DEDICATED TO DESMOND

DEDICATED TO DESMOND

It’s the Desmond Llewelyn dedication

Muttered quietly under the breath

When a meeting goes on far too long

Carrying with it the stench of death

“Dedicated to Desmond” I softly mutter

“What’s that you said?” they cry

“That I believe I heard you utter...?”

“Oh, nothing...” I reply

It’s the Desmond Llewelyn dedication

I have to use it far too often

When the talk is all “going forward”

And ordinary people get forgotten

“Dedicated to Desmond” I softly mutter

“What’s that you said?” they cry

“That I thought that I heard you utter...?”

“Oh, nothing...” I reply

It’s the Desmond Llewelyn dedication

I seem to use it all the time

In order to get through another day

Business people can be such swine

“Dedicated to Desmond” I softly mutter

“What’s that you said?” they cry

“That I’m certain I heard you utter...?”

“Oh, nothing...” I reply

It’s the Desmond Llewelyn dedication

Whispered quietly at that big table

In response to their latest nonsense

As they weave some management fable

“Dedicated to Desmond” I softly mutter

“What’s that you said?” they cry

“That I know that I heard you utter...?”

“Oh, nothing...” I reply

It’s a Doctor Who production code

For “The Face of Evil” - you can look it up

But if you think that’s being too obscure

Keep on staring into your coffee cup

“Dedicated to Desmond” I softly mutter

“What’s that you said?” they cry

“That I’m convinced I heard you utter...?”

“Oh, nothing...” I reply

It’s the Desmond Llewelyn dedication

A useful phrase - you might find - for you

When you’re asked to salute some flagpole

But those bastards deserve a “For Q”

Martin A W Holmes, June 2019

A "JAMES BOND" FILM

I did a rare thing the other day when, after a bit of online chatter got me thinking about such things, I decided to sit down and watch, for the first time in absolutely ages, a "James Bond" film.

Now, this is not as simple as it might at first seem, not least because my Beloved is not really a fan, and so finding such two-our windows of opportunity can be quite a rare thing anyway, so making such a decision can eat massively into the free space in my busy blogging schedule that I set aside for writing my nonsenses, or devour time which is meant for more worthy, practical, washing-up related pastimes, or time sometimes meant for just sitting down for what is, just plainly something else which might be better entertainment.

But it's not just about those things.

After all, a film franchise that has endured throughout fifty years or more must have some sort of entertainment value, even if I sometimes think that I might just have finally "grown out" of it, but, despite being what you might still call a "fan" of the series, sometimes the idea of sitting through one of the actual films themselves does seem rather tiresome, especially when there is such a smorgasbord of other video entertainment waiting on the shelf and in the ether to be consumed nowadays.

Incidentally… Have you ever noticed that you can have a movie sitting upon your shelf unwatched almost indefinitely, and really "not fancy" it, but then find yourself watching that self-same movie all the way through when you happen to spot that it's being broadcast on TV…?

Or is that just me…?

Is this merely a strange compulsion, or just basically part of being bone idle and taking the easy option every single time…?

Switch on TV...

Think "Oh, that's on, I like that..."

Disengage brain.

Watch evening vanish.

Meanwhile, getting back to that "James Bond" film, the difficulty comes in picking which one to actually watch.

Of the twenty-three so far released, the first six are now so familiar to me that I could probably sing along to the lyrics if you set the dialogue to music, and they have, perhaps, become about as diverting as a screensaver, at least in my memory when my fingers move past them across the DVDs on the shelf in search of something that I want to watch.

I have recently had a slight yen to give the shallow, overblown and vacuous nineteen-seventies offerings another go. After all, "Moonraker" always remains a guilty pleasure, and, despite the fact that my head tells me that "Diamonds Are Forever" and "The Man With The Golden Gun" are utterly ridiculous, cheap, nasty and really not very good at all, my heart feels like giving them another chance, just to see if I'm remembering this incorrectly and they're actually quite brilliant, whilst "Live and Let Die" struggles to get past even my fairly low "politically correct" barriers nowadays - although some of the other films score quite poorly on the sexism and cultural stereotyping meter, too, as the times have moved on...

People took their children to see "Live and Let Die" when I was a child you know... for birthday outings and such.

I wasn't invited...

However, getting back to the present, the problem is that, around ten minutes into any of them, I'll suddenly be wishing that I was watching something else, and that's no fun when your window of opportunity is closing.

The eighties films I really struggle with.

"James Bond" films can be many things to many people, but what they should never be is boring. "A View To A Kill" I'm thinking at you right now, and you know why. I mean, it's a movie with the fabulous Patrick Macnee in it, and I still manage to find it  a struggle.

Embarrassing I can cope with, but boring is just unacceptable.

That said, I have recently fancied giving "Octopussy" another go, and the Dalton pair were favourites when I was at an impressionable age, so any of those might be worth a punt...

But then...

The Brosnan quartet, well, I still struggle to get through any of those, and the Craig trio go from being worthy but dull ("just get that bloody card game over with, will you?") to just a little bit rubbish, to far too recently seen to be diverting.

So, once again, having decided to watch a "James Bond" film, I ended up not watching one after all, and doing something else instead, which is probably a good thing in the great scheme of things and, well, if one just happens to appear on my telly one evening, I'll probably just settle down and watch that and find that I find it quite entertaining.

And there was me thinking that I was a bit of a fan...

FLEMING SIX

In his lifetime, Ian Fleming published twelve “James Bond” books, and another two were published posthumously after his lifestyle finally caught up with him and finished him off in 1964 at the grand old age of fifty-six.

Obviously, the character he created has long outlived him and, like many a chap my age, I have been aware of the character for most of my life and yet, whilst the cinematic “icon” has become more than familiar to us, I am not as well acquainted with the character as Fleming wrote him as I am with the character as seen in the many films.

I did read “Live and Let Die” when I was at school during one of those “book exchange” exercises which seemed so prevalent then, and I may have also read “The Man with the Golden Gun” at that time too, and I can well remember a friend of mine introducing me to the more salacious paragraphs from “Casino Royale” when I was at a most impressionable age, but, on the whole I read more of the John Gardner “relaunch” novels of the 1980s than I did of the original Fleming, as well as the Kingsley Amis (writing under the pseudonym of Robert Markham) “Colonel Sun” which I seem to remember finding quite diverting.

I did have all of the books, you see. All of them paperback editions which were mostly film “tie-in” editions which I picked up from various market stalls in the late 1970s and 1980s, but I never got around to reading any of the others, perhaps because they seemed too “different” from the films which I was enjoying watching so regularly on ITV, and perhaps because the idea that they were “full of” sadism, sexism and racism didn’t quite gel with the more “educated” version of myself that I grew into, the same person who would later also deny that they “quite enjoyed” such things when he was trying very hard to impress someone who loathed the entire “wretched” franchise.

Well, that didn’t work out, and yet, despite such antipathy, Bond prevailed, even if, in truth, my own interest did actually wane quite a lot once I’d acquired all of the DVDs and found that I never seemed to actually get around to watching any of them any more, and the “new, improved” films began to appear to general acclaim, even though I didn’t find them quite as enjoyable as quite a few people seemed to.

Recently, however, and due in no small part to a quirk of timing, I found myself in a remainder book shop when they were selling off an audiobook version of “Doctor No” quite cheaply and, because I had already toyed with buying one or two of them online, but decided that they were far too expensive for something that I wasn’t all that bothered about really, I thought that I would snap up this bargain just to see how well (or otherwise) they’d been done, and it’s always a lot easier to find the time to listen to those books which you’ve never got around to reading when you’ve got a daily commute to entertain yourself during, rather than chewing up your precious evenings and weekends with the actual books themselves, I find.

Anyway, having bought the one, I decided that I had, in fact, rather enjoyed it, especially if I was able to gloss over the snobbery, casual racism and sexism and put it down to being very much “of its time” in much the same way that Victorian adventure novels can be. Looking beyond those unfortunate and distasteful aspects (of which there were actually surprisingly few) there was actually a cracking little adventure yarn in there which was remarkably well written.

So I ordered myself another one and, after I had enjoyed that one so much, yet another. Oddly enough, I knew that my strange “completist” tendencies were unlikely to be triggered by this particular series, but there were definitely five (eventually becoming six) that I would really like to hear.

DOCTOR NO - Of course, I’d already listened to, and, even though it wouldn’t necessarily have made the cut if I’d been starting out from scratch, it turned out to be rather good and, more importantly, good enough to trigger my interest in all of the others.

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE – My favourite of the films so it was obvious that I might like to finally find out how “different” it was from the film version. Later on, I would also justify it to myself still further because it’s the middle part of a loose trilogy of sorts, and you can’t really listen to a trilogy without hearing the middle bit, can you...?

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE – allegedly one of the very best of the books, and it certainly led to one of my favourites from the film series. It is, however, structurally very different, and “our hero” doesn’t actually turn up for quite a while within the narrative. It’s also the book in which Fleming first tried to end the life of his literary creation, finishing on the kind of cliffhanger which would have had you tearing the wrapper off the next book, “Doctor No” back in the 1950s when it first appeared, and might have had that effect on me too, if I hadn’t already listened to it and hadn’t had an entire lifetime to know that it turns out alright in the end.

MOONRAKER – Very, very different from the film, but the book had quite a reputation despite being one of the earlier books and shorter than any of the ones which I had so far listened to, and Hugo Drax really is the most terrible of adversaries for post-war Britain’s best secret agent to come up against. It had the added advantage of being read by Bill Nighy which possibly made it sound far more classy than it might otherwise have done.

THUNDERBALL – The opening of the so-called “Blofeld Trilogy” includes an utterly hilarious rant about “women drivers” which you really, really could not get away with today, but, on the whole, given that it was the source of all those lawsuits because it was based upon a film treatment, as a book it fairly rattles along, even though lots of it feel very familiar indeed.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE - Well, if you’re going to listen to parts one and two of a loose “trilogy”, you may as well get yourself the final part, I thought, and, even though this has always been described to me as being a rather “odd” book, it does at least bring the whole series to a rather satisfying conclusion of sorts, and, given that most of the rest of Fleming’s work was published posthumously, and some of it given a final polish by other hands, this could also be considered the “proper” end to the story of the literary James Bond. It’s also read by that stalwart of the audiobook world, Martin Jarvis, and I really could not resist that particular combination.

We should, I suppose, consider the ones which I chose not to buy, and, perhaps more importantly, why. Well, I say we should, but why should we...? The only reason that I can think of is that I don’t have a Book Group to go to so this is turning into my own substitute for a Book Group and so I suppose that I can say what I like about whatever books I choose to write to you about...

Anyway, my reasons, however fatuous they might appear to be to the aficionado, were as follows...

CASINO ROYALE - I don’t why I’m so averse to this one, actually, given that I’m usually a big fan of the origin story. After all, I’ve got myself “A Study In Scarlet” and I don’t think all that much of it as a novel either. Perhaps I had a dull experience of the novel - and the tiresomely long card game sequences in the film, too - so it just doesn’t appeal to me...

LIVE AND LET DIE – I really, really couldn’t bear the idea of a white actor trying to mimic all of those Harlem accents, no matter how well done they might be. I do remember both enjoying and being disappointed by the book as a teenager, so maybe those memories are just cut too deeply for me to be objective. Perhaps I'll revisit my paperback sometime and try to gloss over the worst bits...

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER - I don’t know, really, but this always struck me as being a “lesser work” somehow, perhaps because diamond smuggling and hearing about some gangsters called the Spang brothers really doesn’t appeal at all.

GOLDFINGER - Possibly one of the better known titles, and certainly one of the most fondly remembered of the films, but I think that this book’s reputation precedes it, and I really didn’t feel like listening to some of the more “controversial” of Fleming’s ideas being read out to me, especially as I’m told that the plot’s a bit “iffy” too.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME - Hearing a book Fleming wrote from a “woman’s point of view” is likely to either be hysterically funny, or induce such sharp intakes of breath that I might swerve into a lamp-post, so I decided that it was probably best avoided despite reviews promising that Rosamund Pike’s voice is “silky smooth” to listen to.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN - Branagh reading the (mercifully short) first draft of Fleming’s final James Bond novel, what’s not to love? Only I just don’t fancy this one at all.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY - Short stories. After “The Hound of the Baskervilles” I thought that the Sherlock Holmes short stories might seem rather slight in comparison, but I’ve really been enjoying them. I’m not convinced that the same might be true of Fleming though, so I’m not even going to try, given that if I did actually like them, I’d also be suckered into getting the other short story collection, OCTOPUSSY and THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS too, and we really wouldn’t want that now, would we...?

ON HER MAJESTY’S

Well it’s fifty years since everyone’s favourite government assassin first walked that slow walk across the cinema screen, turned and shot at the gun barrel which was pointing at him and now he’s become so ubiquitous that the image of a paid killer in a smart suit is now deemed to be so representative of the very “best” of “British” that he can be used as a central feature in our international image making exercises and can even be allowed to be given the Royal seal of “approval” by appearing in skits with Her Majesty herself.

As a culture, we’ve come a long way in half a century, and sometimes not so very far at all.

I’ve got to admit that, despite their moral ambiguity, their rather unpleasant portrayal of women and “foreign types”, and the general glorification of violence, I’ve always rather enjoyed a James Bond film as, it seems, have rather a lot of people, especially since they became rather a cornerstone of the ITV schedules in October 1975 and for most of the subsequent Bank Holidays, until, it seems now, when the film rights baton has apparently been passed over to Sky and the current showings might very well be the last for terrestrial television for quite some time.

In fact, whilst all of my chums were being allowed to actually go to the cinema and see the unsuitably “adult” content of “Live and Let Die” a couple of years earlier at an age when such things should have been restricted from us, my own first experiences of this film series came from those “first ever” showings on British Television nearly a decade and a half after the first movie was released and, as an impressionable not-quite teenager back then, I was simply “blown away” by all of the excitement.

Strangely enough, however, I think that it might have been the exciting posters reprinted in the “TV Times” and my “Look In” comics which drew me in the most. I might even go as far as to say that my own burgeoning interest in things of a “Graphic Design” nature might have been stimulated by those rather bonkers, over-the-top campaigns that were created in the 1960s but which only reached me some ten years later.

Why is it that I still think that after all these years and it being rarely considered to be the most memorable film in the series that I still think that “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” is a rather great film…? Could it be the age I first saw it at? Was is just that I was at an impressionable age? After all, right from the moment I first saw it – quite possibly in September 1978 when I was fourteen years old – something about the style and the pace of it made it seem to be something rather “special” and “different” from all of the films which had preceded it, and it wasn’t just due to the lack of Sean Connery as the star.

He had, of course, been replaced by the Australian actor/model Mr George Lazenby who, by deciding at the eleventh hour to only ever appear in one James Bond film (something which apparently had ruled out Cary Grant back at the beginning of the series which would have been “interesting...”), instantly became the butt of so many jokes and “Whatever happened to...” articles for the rest of his career, but he gives an honest, more “humble” and rather more “innocent” performance which has been unfairly ridiculed down the years but which actually is not that bad. His biggest “crime” was possibly in simply not being Sean Connery...

Even now, I think that this is the film which I have probably seen the most times of any film in my life , with “From Russia With Love” possibly running it a close second. Oh, I might have watched and rewatched “Alien” a fair few times over the years, but for a long time, “O.H.M.S.S.” was my default position on those long, lonely weekends when I couldn’t really think of anything much else to do.

It’s not a film great of course, but it is still a great film (if that’s not a paradox?) and I do think it edges out most of the others and really ought to be considered to be the very best of the Bond films not least because of its almost spectacular and slightly epic direction from Director Peter Hunt and one of the very best and more subtle scripts written for the series.

The film also starts with possibly the best joke in the series with George Lazenby breaking the “fourth wall” and looking straight down the lens and smirking “This never happened to the other feller” after the girl has left him on the beach holding only his shoes. “The girl” in this instance is, of course, the rather fabulous Diana Rigg, fresh from her rather brilliant turn as Mrs Emma Peel on “The Avengers” (The telly one, not the Marvel Comics one...) who is destined briefly to become the future “Mrs James Bond” during the tragic closing sequences of the film.

Perhaps one of the reasons that this film seems so great is because for once the two main roles are pretty much equal with Diana Rigg as Tracy giving as good as she gets in her various “face-offs” with both the villain and his henchmen, although she still has to - perhaps - get killed for her sheer arrogance in being “equal” in status (in plot terms at least, although her performance is by far the best in the film) to her “leading” man.

There are other Bond films that are far more well regarded amongst the general public and the people who write about such things. “Goldfinger” is often made out to be by far the “best” of the series amongst the critics and in terms of story, perhaps “From Russia With Love”  is the better film. After all,  I’d be the first to admit that “O.H.M.S.S.” has more than its fair share of flaws, not least because despite the fact that there is less overt sexism on display than is usual for films of this type at that time, once the plot takes you into Blofeld’s lair, the “eye candy” aspect of Blofeld’s “Angels of Death” is pretty dated, even if you take into account the presence of both future 1970s icons Jenny Hanley and Joanna Lumley in the mix, and there is some quite bonkers dubbing going on and a large chunk of the plot depends upon Bond not being recognised by Blofeld despite them having been face to face in the previous film, a plot point that only makes sense if you accept that the change of actor means a change of the actual character as well.

The other thing, of course, that puts this move right up there for me is the astonishing soundtrack to the movie which I think is one of John Barry’s masterpieces, only let down by the rather strange Christmas Carol which tends to lock itself inside your brain like a Piranha fish in a villain’s pond deep inside his subterranean lair and refuses to let go, no matter how hard you might try. The instrumental title music is an astonishing piece of work, and remains one of my own all-time favourite pieces of music.

The soundtrack also, of course, contains Louis Armstrong’s last recording, the rather beautiful “We Have All the Time in the World” which has rightly become a bit of a “classic” and it sometimes really surprises people when they discover that such a beautiful “old song” was written for a James Bond film.

I once had a friend who hated Bond films and she would most probably have disliked me even more than she actually did had she known that I enjoyed them so much. Ah well… I haven’t heard from her in years but, unlike friendships it would seem, Bond Films are Forever... Still, I don’t really think that there’s any real harm in liking things that you “shouldn’t” and these films, especially that first half dozen or so, remain one of my own “guilty pleasures” even though it’s now actually quite a few years since I actually sat down and watched one all of the way through.

There is, of course, that final scene which lifts this particular film above all of the others in the series. Someone - it may very well have been Peter Hunt - once said that George Lazenby “couldn’t have created a boiled egg” in that scene, but that seems ridiculously harsh to me and it seems perfectly fine to me, so I really don’t think so. In the end it remains almost the perfect send off for that “incarnation” of the franchise…

JOHN BARRY OBE 1933-2011

When I heard that composer John Barry had died over the weekend, I felt a genuine sense of loss. Not because I knew the man, but because, to a certain extent, it was his music that was the soundtrack to my youth and which introduced me to the whole world of “grown up” music for the very first time.

I didn't even know that such a thing
could even have existed...

I know that I was telling you about my less than trendy record buying past a couple of weeks ago, but when I heard the news, I was reminded of an incident that must have occurred when I was about twelve or thirteen. I was in WHSmiths in Stockport fairly late on on a Saturday afternoon, browsing disinterestedly through their record department when I came across an album that excited me beyond my wildest dreams, the tenth anniversary edition double album James Bond collection. At that point in my life I didn’t even know that such a thing could even have existed and I remember being utterly astounded at finding it.

Now I think I’ve already mentioned how musically unsavvy I was back then, so I wasn’t very aware of record shops and music generally. But in 1974, ITV had started showing the Bond films on television for the first time and, like many young boys of my age, I’d very quickly become hooked on them. Now this was in the days before home video was widespread and so to find this small fragment of those movies in a format that I could enjoy over and over again was an amazing thing to me.

I remember dashing home to ask permission if I could spend my £6.00 savings on this object of desire, and then tearing, panic stricken back to the store to get my copy, hoping against hope that no-one else would buy it before I got back. In those days I had no real idea of how retail worked and was probably convinced that this was the only one left in the world. I think that this may well have been the very beginning of my later retail obsessions and addiction to collecting and completism.

I got home and loaded up the music centre, put on dad’s chunky old headphones so as not to disturb the television viewing and played that album to within an inch of it’s life. Sometimes I’m told that things you experience at certain points in your life, when you are at your most “spongelike” are the things that stay with you most, and for me, every single note of those four sides of vinyl are still as vibrant and vivid in my memory today as when I first heard them late on that long ago Saturday afternoon. The music of those films still came very vividly to mind long after it became less than cool to admit to enjoying the actual films any more, which I think is testament to just how great John Barry’s music was.

His theme to “The Persuaders!” is another one of the most haunting melodies that reaches back into my childhood memories and plucks at them, but there was so much more to Mr Barry than just action and adventure or Bond. Films ranging from “The Lion in Winter” to “The Black Hole”, and “Zulu” to “The Ipcress File” benefited from his ability to turn mere visuals into true art, and we mustn’t forget his many Oscars for films like “Born Free”, “Out of Africa” and “Dances with Wolves” as well as his many other  awards like Grammies, a Bafta and a Golden Globe. Somewhere along the way he even composed the memorable theme to “Juke Box Jury” which is part of the soundtrack to the teenage years of another generation.

One of Mr. Barry’s greatest scores for me was his soundtrack to the 1969 James Bond film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” starring George Lazenby in the title role. That was the score on which he managed to persuade “Satchmo” himself, the legendary Louis Armstrong, to record a performance once last time, on the haunting song “We have all the time in the world”, and it still surprises many people when then find out that something so timeless and beautiful was written for a James Bond film.

The instrumental main title theme for “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” remains one of the tunes that I would select in the unlikely event that I was ever asked to go on “Desert Island Discs” because it evokes such strong memories in me and was probably one of those tunes that changed me from being someone who just watched films into someone who was interested in films. I know that it’s a subtle difference, but it is also a significant one.

I wonder whether the composers of movie soundtracks will be as revered by history as the classical composers are? I imagine that the Mozarts, Chopins, Beethovens and Bachs would probably been working on movies if they were alive in modern times. John Barry will no doubt become one of music’s immortals just because of his arrangement of the James Bond theme, and that would be more than enough for anyone I would imagine, but I do hope that his other work lives on and is played and enjoyed for many, many years to come.