The Moore, the merrier
Olly Smith was left shaken and stirred by a friendship bonded by liver and bacon (and booze!)
Roger Moore was my hero. Growing up I practised curling my eyebrow in the mirror to mimic the facial expression that seemed just as effective facing down villains as it did seducing beautiful double-agents. Even today my two daughters are remarkably adept at mimicking my quizzical stare as I interrogate them in my best Roger voice on the status of their homework.
I first met Roger in 2004 in bizarre circumstances after my friend, the animator Dan Chambers, created a short cartoon, Roger Moore’s Requiem, after he had collapsed on stage while appearing in the Morecambe and Wise tribute, The Play What I Wrote, in 2003. I’d wanted to thank him for being such an inspiration to me, and Roger declared himself ‘tickled pink’ by the irreverent cartoon, which he saw on the internet.
This led to the three of us collaborating on The Fly Who Loved Me, a short animation Dan and I put together for Unicef, in which Roger played the part of Father Christmas and I was a fly who volunteers to pull the sleigh in place of his reindeer. I can still clearly remember him walking into the suite at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo: resplendent, genial, the self-deprecating 007 idol of my childhood.
But he became my hero for completely new and different reasons. Aside from his top tip of how to get people smiling for a photograph (‘just say witty titty sex’), and revealing his love of gin martinis (unlike 007’s vodka version) and Loire Valley Sancerres (such as the Pascal Jolivet Les Caillottes), he was determined to help tackle issues that blight the lives of children around the world.
Roger was unfailingly charming, funny and considerate. One time I remember lunching with him when a health scare compelled him to eat only steamed fish – he insisted I ordered and devoured his favourite liver and bacon on his behalf. He ate it with his eyes.
They say you should never meet your heroes. But in fact you must. If they don’t meet your expectations, they should never have been your hero in the first place. As far as it goes with Roger and me, nobody did it better. I only hope there’s a guest room in the great ski chalet in the sky. With lashings of Sancerre.