Rewind to James Bond’s most recent fresh start

CASINO ROYALE Thursday, ITV4, 9pm

IN 2006, in an attempt to add pep to a film series grown tired and stale, James Bond franchise owners Eon Productions handed the keys to the Aston Martin to a relative unknown, Daniel Craig.

He could act (not a pre-requisite, admittedly), had the all-important twinkle in his startlingly blue eyes and, as audiences would discover, looked great in a pair of tight La Perla swimming trunks.

Behind the scenes, Eon also gave a share of the writing duties to Hollywood newcomer Paul Haggis, writer-director of kinetic crime drama Crash, and for their source material went back to the very beginning of it all: Casino Royale. Published in 1953 and the first of the 11 James Bond novels, it’s short, tightly composed and, beyond a card game and an extended torture scene which reveals Fleming’s own penchant for S&M, nothing very much happens. In other words it’s a perfect place for what is essentially an origins story.

Craig’s tenure as Bond ended with last year’s No Time To Die and is broadly considered a great success, thanks in large part to the excellent start he made here. Sure, the tech is hilariously clunky – the film was released two months before Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone and he clearly didn’t give MI6 a heads up – and, pointedly, there is no scene in which Q unveils the whizz-bang gadgetry which had become such a fixture of the Dalton/Brosnan years.

But everything else is bang on the money. It was an era when dark was in vogue (the first of Christopher Nolan’s noir-ish Batman reboots had come out a year earlier), and Casino Royale jumped nimbly onto the bandwagon.

Talking of jumping, you can probably skip the first big action sequence unless you’re a fan of parkour, or free-running. Our first sight of Bond is in Madagascar, where he sets off in pursuit of a terrorist and becomes involved in long chase which shows off the (admittedly awesome) skills of parkour legend Sebastian Foucan. Much better is the second act.

It forms the core of the film and pretty much follows the plot of the novel as Bond heads for Montenegro to take on criminal financier Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) in a highstakes poker game.

The venue? Casino Royale, of course. Escorting Bond (and the millions in British government money he’s using for a stake) is headturning Treasury wonk Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), who appears to take an instant dislike to the cocky spy, only recently elevated to double-oh status and already trying the patience of service boss M (Judi Dench). Of course her hauteur doesn’t last long …