Sir Roger Moore1927-2017

It sounds morbid, but I've been meaning to write an obituary for Roger Moore since 2013. I had the immense fortune to interview him for the Empire podcast in the previous October, and while it was everything you'd hope for from an interview with Roger Moore, it did strike me that he was a Very Old Man (he'd just turned 85 that week), and his delicate shuffle and hushed tones suggested that he might not be long for this world. Every now and again I wondered whether to make a start, but each time I put it off - partly because I'm lazy, but mostly because I didn't want to admit that he might not actually be immortal. He, too, evidently decided to put off dying until he'd written a few more books, performed a few more sell-out shows and generally enjoyed the absolute shit out of his ridiculously charmed life. Turns out James Bond is pretty goddamn hard to kill after all.

Still, the day when Twitter could at long last break out its "Roger no Moore" gag has finally arrived, so only now do I sit down to gather my thoughts about the first 007 to ascend to the great damp-fannied-Bond-girl-filled boudoir in the sky. This isn't going to be a biography (read his books for that, they're terrific), but it is going to be tediously personal, so please forgive me if I uncharacteristically go off on a boring ramble about James Bond and Roger Moore for once.

Like most people my age, I was introduced to Rog (and Bond) by my dad and ITV. I'm ashamed to say I can't remember which Bond film I first saw on the telly, but I do know that that's how Roger first exposed himself to me: unconvincingly beating up lesser-paid stuntmen without getting a hair out of place, before making a terrible quip, throwing back a goblet of fizz and sucking the face off an alarmingly young lady who would then probably try to kill him. It's a lifestyle to which eight-year-old me immediately aspired, and has disappointingly failed to achieve thus far. But then I'm not Roger Moore, and nor is anybody else - not least the three actors who took over his role but, for various reasons, chose not to emulate him.

Because how do you follow Roger Moore? You can't, so you don't. You wouldn't get away with it, partly because the world has mercifully moved on from finding sexism and racism funny (not that that was the backbone of Rog's humour, but it would be disingenuous to ignore it), but mostly because with the twinkle of a baby blue eye, the gentle elevation of a beautifully-coiffed eyebrow and a wry grin, Rog's Bond could get away with pretty much anything. I loved this about him when I was a kid, hated it when I became a dull Bond purist in my twenties and have now made peace with it for what it is: cinema history, for better or worse. 

It's easy to dismiss that mercurial run of films that somehow frequently defied quality control to keep James Bond afloat in the '70s and '80s despite increasingly fierce competition in the action movie market. Rog didn't single-handedly turn the franchise into self-parody, but his name and eyebrows were front and centre when Ian Fleming's cold, cruel secret agent glided past a double-taking pigeon in a hover-gondola or defused an atomic bomb while dressed as Bingo fucking Dimples the clown. You can groan all you like (and believe me, I have), but try and imagine any other Bond actor pulling that shit off. Moore turned the Bond films into Roger Moore films, and there's nothing wrong with that in a franchise which frequently needs its pomposity bubble bursting.

*pop*

Look closely at Rog's Bonds, though, and you'll find it wasn't all cringe-inducing misogyny and pensioners fucking Grace Jones. Occasionally that RADA training and twenty-odd years of pre-Bond acting experience paid off: witness the scene in The Spy Who Loved Me where Bond reveals to his female Russian counterpart that he murdered her lover with a flare-firing ski-pole, or watch him boot a villain off a clifftop in For Your Eyes Only as revenge for the death of a colleague - those are the moments where Fleming's Bond briefly comes alive, and incongruous as it seems it proves that Roger Moore was indeed capable of being somebody else other than Roger Moore.

But could he be somebody else other than James Bond? That's what I decided to investigate when I embarked on That's Rogertainment!, an ill-advised attempt to watch all of Rog's non-Bond films; a project which began in earnest and tailed off somewhat as life got in the way. But of all the actors in the world I wanted to watch more of, it was Moore. Something about his indefatigable attempts to keep plugging away at something he clearly wasn't very good at but which paid for those homes in Switzerland and Monaco made me hungry to see what else he'd achieved in his time. The answer is a fucking shitload, a mere fraction of which I've managed to catch. But I recommend all of it, no matter how bad: North Sea Hijack sees him as the comically-named Rufus Excalibur ffolkes, cat-loving head of an aquatic counter-terrorist unit; Shout At The Devil has him visibly attempting to keep up with a sozzled Lee Marvin before smearing gravy browning on his face and donning a turban; Bullseye is basically Moore and Michaels Caine and Winner having a supermassive megajolly on camera for 90 minutes regardless of literally everything else in the world. Embodying the term "movie star" (in stark contrast to the term "actor"), Rog deployed his overabundance of charisma at every turn to ensure that he at least was always watchable, even if his films were frequently quite the opposite.

But if you want to see the man at his best, check out 1970's madgasm The Man Who Haunted Himself, which I have yet to cover on That's Rogertainment! - a failing I hope to correct very soon. It's a film I love so much I screened it in a cinema on my thirty-tenth birthday, complete with an audio introduction recorded on request by the man himself. That's the kind of guy Roger Moore was: 100% aware of how much his work meant to his fans, no matter its quality, and frequently happy to accommodate those fans' requests. There are numerous stories on Twitter right now that people have told about how lovely Rog was when they met him; see how many equally enthusiastic tales you can dig up about his co-Bonds. Maybe they'd rather move on, but Roger's acceptance that fate dealt him a winning hand with 007 and his gratitude for that make his death that little bit harder for Bond fans.

So as much as I love his Bond (a love which, frankly, has seen peaks and troughs over the years), I consider myself one of the lucky ones whose memories of Roger Moore are enhanced by having spent a brief amount of time in his company, which is why I have to bookend these ramblings with that 2012 interview. I got to ask him about The Man Who Haunted Himself, I got to shake his hand and see up close and personal how immaculately turned out he was, and I got to make a cack-handed attempt to explain the plot of Inception to him. Throughout all of this he was an absolute joy; a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire who insisted we didn't call him 'sir', suggesting we could call him 'Charlie' if we liked. I've no idea why. They say never meet your heroes, but 'they' have obviously never met Roger Moore: a hero for the ages. Rest in peace, Charlie.

Richard Kiel1939-2014

"                                          "

- Jaws, The Spy Who Loved Me / Moonraker

BlogalongaBond / The M To R Of Awful Things In Moonraker

Of all the terrible things in the world for which Star Wars was responsible - George Lucas' constant tinkering, Jar Jar Binks, grown men dressing up as Jedi Knights - by far the most heinous was the blasting of James Bond into outer space. It wasn't entirely Star Wars' fault, obviously: it's mostly Cubby Broccoli's for listening to the cacophonous mooing that passes for public opinion. Space-based escapism was all the rage in the late 1970s, so what better way to cash in on the craze move the Bond franchise forwards than to wrap 007 in tin foil and fire him at the stars?

The trouble is, the general public have absolutely no idea what makes a good Bond film. They didn't even like On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the drooling cretins. And so Broccoli commissioned a script that was little more than Bond On Demand: a virtual remake of The Spy Who Loved Me (itself a virtual remake of You Only Live Twice) only in space instead of underwater, with incongruous references to other films for no apparent reason (The Magnificent Seven? Really?) and the transformation of a cold-blooded killer into a soft-hearted love machine because under-eights demanded it.

Promoting Moonraker, Broccoli wittered: "This isn't science fiction, this is science fact." Well, sorry Cubby, but this isn't science fact, this is science fucked. A man who falls out of a plane and lands on a circus is unlikely to survive without a scratch. The time between a space station being discovered by NASA and a platoon of fully trained Space Rangers arriving there to blow it up is unlikely to be six minutes. And a spy attempting to follow someone without being spotted is unlikely to succeed by hiding behind a glass vase. He's just going to appear slightly further away.

While Moonraker still isn't the worst Bond film so far (Lewis Gilbert's breezy direction keeps it from being as tediously leaden as Thunderball), it does have the dubious honour of having many of the worst things ever to appear in the franchise. To prove it, I was going to do the A to Z of awful things in Moonraker, but that would take so long it would be quicker to just watch the film again, so here instead is the, uh, M to R. That works, right?

M is for My God, what's Bond wearing?
While Roger Moore looks fairly sharp throughout most of Moonraker, he bookends the film with two of Bond's most alarming outfits: a blue blazer over a roll-neck sweater, the neck of which resembles a large, rolled-back foreskin - thereby making his head look like a massive, bewigged bell-end - and a yellow jumpsuit, the less said about which the better. What next, a clown outfit?

O is for Oh for God's sake

Presumably this is so Bond can identify his miniature spy camera amongst all the others cluttering up Drax's chateau.



O is for Onanism scene that explains plot hole
At the beginning of the film Bond is issued with a wrist-mounted dart-gun thingy, which saves his life early on and is probably one of Q's most useful inventions. Why he doesn't bother using it in any other life-threatening situation except to kill Drax right at the end, then, is a mystery. Perhaps he took it off so he could have a wank without firing an armour-piercing dart into his scrotum and forgot to put it back on again. There's a tragically missed opportunity for a "one off the wrist" gag somewhere there.

N is for Nicola Roberts from Girls Aloud

Not awful as such, just worth pointing out.

R is for Rubbish secret agent
In keeping with his professional desire to remain incognito at all times, Bond blends in with Venice tourists by driving through St Mark's Square on a massive hovering gondola with red and white stripes on it. This scene made my DVD player cry.

A is for Apparently this belongs in a James Bond film

In actual fact it doesn't.

K is for Kill me now

The romance evoked by the slow motion run and the pile of fresh corpses littering the surrounding area is almost palpable.

E is for Er, why is that guy hiding in a coffin?
Why shoot 007 from a safe distance with a sniper's rifle when you can customise a coffin with an arsenal of knives, float down a canal, take out a gondolier first then wait a moment before having a go at Bond, thus giving him the chance to do you in first? Henchman fail #372.

R is for Really? REALLY?

The thing is, Moonraker isn't a bad film, it's just a bad Bond film. Take 007 out of it and you've got a perfectly serviceable, fun seventies romp. Maybe I'm being too po-faced - God knows the franchise shouldn't take itself too seriously - but double-taking pigeons don't belong in a film series that includes Sean Connery shooting a dead man in the back just to be sure.

Fortunately, and as is usually the case, it's not a complete disaster...

The death of Corinne Dufour

Having agreed to a little Dufour-play with 007, Corinne's only future career path as a Bond girl lies in certain death on the orders of her boss, Sir Hugo Drax. In the middle of a film full of crass double entendres and risible sight gags, the scene in which she's chased through the forest by Drax's dogs is weirdly stylish and poignant. Jean Tournier's long-lens photography is stunning, with dappled sunlight and dreamy slow motion offsetting the violence with unexpected class, while John Barry's urgent, menacing cue is one of his career best.

The stuntmen

Despite being jarringly intercut with blatant rear-projection shots of Roger Moore pretending to be in trouble, two of Moonraker's stunt scenes remain breathtaking. The pre-title skyfall was not only done for real by aerial mentalists BJ Worth and Jake Lombard, but done 88 times over five weeks to get all the required footage, while Richard Graydon actually dangled over the edge of that cable car in Rio without any kind of safety attachment, which is both heart-stoppingly terrifying and certifiably insane.

The bit where Roger Moore acts

Coincidentally, I pulled the exact same face throughout most of Moonraker

Having worn himself out developing a bit of character for Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me, Rodge reverted to his usual, eyebrow-waggling self in Moonraker. In a careless lapse, however, Moore accidentally acted a little bit during the scene where he goes for a spin in Drax's centrifuge trainer. The faces he pulls while being subjected to thirteen Gs are amazing enough, but when he emerges from the machine, sweaty and barely alive, it's the most physically unsettled we've seen Bond for a long time. His refusal to let Holly help him gives us another all-too-brief glimpse through a hairline crack in his steely veneer.

And finally: No cock joke this month, sorry, unless you count this poster:

In zero gravity, everyone can see your erection.

BlogalongaBond will return with For Your Eyes Only

This Is BBC Bond

Because the BBC spends all its money on people like Bruce Forsyth rather than on trumpeting the amazing stuff buried inside its unfeasibly brilliant website, it falls to me to tell the world about the online Archive - specifically, the James Bond Collection.

The BBC Archive collects broadcasts from its 90 year history about various subjects and dumps them in a dusty corner of the internet for obsessive nerds to pore over at their leisure. The James Bond Collection is obviously its most exciting feature, the kind of thing that would give your basic Bond fan a week-long erection. I'm an advanced Bond fan so it only provided me with four or five days of uninterrupted tumescence but that was quite enough thank you very much.

There are currently fifteen separate radio and TV clips from between 1958 and 2008 in this collection, totalling over five hours of Bondeliciousness. And it's not the same old guff you've already seen on the DVDs - there are clips here even the most socially unstable geek (hello) probably hasn't seen before. Here are just some of the treats within:

Film '79: On Location With Moonraker (BBC1, 1979)

Pillow-faced legend Barry Norman presents his report from Brazil on the production of Moonraker. Bazza's film opens with some fantastically politically incorrect close ups of bikini-clad tits for no reason whatsoever, before he spends far too long asking Roger Moore if this will be his final Bond (he went on to make three more), attempts to get interview blood from a stony Cubby Broccoli and awkwardly over-compliments Bond girl Lois Chiles. You could do that in the 1970s and still be a national treasure.

Time Out: The Guns Of James Bond (BBC2, 1964)

None other than Sean Connery introduces this historically interesting but actually quite tedious piece in which luxuriantly-moustachioed gun nut expert Geoffrey Boothroyd goes on at great length and in worrying detail about Bond's choice of shooter before blowing holes in a defenceless tin of tomato juice. Worth watching just to see Boothroyd point out the errors in Connery's bizarrely inaccurate introduction, and to boggle at Sir Sean's insistence on pronouncing 'Fleming' as 'Flemmen'.

Back Row: David Arnold (Radio 4, 2003)

I nearly popped a sprocket when I discovered this. First off, The Incredible Suit interviewee and hero Joe Cornish interviews The Incredible Suit interviewee and hero David Arnold, who demonstrates his encyclopaedic knowledge of Bond music history and explains his approach to scoring Die Another Day. Then the show asks a selection of experts what the next step in the franchise should be - Cornish proposes a micro-scooter chase through Bluewater shopping centre while Mark Gatiss suggests calling the next Bond girl Mahogany Wasp or Kingdom Come. Fascinating, funny and a genuinely exciting find.


All of which would be flambasmic enough but the BBC Archive has bags more stuff like this on just about every subject in the known universe. So the next time some whining imbecile complains about the licence fee, sit them in front of a computer, go to www.bbc.co.uk/archive and smash their face repeatedly into the keyboard until they get the P key jammed in their eye.

Saturday Playlist #5: James Bond In The '70s

If Bond music in the '60s was all about the sleaze, in the '70s it was all about the cheese. From John Barry's Vegas of Diamonds Are Forever, through George Martin's funkalicious blaxploitation-esque wah-wah of Live And Let Die, to Marvin Hamlisch's whatever-the-hell-you-describe-it-as version of the Bond theme for The Spy Who Loved Me, well-past-its-sell-by cheddar runs through these scores like massively-collared safari suits run through Roger Moore's wardrobe.

So get out the cream crackers, raise a solitary eyebrow to the heavens and suck your cheeks in as you kiss a series of ladies in a horrifically unwatchable fashion, because it's time to...

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

SATURDAY PLAYLIST #5:

JAMES BOND IN THE '70s

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Claudia Winkleman's Competition

Seeing as how the BBC has a Political Editor, a Business Editor, an Economics Editor, an Arts Editor, a World Affairs Editor, a Europe Editor, a Middle East Editor, a North America Editor, a Home Affairs Editor, a Sports Editor and probably a Volcanic Ash Cloud Editor by now, isn't it about time they got a James Bond Editor?

Then we wouldn't have to put up with complete interest-vacuums like the one Alison Harper delivered from last weekend's FanFest event at the London Film Museum, in which she wittered with former comedy Bond villain and tragic actor clinging desperately to a single part he played in two films over thirty years ago Richard Kiel, forever known to an uncaring world as Jaws.

You can watch the report on the BBC's website here, although I don't advise that you do because your brains will trickle out of your nostrils at the sheer lack of any enlightening content. Here's a handy transcript of Ms Harper's opening pitch, in which she makes a curious statement:

Now, what exactly does she mean by that? That Jaws is one of her favourite, favourite James Bond films? Because it's not, strictly speaking, actually a Bond film is it? It's a film about a shark that doesn't feature James Bond, even in a cameo role.

Or does she mean that the James Bond film with Jaws in it was one of her favourite favourites? If it is, you'd think she'd be aware that he was in two Bond films, no? She later refers to Moonraker, firmly placing her in a certain subset of Bond "fans", so one can assume she hasn't seen The Spy Who Loved Me.

To be fair to Ms Harper she did have to put up with Kiel looming over her and creepily asking "Shall I bite you on the neck?" and referring to one of the rustiest nails in Roger Moore's Bond coffin by mentioning how, in Moonraker, he "had a girlfriend about your size". Sadly Alison responded to this last abysmal chat-up line by wiggling a lot and squealing "Oooh! That'd be wicked!"

And just watch her face drop as Richard starts banging on about some failure-destined cack he's about to start filming that not even she gives a toss about because he's only ever going to be Jaws and she's feeling slightly violated.

Anyway I don't wish to be mean and I wish Alison Harper all the best in her career, although it would be nice if she'd watch a few more Bond films, preferably some of the good ones.

As for Richard Kiel, good luck with your future career too. Here's the kind of quality you need to aim for to relive those golden years:



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Trapped In A Dustbin

It’s about this time of the week that the world waits with baited breath for the results of The Incredible Suit’s weekly poll, and I satisfy that demand with a meticulously crafted graphic representation and poetic prose hewn from the mightiest oaks of wit and arranged on the screen with the care of the world’s most careful carer of things.

Unfortunately some berk has set the end of the poll for 24 hours later than usual, so you’re going to have to come back after 5pm on Friday to discover what the readers of The Incredible Suit deemed The Greatest James Cameron Film, Like, Ever! Except you won’t, because I know for a fact that at least half the people who voted for True Lies, which is currently in the lead, thought they were voting for True Romance, which wasn’t directed by James Cameron and has nothing in common with True Lies apart from the fact that there are some people in it, talking. So a fat lot of good that poll is.

It doesn’t matter anyway because I watched Aliens again recently and can confirm that it’s far and away Cameron’s best work. It’s a 10 out of 10 perfect action thriller that feels like spending two and a half hours trapped in a dustbin while the most terrifying nightmares your mind could generate try to get in and eat bits of you that you’d really rather keep hold of. And I should know, I’ve stayed in the Formule 1 Hotel in Liverpool.

So with no poll result to announce and no new poll to kick off because I haven’t thought of anything yet, I’ll have to pull something else from the sleeves of The Incredible Suit. Hello, what’s this? Why, it’s something incredible! It’s a cheeky song written by Joe Cornish for BBC 6 Music’s Adam & Joe Show! If you’re living in a state of blissful ignorance of the Adam & Joe show (if you can call that ‘living’), it’s a weekly work of such sublime genius you could fatten it up, put a suit on it and call it Alfred Hitchcock.

It’s off air for the summer so don’t pop a sprocket trying to find it. But when it’s back, at the very least download the weekly podcast and listen to it on the way to work, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes to freak out fellow commuters by spontaneously snotting yourself with laughter for no apparent reason.

Anyway Joe wrote this song for the show’s Song Wars slot, which I haven’t got the arsedness to explain right now, but it’s basically a theme song for the latest Bond film, Quantum Of Solace. Yes, they did it about nine months ago but they’ve just put it on their website to download for nought pee, so I recommend you do so. Adam wrote one too but sadly it was like Moonraker to Joe’s Goldfinger. Sorry Adam, I know you’re reading this.

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