL, 007 and related James Bond Trademarks are trademarks of Danjaq, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Every effort has been made to fulfil requirements with regard to reproducing copyright material. The writers and publisher will be glad to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Glossary

PRELUDE – by Barbara Broccoli

FOREWORD – by Mark Gatiss

INTRODUCTION – The Pre-Title Sequence

1 THE OPENING TITLES

2 BITING THE BULLETS: Octopussy and A View To A Kill

3 THE CHRISTMAS BULLET: Moonraker

4 THE BULLET HOLS – PART I: From Russia with Love and Diamonds Are Forever

5 THE BULLET HOLS – PART II: Live And Let Die and Thunderball

6 THE DISCO BULLETS: For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved Me

7 THE ROGUE BULLET: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

8 THE DESIGNER BULLETS: Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice

9 THE SILVER BULLETS: The Living Daylights and The Man With The Golden Gun

10 THE STRAY BULLET: Licence To Kill

11 THE BRITPOP BULLETS: GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies

12 THE MISFIRED BULLET: The World Is Not Enough

13 THE RUBY BULLET: Die Another Day

14 THE SPEEDING BULLETS: Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace

15 BULLET PROOF: Dr. No

AFTERWORD - by Maud Adams

THE CLOSING CREDITS

To Frederick James O’Connell -

Who drove me and a few others to James Bond 007

BOND ARRIVING: Any musical or visual cue to denote James Bond 007 arriving in a country, nightclub or foreign lady’s comfort zone.

DIVORCED PARENT SUNDAY: A Sunday in 1980’s Great Britain when a divorced parent takes their child to either a vintage railway line or the cinema to see a James Bond film.

EXPLODING LAIR: The Bond films motif for blowing an expansive, penetrable un-penetrable base to smithereens.

EXPOSITIONAL CHAUFFEUR: A driver of a mode transport that James Bond is using who either passes on idle but valid information or threatens to kill him. Either way, the audience is told what is going on.

JAMES BOND TURKEY DASH: The eating of one’s Christmas dinner quickly enough to catch a Christmas Day showing of a James Bond film you haven’t seen before.

KEN-ADAMING: The production design of the James Bond films, often inspired by original visualist Ken Adam’s triumphant use of modernity, shapes and producer Cubby Broccoli’s wallet.

LEON LOVELY: Coined in honour of Dame Screen Crumpet herself, Valerie Leon – veteran of Bond, Hammer Horror and the Carry On films. The lady all passing ladies in James Bond films are to be judged by. Not to be confused with a leading lady.

MAUD ADAMS: Former Bond girl, my future wife and only ‘girl crush.’

MOORE (AS IN “TO MOORE IT UP”): Where British men arch both eyebrows when walking through customs, a hotel lobby or a lady’s walk-in wardrobe. American men have their equivalent in George Clooney and Dirk Benedict.

PAN AM (AS IN “TO PAN AM OUT OF HERE”): The moment James Bond flies off at the start of a mission on the now defunct airline Pan Am.

STEP-JAMES BOND: The second actor you see in the role of James Bond 007. Not your real James Bond (the actor you saw first).

STRAIGHT SHIELD: The defence mechanism a closeted gay guy holds up against the world to deflect attention from a lack of lady-dating.

I spent my entire childhood in the company of Jimmy O’Connell. He was one of the most honourable, kind and funny men I have ever met.

The number of times he would chuckle when avoiding a roadside incident and say "Crash bang wallop... tinkle tinkle glass."

Jimmy was there from the beginning… in the Warwick Film days, through the hardest times of my Father's life when he was widowed and was raising two small children on his own. He was there when my parents married. I shall never forget him or the respect and love my parents and family had for him.

Catching Bullets is a wonderfully funny and touching memoir. I wish you the best for this book... I think I can say with some authority that Cubby and Jimmy would be proud.

Barbara Broccoli

For me it began with diamonds. A darkened cinema, a family outing, two gay hit men (which is another sort of outing altogether), a scorpion down the back of the neck and a premature cremation - the sheer, stomach-churning terror of which has never left me. Welcome, little man, to the world of James Bond 007.

I was always a ‘sensitive’ child (i.e. gay) and so my fascination with the aggressively heterosexual Mr Bond has long been seen by some of my contemporaries as an aberration, the kind of strange quirk – like Hugo Drax’s gingerness, Blofeld’s lack of earlobes (though he did that to himself) and the wonderful fact that Francisco Scaramanga couldn’t whistle - which always singled out Ian Fleming’s baddies as a bit rum. Being a puff and loving James Bond somehow just don’t add up. So it’s a delight to read this funny, touching and gossipy book and discover that I’m not the only one. As any number of Ken Adam lair-inhabiting villains might have said – “We are very alike, you and I, Mr O’Connell.”

My earliest recollections of going to the cinema (or the ‘pictures’ as we always called it - my brother once told me very sweetly that he thought this meant merely looking at the lobby cards displayed outside) are clearly defined. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Scrooge, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Fiddler on the Roof and, of course, Diamonds Are Forever. The other films wove their own brand of motion picture magic, but the impact of James Bond on me was seismic. A heady vodka Martini of glamour, grown-upness, thrilling cities, titillation and outlandishness that instantly became hard-wired into my brain as the definition of fun.

Very soon after Diamonds, there was a re-release of Dr. No and Thunderball (the wrong way round as I recall) which my sister took me to see. Then, suddenly, someone else became James Bond! A suave, but less-threatening man with sandy hair and an ironic eyebrow. Him off The Persuaders, in fact. This left me, as a nascent Bond fan curiously on the cusp. Connery with Moore rising, to speak in astrological terms. The wonderfully wrong Live and Let Die (“Names is for tomb-stones. Take this honky outside and waste him!”) sealed the deal. I was in heaven. Through my Dad’s Ian Fleming Pan paperbacks and catching up with the old films on TV, Bond became part of the fabric of my life. We always went to see the new film as a family and I’ve never forgotten the magical thrill of those very special occasions. I knew the game was up though for the increasingly decrepit Roger Moore when my Dad leant across and whispered, “if the secret service is in the hands of this bugger, son. God help us.”

Mark O’Connell’s experience though was a little different. His Grandad was Cubby Broccoli’s chauffeur! As you’ll see, this led to a curious interplay between the dazzling glamour of the fictional Bond and the realities of camel-coat wearing Pinewood blokes turning up on Christmas Day. Mark’s perfect Bond is A View to a Kill, almost certainly because it was his second and therefore the one he most anticipated. And anticipation is a big part of the appeal. To this day, the arrival of the Bond teaser trailer is a red-letter day for me and though, with a grown up eye you see things a little differently, there’s something immutably glorious about those early Bond experiences. Yes, Goldfinger is the paradigm and Sean is clearly bored and a bit overweight in You Only Live Twice. Yes, the sight of Grace Jones bedding Roger Moore makes you fear for his brittle bones but The Spy Who Loved Me is almost the perfect Bond movie. Yes, Timothy Dalton never quite caught on, but wasn’t he a Daniel Craig 20 years early?

Fashions, public taste and even safari suits change. But comparisons, Mr Bond, are odious. The formula remains fabulously familiar and yet flexible. An outlandish, imperishable comfort blanket, it’s curious joys are never better expressed than in Mark O’Connell’s charming book. And if he never quite got to consummate his crush on Maud Adams’ sinuous Octopussy, then there have been rewards for Mark elsewhere, I’m sure.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is still the best one, though.

Mark Gatiss

Jimmy O’Connell with Cubby and Dana Broccoli at Pinewood Studios in 1976.

BLACK SCREEN.

One white dot and then another shimmy across a black background, vying for consequence as they vanish screen-right. One dot instantly returns framing a bankable British actor of the day walking across the screen in profile. That actor pauses, twists on the spot (or drops to his knee - depending on what decade you were born) and fires his gun at the audience. Blood pours down the screen, the circle starts dancing around before opening out iris-like and revealing...

Early June, 1983

St. Cuthbert Mayne School. Cranleigh, Surrey. I was seven and hadn’t even heard of James Bond 007. In the classroom we might have been preparing our Catholic-marinated selves for our First Holy Communion, but in the playground we were kneeling at the altar of popular culture as we obeyed a very devout - and transient -rota of film and TV tie-in gameplay. Every lunchtime the school field was jammed with kids on their imaginary Star Wars Speeder Bikes or soaring around with Superman flying-fists raised skywards. Individually they all thought they had the Stormtroopers and Man of Steel down. Collectively it looked like the nuns had opened the Ark of the Covenant every lunchtime. Despite having both a Superman flask and a mild Christopher Reeve crush (I once saw him in Guildford High Street and was most devastated my Mum didn’t ask his Mum if he could come round to ours for his tea that very night) I was trying to keep my feet and fists firmly on the ground. Besides, I was training to be a Jedi Knight. Naturally.

Whilst not quite getting prompted from ghostly visitations from a robe-clad Alex Guinness (as we called him), I had spent a whole fortnight in the playground training to be a Jedi. I even had a satchel strapped to my back as a makeshift Yoda. My seven-year-old thinking was that if I kept running around the playground avoiding the other kids flying to Krypton with their various Lois Lanes I would genuinely become a Jedi in two weeks. Or by morning break Friday, at the absolute latest. I would even try to use my Jedi mind to levitate packets of Monster Munch crisps.

In keeping with the transient nature of our film and TV gameplay, my self-taught Jedi training was itself broken by a quite spectacular playground production of Dallas – unfurling like a children’s Aida over two successive lunchtimes. I would like to say I was cast as Patrick Duffy (another later innocent crush of mine at the time – he was always towelling himself off in one of Southfork’s various en-suite bathrooms). But the truth is I was a very unprincipled Victoria Principal. It was that or be a male, nearly-eight-year-old Sue-Ellen which – had I lobbied for the sassy drunk Texan wife role - it would have led the nuns to put me instantly into foster care. I always felt the beady eye of Catholic compassion on me throughout my primary school years. I would be occasionally dragged to local church halls for ‘divorced children’ parties – where the broken-homed children of the district would invariably play Pin the Tail on your Demons, Pass The Emotional Baggage and non-ending bouts of Musical Chairs – where the adults would add more seats as the music stopped so no kids had to endure having their world pulled from under them…again! Or something like that. It must have been quite a sight for the nuns and dinner ladies to witness key scenes from Dallas recreated by angelic seven and eight-year-olds. We even had a cross-year cast list – i.e. kids from the year above took part. And that never happened. That was Catholic détente brought about by a shared love of Texan-based oil dramas. This might explain why all we ever recreated from Dallas were the Ewings’ deaths and arguments – ironic as that was the main thrust of the Biblical parables and hymns we were trying to forget.

In a school fancy-dress pageant far, far away – my best attempts at Luke Skywalker chic. Regrettably my Gandhi with a lightsaber ensemble did not win a rosette.

So with the school bell being the nearest we got to a Dallas cliff-hanger freeze-frame, our two-part special came to a not very dramatic end. Besides, our Bobby Ewing got detention, Cliff Barnes became the playground Airwolf until half-term and I chose to resume my Padewan studies a whole 16 years before George Lucas even invented the phrase. We were like a repertory theatre of Reagan era entertainment.

It was while I was trying my best Jedi running somersault-over-a-swamp tree manoeuvre that those two 007 white dots searched me out and found me in the playground. Just as my satchel Yoda and I were catching breath, I found an Octopussy pin badge in the grass. Too young to know that sounded naughty, it was however vaguely familiar. A boy in my class had just plastered some Octopussy breakfast cereal stickers all over his lunch box – but I didn’t like him as he had just glibly poached one of my best friends, and all the mums hated how glamorous his mum was in a Vicki Michelle from ‘Allo ‘Allo! type way. Some Bond fans have the first-time dignity of Sean Connery in the casino tux, George Lazenby in the kilt, Timothy Dalton and his C&A friendly anoraks or even Pierce Brosnan’s mid-90’s deck-wear. But no, it seemed my first encounter with my James Bond 007 was Roger Moore dressed as a clown promoting a wholegrain-wheat cereal ideal. Understandably I was not one bit bothered by this James Bond chap. Or Shredded Wheat.

However, on a weekend not far from that point in time, my Dad chose to dedicate one of our Divorced Parent Sundays™ to take a very reluctant me to see the recently released Octopussy at the Guildford Odeon. Not befitting of a newly qualified Jedi Knight, I had an anti-Bond tantrum in the foyer. Quite a dramatic one if I remember rightly. I even tried storming precociously through the iron turnstiles the wrong way. Frankly, the pull of the also newly released Return Of The Jedi and the fear of a secret agent dressed as a creepy clown were too much for me. And that was far from befitting of a calm, meditative Jedi Knight. This seven-year-old wanted Ewoks and X-Wings, not Roger Moore, that French bloke from Gigi and two rounds of Swedish actress crumpet poncing around colonial India. But for a very good reason my Dad was most insistent we saw Octopussy that June day – and his reasoning made so much more sense in the months, years and decades to come…

END OF PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE.

FADE TO BLACK.

CAPTION : “ALBERT R. BROCCOLI presents”

The title sequence of every Bond film lays out the stall for the ensuing film in striking graphic form - all to a John Barry inspired anthem. No such naked writhing and spring-boarding off of guns, bullets and unknown Leon Lovelies will be recreated here. But I will at least initiate this look at half a century of cinema’s most persistent chap of the British Empire by suggesting the image of some expensive cloth gloves spinning the leather-clad steering wheel of a bespoke car with a walnut dash. But they will not belong to 007 himself – even if the car sort of does.

I was always oddly fascinated by Grandad O’Connell’s gloves. They were one of the first things I remember about him. They were immaculate, looked expensive and felt relevant to his job. Actually both my grandfathers dressed well. And both of them had framed photos of their boss meeting the Queen hidden with veiled pride in their lounge drawers.

My Mum’s father, James McLaughlin, was a marine engineering draughtsman at the John Brown Shipyard in Clydebank, Glasgow. He helped design the iconic red funnel on the QE2 liner and – along with his brothers – was a leading design engineer in the John Brown firmament. My Mum was apparently near the Queen when she launched the QE2 at Clydebank – and then re-launched it because it did not move first time. They should have hired Roger Moore. He’d have slapped the ship’s back end into action. My Mum’s cousin, Sarah-Patricia, was allowed to ceremonially turn off the engines when the QE2 docked for the final time in Dubai in 2008. I like the poetry of the McLaughlins’ involvement in the conception of such a ship and then helping to administer its death rites.

Frederick James O’Connell, serving in India in the mid-1930s.

My Dad’s Father was also called James – or Jimmy, as he was known. Born in Woking in 1911, he was the last of six children from Irish parents living next door to the same electrical works where their father worked. Like so many, Jimmy left school aged 14 and became an errand boy, labourer and newspaper deliverer until he enlisted in the army in 1929, aged 18. After discharging then promptly re-enlisting himself, he embarked for India in 1932 where he spent the next five years in the Signals Corp. Jimmy had been in India for less than two months when he “sustained an accidental injury to his left thigh,” yet “was not to blame” (according to army medical records). He returned to Woking in 1937 and met his future wife Renee at a local dance night, his leg clearly healed.

As the contagion of an Anglo-German conflict took a greater and uncertain hold throughout the summer of 1939, Jimmy finally set sail for France three weeks after Neville Chamberlain declared war. After marrying Renee in the Spring of 1940, he was now working as a dispatch rider for the Royal Signals Corp in Calais, Lille and Dunkirk. It was one day into the famous Dunkirk evacuations of May 1940 when – according to Jimmy’s own medical testimonies, “I was in Dunkirk and blown off my motor-cycle by shell fire. I was struck in the leg by a splinter, which smashed the leg, and caused shrapnel wounds.” His recovery was a messy six-month bout of operations, diseased wounds, special boots and callipers. With the army declaring him “permanently unfit for any form of Military Service,” Jimmy was eventually discharged in the July of 1941 with a dropped foot, slow-healing shrapnel damage and an inability to stand for any length of time.

With a wife and infant son to now support, Jimmy eventually saw out the war taking all sorts of work where he could find it – just like thousands of displaced others. In 1946, Jimmy started work as a chauffeur.

It was a job he had tried before until various cars and their clutch pedals got the better of his bad leg. But now he was working in Northamptonshire as a chauffeur for the Macdonald-Buchanan family at the stately Cottesbrooke Hall – a Queen Anne style address reputed to have been the inspiration for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Having been more or less homeless and initially having to wrangle transport up to Cottesbrooke in the back of a Bentalls department store van with the five-year-old Gerald in tow, Jimmy and Renee worked ‘under stairs’ for the whisky baron’s family. It was here, in the village of Cottesbrooke that John – my Dad – was born in 1948. But the Southern-centric Renee would get very nervous in any foreign clime north of the Thames, missed her family in Surrey and the gentry-orientated education options for their two non-gentry sons were never going to be favourable. So after six years, Jimmy and the family left the Macdonald-Buchanans and Cottesbrooke Hall and headed back to Surrey.

There followed a series of driving jobs and temporarily splitting the family in order just to house them, an army medical board declared how that Nazi shrapnel may well have pre-determined Jimmy’s eventual chauffeur life. “He is fit for all ordinary work not entailing prolonged standing or walking.” Jimmy eventually negotiated a driving job with one Lord Furness. As was the reality for so many post-war families, Renee and the boys were living in a packed house in Hersham, Surrey, while Jimmy took an apartment in Marble Arch to be nearer Lord Furness and to avoid overcrowding the in-laws.

Anthony Furness was grandson to the Furness shipping magnates, a childhood friend of Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall and later a theatrical producer and agent – all the time alongside his parliamentary and shipping duties. Furness’s socialite mother Thelma was herself an ‘It girl’ and fleeting 1920’s film actress, counting William Randolph Hearst as one of her producers. She was also an oft-cited lover and companion of King Edward VIII, then the Prince of Wales. It was Thelma who was purported to have introduced Edward to her friend, Wallis Simpson. Some years later Edward resigned Thelma to history as he was about to go on and make some of his own with Wallis. Tony Furness was also first cousin to Manhattan actress, fashionista and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. One of her husbands was one Pat di Cicco – Hollywood producer, agent and first cousin of film producer Albert R. Broccoli.

As if Jimmy’s post-war serendipity was not already making him the Forrest Gump of Hersham – where he was close to finally acquiring a permanent address for Renee and the boys – he was about to start driving for Lord Beaverbrook. The British-Canadian business tycoon was the owner of the Daily Express, Fleet Street’s first press baron, close ally of Winston Churchill and a central member of the War Cabinet during both World Wars. He was also friends with the author Ian Fleming. The pair shared mutual acquaintances, wartime bolt-holes, military contacts, bridge tables and social hotspots – not least the post-war social set occupying the north beaches and colonial residences of Jamaica. It was Lord Beaverbrook who invited Fleming to turn the Bond novels into a daily comic strip form for his Daily Express newspaper. Of course there is scant linkage to be made here, but the 007 stars were already aligning for Jimmy.

In 1957 a bout of tuberculosis laid Jimmy low and his finances even lower. Always one who favoured driving a Rolls Royce – driving a substandard Austin Princess would apparently be mortifying for him – an eventually recovered Jimmy began to keep in with a small network of London-based Rolls Royce chauffeurs. Due to the nature of the job they often had time to kill and would congregate in and around Mayfair. Because gossip was free and their waiting hours lengthy, the band of chauffeurs would quickly hear all the local news – including which potential employers needed drivers. It was the late 1950s when Jimmy heard of and took that one job, under one boss that he would have for the rest of his working life. A London-based American film producer with a company called Warwick Films was looking for a driver. That producer was Albert R Broccoli. Jimmy landed the job, and witnessed the launch of Warwick’s final titles including the splendid The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), where he became a friend of the film’s lead, Peter Finch.

The real ‘Universal Exports’ – 2 South Audley Street, home of Eon Productions for the first 30 or so years of Bond movie making.

Jimmy was there when Cubby and his wife Nedra experienced Warwick’s successes and continued their lives in London. Jimmy was there when Cubby first had the notions of adapting a James Bond novel for the big screen. And Jimmy was there when those thoughts were curtailed as illness tragically and unexpectedly claimed Nedra, leaving Cubby to raise a young son and daughter on his own. These were hard times for Cubby. But Jimmy’s assistance was resolute – possibly buoyed up by an understanding of being responsible for a young family in uncertain times. Jimmy then continued to drive Cubby into happier times when he later met and married Dana Wilson in 1959. And it was Jimmy who was waiting at London Airport a year later to meet Cubby and Dana off the plane when they brought their six-week-old daughter Barbara to the UK for the first time to set up a family home with all their children in London.

With finances and circumstances leaving Warwick at the end of its run, Cubby Broccoli eventually teamed up with Canadian producer Harry Saltzman who shared Cubby’s desire to fetch Commander Bond to the big screen and who happened to have the film rights to Ian Fleming’s novels. After a few months of back and forths, in 1961 the pair launched a new Mayfair-based independent film production company called Eon Productions. Eon’s output was – and still is – the James Bond films. And because the new set-up might possibly have needed a chauffeur, it seems Cubby brought Jimmy with him.

In hindsight, both my grandfathers had separate hands in some of the only decent output of the ailing British Empire in the 20th century – shipbuilding and James Bond. And it was my grandfather Jimmy’s hands – clothed in those ornate chauffeur gloves – that were my first inkling of his involvement with 007.

I have always had James Bond in my life – before I even knew it, and certainly before I found that Octopussy badge in the playground. I may have even been conceived (and I really wished my mother hadn’t told me this) at my Grandad’s house during a 1974 Christmas TV screening of Eon Productions’ Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (itself based on an Ian Fleming book). It may even have been a metre away from the same driveway where Cubby Broccoli’s car would sometimes stay overnight (though thankfully never during Christmas 1974). So, as a possibly serendipitous conception overseen by an Eon-employed Dick Van Dyke was followed by a childhood punctuated by James Bond movies, an adolescence soundtracked by 007, sparked a desire to work in film and then an adulthood and professional life that now sees them as vital cinematic security blankets, I feel sort of vindicated in writing a love letter to Bond.

Despite thinking I needed to be an actor, then a stuntman and possibly a director (the only film jobs listed in our rubbish school computer’s careers guidance directory) and because of the inadvertent influence of the filmic jaunts of this 007 chap and an early Channel Four commission, I eventually fell into writing. Although – conversely - I have never harboured great ambitions to pen a Bond film.

No, that’s not true. I admit it – I may have a Bond film treatment in a WHSmith box file somewhere with a killer title I will let Eon buy off me for an easy £1 plus an opening title credit. I even wrote title song lyrics, which I am willing to sell for another pound. That could be the best two pounds the Bond management ever spend.

My four year-old self keeping the British end up (and the fortunes of the home-knit industry).

But Catching Bullets is not my autobiography. It is not even the biography of the James Bond films. It is the biography of watching James Bond films.

The world is littered with more than enough books chronicling 007’s 50-year cinematic reign. They slavishly discuss the films in release order, starting with Dr. No (1962) and usually ending on an afterthought of a final chapter detailing the most recent Bond outing. Catching Bullets may end up shamelessly repeating that last publishing truism. However, the rest of this tome intends to follow the very selfish path of revisiting the films in the order this fan saw them. Older Bond fans are fortunate enough to have seen all 307 Bond movies released in the cinema since Moses came down from a Pinewood mountain with two reels of film marked ‘Property of Broccoli.’ They are the increasingly elite few who have chronologically seen the on-screen Bond take his first steps, go through primary school in the 1960s, college in the 1970s, get married and widowed, take a few graduate jobs in the 1980s not wholly befitting of a spy (circus clown, ski instructor and iceberg navigator), get his pension, get married and widowed again, go back to his roots and then start all over again but with blonder hair and tighter abs. I too have seen those notes played out but – to paraphrase Eric Morecambe – not necessarily in the right order.

Like all virginity-bursting moments, my first encounters with the various Bond films were mixed and varied – catching 007’s bullets over a series of rainy British bank holidays, World Cup scheduling alternatives, a thankfully short-lived Cub Scout trip, a magical petrol station-cum-video store, Christmas Day TV premieres, the local monoplex, some birthday VHS tapes and a collection of charming Eon Productions’ crew screenings at dawn o’clock. But this is not a list. This is not about marks out of ten. This is about being in the audience, being raised on the cinema of the 1970s and 1980s and knowing why someone bolts down their Christmas dinner quick enough to catch Roger Moore falling out of a plane without a parachute on TV after the Queen’s Speech.

James Bond’s filmic bullets have punctuated a life, entertained a life, fascinated a life and inflicted years of Shirley Bassey songs on to friends, parties, at least seven barbecues and one wedding. And this odd marriage between a Surrey boy and a chap of the British Empire started with biting the first bullet – the first date that was 1983’s Octopussy.

OCTOPUSSY AND A VIEW TO A KILL

Sunday 12th June 1983 Octopussy. When a Double-O agent is found dead in East Berlin dressed as a circus clown, James Bond (Roger Moore) trails a dubiously purchased Fabergé egg into palatial India. He encounters the mysterious Octopussy (Maud Adams) before unearthing a rogue Cold War plot to trigger a nuclear war via a jewellery-smuggling travelling circus.

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Octopussy is an unusually timeless Bond film. Apart from the odd fold-up jet, Sony monitor and Seiko timepiece, the film doesn’t feel particularly contemporary – with its émigré palaces, vintage cars, lush barges, hot air balloons and steam trains. It is an Agatha Christie India stepping on the sari of the then raging Raj genre – evidenced in Heat And Dust, Gandhi and the imminent Jewel in the Crown, The Far Pavilions and A Passage to India. This imperial setting seems a perfect fit for the Boy’s Own colonial outpost that is James Bond himself, which is curious as Octopussy is easily the most feminine 007 film entry to date. Like Octopussy’s island itself, the film is populated with women pushing on the story. From a Cuban Leon Lovely (a term used in honour of the 007, Carry On and Hammer legend and Dame Screen Crumpet herself, Valerie Leon – the only woman I have ever met who made me blush) setting in motion Bond’s pre-title break-out to an Ambassador’s wife taking delivery of the plot coupon that is the Fabergé Egg plus the shifting allegiances of Kristina Wayborn’s lithe go-between Magda, two Moneypennys (well, the real one and her Sloane-clone intern backup, Miss Smallbone) and a women’s refuge housing umpteen sari-clad hench-crumpets. Added to that is the titular Octopussy, powering character and story decisions from the start. To paraphrase another Fleming story from the posthumously-published Octopussy & The Living Daylights short story collection, the whole of this Bond film is the property of many ladies. And the last of whom is India herself.

Maud Adams is a defining leading Bond lady for me. When I was in “the closet” (the gay one, not the one Roger Moore had to shut all 70’s Bond girls in at least once) I would use Maud as my Straight Shield. “Come on Mark, your turn – who would be your ideal Hollywood romance?” friends would ask. “Oh let me think…” I lied, “without a doubt, Maud Adams.”

It was a defence mechanism that was apparently transparent to everyone but me. In fact when I did finally come out to friends, Maud Adams was thrown back at me like a scorned lover I never had. I would like it noted how I would still very much like to marry Maud Adams. My beautiful boyfriend of 12 years and counting might have some issues with that potentially very strange domestic set-up - “Mum, Dad, I’d like you to meet our wife Octopussy” - but he can worry about the domestic logistics as I row Maud through the English countryside, threading daisies into each other’s hair, mulling over the correct way to tie a sari for launching oneself off a palace balcony and planning our next trip to India. Straight guys are allowed a ‘man crush.’ Maud Adams is my ‘girl crush.’