MY WORD IS MY [JAMES] BOND

Timothy Dalton is the best actor to have ever played James Bond. There, I said it. I'm not ashamed. Although I suppose I'll have to back that statement up with a pretty compelling argument. So why do I think Timothy Dalton was the best Bond? Because when The Living Daylights came out in 1987, it was a revelation.

Compelling enough for you? Don't worry, it's not as weird as it sounds. I was raised on James Bond, perhaps as much as Doctor Who, if not more. I can't remember which film I saw first, but it was probably an old Connery one on TV, perhaps Goldfinger or Dr. No. I wasn't allowed to watch R-rated movies at the time, so I had to get my fill of sex and violence from pre-PG13 PG films. And the Bond films were an excellent source. Somehow, they were titillating yet family friendly at the same time. 

There was an excitement to them, but you didn't get that flush of embarrassment while watching them with your parents. (It helped that I really didn't grasp the subversiveness of calling a film Octopussy at the time.) Even though my first Bond was Connery, I remember my formative favourite incarnation of the spy being Roger Moore. And I have to say, when they retired his licence to kill, along with his wig, I was highly sceptical that anyone could fill his orthopaedic shoes.

Enter Timothy Dalton.

For me, The Living Daylights was a jolt of adrenaline; it made me appreciate film as a visceral thrill. This was a more adult Bond, and it made me feel like a grownup movie-watcher. Daylights wasn't so much a re-imagining of the series as it was a re-writing. It had all the hallmarks of a classic Bond film: amazing stunts (Skydiving! Skiing!), a tricked out Aston Martin, cool gadgets, an over-the-top villain (but not TOO over-the-top), and a creepy henchman who doesn't say much. It also managed to incorporate an element of humour without crossing over into parody (although, in retrospect, the cello case sled scene is pretty silly).

But these elements felt fresh when combined with a more serious tone and an infusion of Dalton blood. After the geriatric antics of A View To A Kill, it brought some respect back to Bond. People have made such a big deal about Daniel Craig's gritty, more realistic portrayal of the spy who loved me in Casino Royale, but those people also forget - Timothy Dalton did it first. Dalton's Bond, at the time, was considered the most similar to Ian Fleming's creation, and thankfully moved the series away from the high level camp of the Moore films. This was something that wasn't lost on 7 year-old me.

His Bond's reaction to the death of a fellow MI6 agent is spectacular. In the other films, a minor character being killed would result in Connery or Moore arching an eyebrow and then moving on. Here though, it’s enough to enrage the man (I pity that balloon), especially since he’s figured out the villains are playing him and MI6 for suckers and they basically wasted a good agent to try and sucker him some more. In Licence to Kill, in the wake of Bond finding his best friend's new wife murdered, the film hinges entirely on Bond being affected enough to quit MI6 and go on a revenge spree. Again, the arched brow approach wouldn’t have worked here. Coupled with the knowledge that Bond is basically seeing his own wedding day replayed before his eyes with a different cast of characters (good friends, no less) and you’ve really got an emotional powder keg in Bond.

Nothing could satify him but revenge on the man who hurt his mates. With the exception of Craig, I cannot see Connery, Moore or Brosnan carrying out the role of a psychologically damaged rouge agent bent on killing for the sole purpose of killing. To me, Licence to Kill is the film Diamonds are Forever should have been. Connery seems largely disinterested throughout, and there’s no tension at all and no reference to his wife's death in the previous film, the largely forgettable On Her Majesty's Secret Service. When he meets face-to-face with Charles Gray’s Blofeld, you'd have thought the writers would have put in a line like, "Hey, James, you do remember that this is the guy who machine-gunned your wife to death in the film before, right?"

Nope, but Dalton did. When Della throws her garter at Bond, teasing him, "the one who catches this is the next one to..." Bond looks visibly pained; when Della asks Felix about it, Felix makes a short, sad reference to Bond once having been married, "but that was a long time ago." Dalton just nails it. In a brief but compelling moment you see Bond's anguish pierce his happiness for his friend, and it sets up the rest of the film perfectly. As Judi Dench's 'M' herself puts it in Quantum of Solace; "It'd be a pretty cold bastard who didn't want revenge for the death of someone he loved ..."

I for one, certainly would.

Dalton was, and still is, criminally underrated as Bond. It’s a bit annoying to me that when polls are done of the best Bond, Dalton is always ranked low, sometimes under Lazenby. Really? Lazenby wasn’t terrible, but there’s no universe where Dalton shouldn’t be at least in 4th place. Hopefully Craig’s Dalton-like interpretation of Bond allows for re-evaluation of Dalton’s tenure, and those critical of him can take a step back and see that he had it right, but audiences at the time just weren’t ready. Those who were used to Moore’s comic interpretation were horrified at the dark menace Dalton brought to Bond. 

It's not that other Bonds have not exhibited brutal acts before - Sean Connery shooting a defenceless man in Dr. No or Roger Moore pushing a car over a cliff with a killer trapped inside in For Your Eyes Only, where Moore dumps a wheelchair-bound 'Blofeld' into a cooling tower, but it was so comically done, that you feel no sense of violence, just hilarity. But in Dalton, you see the darkness, the violence, and you are hit with the realisation that Dalton’s Bond is no different from the people he killed. They are all the same ruthless murderers who just found themselves on different sides of the coin. Unfortunately, people weren't ready for it, as evidenced by the return to a lighter tone with successive films. Dalton was replaced by that Irish bloke from Remington Steele and we wouldn't see another hard-edged Bond until Daniel Craig in 2006. 

Sure, there are better Bond movies, but Dalton is the best Bond. He wasn't as lecherous as Connery, as smug as Moore, or as lethargic as Lazenby. He made the character more human, elevating him above a persona, a fantasy aspired to by boys (and, to be honest, a lot of men as well). His charm was less of an affectation, less of a put-on. He was the most human. Even at 7 years old, I could sense this.

And that's why nobody does it better.

For those of you who feel Dalton is just a slightly larger blip on the Bond radar than George Lazenby, have I convinced you to give him another shot? Or was I just exposed to these films at a critical time in my cinematic development, and therefore biased? No, I can unequivocally say that they stand up for me, at least as well as any of the Bond films. If you look past the late 80's trappings, you're left with two very strong entries in the James Bond canon, as well as the most successful on-screen portrayal of the literary character ever.

I look forward with baited breath for SPECTRE, though …

GARDEN MOANS

Did you know 27% of male heart-attack victims are struck down while cutting the grass ?? What, you didn’t ?? That’s because it's not true, I just made it up. But I bet the real figure is huge. I recently spent a (what was supposed to be lazy) Bank Holiday off chopping down a tree, laying slabs and getting covered in mud and cement dust as a result. What the garden now looks like isn’t that much different to how it started either. According to another recent bit of mysteriously-obtained statistics, 2.2 million of the new homes built in Britain this year will not have a private garden. This is because developers are building lots of flats and - I never would have guessed this - the likelihood of having a garden is greater for larger detached dwellings than flats.

I believe there is another way of looking at this. If people are paving over their front lawns and selling their back gardens to Bryant and Barratt, it must mean they value a car-parking space and an extra bit of dosh more than they value spending half their weekend huffing and puffing behind a lawnmower. Clearly, some people plainly don’t like having a garden, and I can understand why. It’s because once you start gardening, there is no end, no point at which you can say, “It’s finished”, unlike when you’re painting or redecorating the front room, for example.

First of all, there’s the bothersome business of choosing from a vast array of plants, all of which have horrendously-complicated Latin names so that the people who work in garden centres can laugh in your face when you get it wrong. Flustered, you will make a panic purchase of something that is pink and won’t grow in your particular garden because it’s not north-facing, or the soil is too acidic, or the wind’s too strong. And even if it does grow, it will turn out to be either a twig, or something so rapacious that within five months it will have eaten your lawn, your shed, your pets and probably your children as well.

First, though, it will want to eat your satellite dish. All plants do this. No matter how hard you encourage them to grow in one direction, they will make a beeline for the dish, so that in the middle of "Doctor Who", you will suddenly get a notice saying no signal is being received. This means you have to go outside armed with a pair of secateurs and some dynamite. Well, I would. We have had some weeds that, in their desperation to get at our satellite dish, brutally murdered three of my Mum’s rose plants that lay in its path. It used them as a launch pad, until the poor things couldn’t cope with the weight and simply snapped. Gravel does not do this. And anyway, once you embark on a project such as a garden, there is simply no end. Next thing you know, you’ll be in a greenhouse, making Harry Potter-style potions with a pestle and mortar, and not sleeping at night because of the prospect of greenfly. Nobody ever loses sleep over their Wickes timber decking.

The other thing I’ve learning in my short career as a gardener is that everything you want to grow dies, and everything that you wish was dead grows like wildfire. It’s like "The Killing Fields" out there sometimes. But let’s just say you do have a garden, you don’t mind dragging your lawnmower through the house every weekend, and that you like being up to your elbows in mud and mortar. Fine, but because you are an amateur, your garden is likely to be fairly small, and because you are British you think pansies are pretty, so you will eventually end up with something that looks like a sponsored roundabout in Milton Keynes. There are some great gardens in this country, but yours isn’t going to one of them. Yours is going to look like it was planted and maintained by Ozzy Osbourne.

And it’s not somewhere you can ever sit and relax or have summer barbecues or parties either, because every time you try, you will notice a bit of moss that needs removing, or a beetle that needs spraying, or a weed that needs beheading. So you’ll be up and down a jet-propelled pogo stick, until one day, while doing a bit of hedge trimming, you will probably cut through the cable and wind up getting electrocuted.

Just make sure you stress in your will that you want to see Alan Titchmarsh get the pants sued off him.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

At this point in human development, I think we can look back on what we've achieved and agree that language is one of our better inventions – certainly better than Wi-Fi, the Dustbuster, “Britain’s Got No Talent” and Super Mario Galaxy. Picture a world without language. Go on. No gossip. No chit-chat. No road signs. No newspapers. No theatre. No internet. The only forms of mass media entertainment available are slapstick and photography. But then, that's the beauty of language. It can change the way you see things without actually altering anything in the physical realm. It turns good into bad and bad into good and back again without anyone ever lifting a finger.

Take "fun-size" Mars bars. They're tiny. Gone, in just a single bite. So, they don't last as long as a regular chocolate bars, in fact as a taste experience they probably last for less longer than the average X-Factor winner’s career. And there’s another thing, with them being individually wrapped, they're fiddly as hell too. And pound for pound, they're actually more expensive than their standard counterparts. But, back in the mists of time, some marketing genius decided to label them as "fun-size". And it worked. These were dinky novelties you could eat !! Hooray for fun-size !!

But the magic of language didn't end there. As well as instantly transforming each and every shortcoming of these miniscule snacks into a thrilling bonus, the sly association of the word "fun" with the concept of "small helpings" had the side-effect of making regular-size chocolate bars seem less decadent, less naughty by comparison. If little ones were fun, regular ones were pedestrian slabs of edible workload. Sometime later, of course, “king-size” Mars bars hit the market, thus imbuing an act of calorific gluttony with an unwarranted air of imperial glamour. This was an imposing, statesmanlike snack to be reckoned with; a nougat mothership; the Mars bar of royalty, language had worked its magic once again.

Now, as a result of all of this, there are many silly, twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. I also have a bit of an aversion to the use of “home” instead of “house”. So if you were to ask me round to “your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta”, I would almost certainly glare rather angrily at you until you decided to go away. But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Lady Gaga’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hungover … is 'beverage'. Apparently they used to have “bever” days at Eton when extra beer was brought in for the boys. And this almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Albert Einstein would understand.

And therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hotels have got it into their heads that the word "beverage", with its Etonian and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing a customer. Even when said customer is wearing ripped stonewashed jeans and a t-shirt with more holes than the plot of the last Star Trek movie. And why is a bowl of pasta more appealing than a plate or a dish of pasta ?? And why not simply say pasta ?? Because don’t worry, I’ll presume it’ll come on some form of crockery, in the same way that I’ll presume, if you have a kettle in your kitchen, you might have some coffee granules and tea bags in there as well.

Now I’m not trying to give the impression that I’m in favour of one of those “Campaigns for Plain English”, because I know how important it is that our language evolves, but just to illustrate how much of a rain check we need here, I’ll leave you with the best example I know of this nonsense. It was a rack of papers in a hotel foyer, over which there was a sign:

"NEWSPAPERS FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE"

All they had left was a solitary copy of the Daily Mail, so it wasn’t even technically correct.