Live and Let Sigh... How Bond showed the ’70s were not so grim

SIR Roger moore, who died this week at the age of 89, regularly topped polls as the best – or at least the most popular – James Bond. On the face of it that is a puzzle, for no one (not even Sir Roger himself) gave him great place as an actor. as was said wickedly of Katharine Hepburn, his range covered a gamut of emotions from a to B.

When compared with Laurence Olivier he joked ‘at least I’m taller’, and after a critic unkindly remarked he was but a one-eyebrow actor, he replied mildly that he was, in fact, a two-eyebrow actor.

He is recalled so affectionately because he held the 007 role longer than anyone else – from Live and Let Die in 1973 to a View To a Kill in 1985, by which time he was nearly 60. and because he brought a certain vulnerability to the character – Sean Connery’s Bond is essentially a killer, Sir Roger’s is a lover. But, most of all, because he was by far the most British.

No actor did suave better, or took himself less seriously. He was not afraid to play Bond, ever so delicately, for laughs; foiling diabolical villains and dodging the jaws of death with a dry quip and a very British amateurishness.

The movies then had a lighter touch that they have long since lost – in the Daniel Craig era they seem dreadfully bleak – but they were the more beloved because, of course, it was the 1970s and, as a country, Britain otherwise had very little to cheer about.

Yet Sir Roger and his stunt-double Rick Sylvester gave us one of the greatest Bond scenes when, at the climax of a desperate ski chase, 007 hurls himself off a vertiginous Canadian cliff and for awful silent seconds falls and falls… and then a great parachute unfurls in the colours of the Union Flag as monty Norman’s jaunty theme music for the Spy Who Loved me kicks in.

One cast member recalled: ‘I saw that and the whole cinema erupted. I thought that was the most fantastic opening ever – just brilliant.’

It has, these days, become fashionable to bang on about the awfulness of the 1970s. David Cameron seized on margaway ret Thatcher’s death four years ago to paint an apocalyptic picture of a decade when ‘successive governments had failed to deal with what was beginning to be called “the British disease”.

‘appalling industrial relations. Poor productivity. Persistently high inflation. Though it seems absurd today, the state had got so big that it owned our airports and airline, the phones in our houses, and trucks on our roads. They even owned a removal company. The air was thick with defeatism; there was a sense that the role of government was simply to manage decline.’

IT was certainly a very difficult time for Britain’s rulers. Three governments in succession, indeed, were effectively toppled by the trades unions.

But the 1970s, as andrew marr has pointed out, were actually very good years for the mass of ordinary folk. Incomes and living standards steadily rose; property was cheap and unemployment was historically low. and, looking back, if the politics of the time seem far more robust, they were arguably a good deal more honest.

We were then still very close to the war and had a certain unflappable humour; a gentler of life. most of us still walked to school; most children keenly read books and comics. Television was far less pervasive, there being (by today’s standards) so little of it; only three channels, broadcasting largely in the evening.

We put up with the inconveniences of incessant industrial action in a sort of abiding spirit of the Blitz, and – faced with a new terrorist threat far bigger and with more frequent atrocities than we endure today – emoted a good deal less and simply told Irish jokes.

and we prospered culturally. These were glorious years for British pop music and British fashion; years of enduring and creative television, from such gentle sitcoms as The Good Life to the more anarchic affairs of Fawlty Towers and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and drama – such as I, Claudius or edward & mrs Simpson – that still stands up remarkably well.

amid all this, Sir Roger’s outings as James Bond are still remembered with extraordinary affection. That is partly because, by this point in the franchise, the films were utterly escapist. There had been no Cold War plotline since From Russia With Love in 1963; Bond never tangled with Baadermeinhof, the PLO or the IRa.

But it was still more because cinema by the 1970s had become so miserable. The British movie industry was in advanced collapse and, in the wake of Chappaquiddick and Kent State and the manson murders, US films had become extraordinarily dark and cynical: paranoid inner-city affairs with dark anti-heroes.

BOND, though, offered us an idyllic world that could never go stale – beautiful women, sleek hotels, glamorous resorts; megalomaniacal villains with diabolical schemes; fast cars and brilliant gadgets and chilled bubbly and, through it all and to inevitable triumph, the immaculately tailored 007.

Sir Roger’s genius lay in subtly acknowledging the absurdity of the part. ‘my whole reaction was always, “He is not a real spy”,’ he once observed. ‘You can’t be a real spy and have everybody in the world know who you are and what your drink is. That’s just hysterically funny.’

Yet he, so to speak, kept the British end up through years when there was little more to cheer about. But as time passed and great horrors once thought immutable fell away – the Soviet Bloc and the Cold War; apartheid in South africa; even the terror from Northern Ireland – Bond himself entered a crisis. Sir Roger’s successor in the role, Timothy Dalton, never convinced. The character seemed dated, something from another era.

after Dalton’s second – and final – film, Licence to Kill, in 1989, no movie in the franchise was made at all for six years.

When Goldeneye finally premiered in 1995, it was a brave and determined reboot with wholesale cast changes – Dame Judi Dench as a female m; Pierce Brosnan as 007 – and the first film not to use any material from Bond’s longdead creator, Ian Fleming.

The film bravely took on the spy’s serious image problem. at one point m calls him ‘a sexist, misogynist dinosaur’ and a ‘relic of the Cold War’.

Bond recovered and has since, if rather more humourlessly, prospered. Sir Roger never made anything of note after hanging up the WaltherPPK. He was by the late 1980s hopelessly typecast and in any event was immensely rich, with homes in Switzerland, monte Carlo and London.

From 1991 he was a tireless and unpaid ambassador for Unicef, fighting child poverty the world over. ‘You can either grow old gracefully or begrudgingly,’ Sir Roger once drawled. ‘I chose both.’