"Everything's based on something real but we have sexed it up at times," admits Fleming's director, Mat Whitecross. "Fleming spent a lot of time desk-bound, which doesn't make great drama. But, in fact, he did get out in the field, he did get to Germany, he did go out to France and so on, but, yeah, he didn't actually have any fisticuffs with any Nazis. But it felt like it would be cool if he did."
Cooper had rather more profound reservations about accepting the role than a dose of spicy fictionalisation.
"I was worried because I knew for a start I didn't look like him," he says. "I always had trouble seeing myself as this person. But then the idea of this person is very much more what he wanted to be, and that takes away the burden of people taking one look at me and going 'how ridiculous'."
This is Fleming as he wanted to be, in other words, as the drama's working title, The Man Who Would Be Bond, makes rather more plain.
But Cooper, having read two biographies (John Pearson's officially sanctioned The Life of Ian Fleming and Andrew Lycett's rather less sympathetic tome) wasn't sure if he actually liked the man behind the fantasies.
"He comes across as a bit of a bastard," says Cooper. "We don't want to watch four episodes of a bastard. I find it quite hard - everything was different - his upbringing was very different from mine."
And as for his treatment of women ...
Lara Pulver, who plays newspaper magnate's spouse Ann Rothermere, Fleming's future wife, is equally perplexed by her character's masochistic relationship with the naval commander derisively dubbed "the chocolate soldier" by Rothermere's smart society friends much to Fleming's chagrin (Cooper, by contrast, self-mockingly describes the sight of himself in uniform as "looking like an easyJet pilot").
"When I first read the script," says Pulver, "I was thinking, why does this woman keep coming back to this man who on their second date gives her a book and says 'amuse yourself, I'm not interested this evening?' All the stories you read -- I mean, supposedly she was the only woman he went to bed with and actually woke up with the next morning and that was a privilege."
Fleming liked to spank Rothermere. Even when the couple's love-making was not incorporating pain and punishment there was often violence not far beneath the surface, and the consummation of their relationship comes after a typical fight-and-make-up. "We were very much of the mindset that we should never feel that Fleming was abusing or raping Ann," says Pulver. "They are both very much compliant in what's going on."
The drama's bookending scenes of Fleming's post-war Goldeneye home in Jamaica were filmed on Majorca, but most of the drama was shot in Budapest, in a cavernous former journalists' club with sets that incorporate a jazz club in London, Fleming's Mayfair flat and a naval intelligence interrogation room, although the scene I watch on my visit is dressed up to be a Lisbon casino, where a chain-smoking Fleming deliberately loses at baccarat, watched by a fellow intelligence officer played by Anna Chancellor, Lieutenant Monday.
Monday is the Miss Moneypenny prototype and the only fictional character in the series. On the whole, and after quite a good early gag about Fleming's taste for martinis, the writers were keen not to over-egg the Bond references.
"We weren't making a pastiche of that genre but we needed to include it," says Cooper. "It was important to understand where this man got his ideas about Bond from. Up to a point anyway, and then it would become laborious."
What: Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond
When: 8.30pm, starts tonight
Where: Prime
- TimeOut / The Independent
