Decades after Fleming’s death, no Bond-based television drama has ever been made. But could that be about to change?
THREE KEY FACTS
Jake Kerridge writes about culture for The Telegraph.
OPINION
007 during wartime? Miss Moneypenny’s early years? The origin of Blofeld’s evil? Here are the Fleming spin-offs and prequels that could be.
In the late 1950s Ian Fleming wrote a treatment for a proposed James Bond television series, featuring the exciting notion of Bond going undercover as a racing driver and haring around the Nürburgring while his enemies tried to finish him off.
Alas, the series was never made (although Anthony Horowitz recycled the plot in his 2015 Bond novel Trigger Mortis). And in fact, 60 years after Fleming’s death, no Bond-based television drama has ever been made. But could that be about to change?
These days every blockbuster franchise has its spin-off, from Amazon Prime’s unloved Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power to HBO’s slightly less unloved Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. And since Amazon gained half the rights to the Bond franchise after purchasing MGM in a US$8.5 billion ($13.81bn) deal in 2021, after a year of tortuously protracted negotiations, it seems highly likely the Bond universe will one day expand into long-form television.
Last year’s Amazon Prime reality show 007: Road to a Million (a second season is currently being filmed) could be seen as a canary in the coal mine, or at least a toe in the water. This has Brian Cox, in the role of the sinister “Controller”, setting espionage-themed challenges to members of the public, and laughing supervillainously when they muck them up. The title overpromises, however: there is about as much 007 in 007: Road to a Million as there is Godot in Waiting For Godot.
The hurdle for Amazon in making a proper Bond spin-off is that the other half of the franchise rights remain with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the siblings who have overseen Eon Productions, which makes the Bond movies, since 1995.
“We do not want to expand [the franchise] any other way,” Broccoli told Yahoo Entertainment when 007: Road to a Million was first streamed. “This idea is something that was brought to us and we really loved it, and we loved the fact that it’s real people. So I think this was sort of a one-off, but we’re not looking to expand the Bond universe into television.”
No doubt Broccoli and Wilson are anxious not to dilute the appeal of the films by saturating audiences with too much Bond; but it’s hard to believe that this is music to Amazon’s ears. One suspects Amazon is busily negotiating behind the scenes to persuade Broccoli and Wilson to reconsider. Which of the combatants in this debate, I wonder, will end up - metaphorically of course - shoved off the footbridge into the piranha pool?
Scouring Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, I think there are certainly several elements that could be expanded into television prequels, sequels, spin-offs and reboots. To start with, there could be proper period adaptations of the novels, especially those which the films mangled out of all recognition. I would love to see a decent adaptation of Fleming’s Moonraker, which is set entirely in Britain and features a Nazi plot to destroy London with a nuclear warhead: nothing to do with the disappearing space shuttle of the film, which was ludicrously intended to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars.
Or what about Fleming’s uncharacteristically tender and experimental The Spy Who Loved Me, with a “Bond girl”, Viv Michel, who manages to be three-dimensional? Anything in the vein of ITV’s excellent recent version of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File, capturing the book’s spirit even if deviating from its plot, would be very welcome.
Of course, such a series would be at a disadvantage in inviting comparison with the brilliant early Bond films of the 1960s, the first few being made while Fleming was still writing. The most obvious alternative is to produce a prequel series answering the intriguing question of what Bond actually did during World War II.
We know from the obituary M writes when Bond is presumed dead in You Only Live Twice that he served (as Fleming had) in Naval Intelligence, as a “lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR”. There are hints elsewhere of a wider experience, however, notably when he comes under machine-gun fire in Dr No: “Then came the swift rattling roar Bond had last heard coming from the German lines in the Ardennes.” How on earth did a Commander from Naval Intelligence end up in the Battle of the Bulge?
The only one of the many post-Fleming Bond authors to nod towards Bond’s war record is William Boyd, who in Solo (2013) gives 007 flashbacks to his arrival in Normandy just after D-Day as part of the intelligence-gathering Commando group 30 Assault Unit - a nice in-joke, as Fleming was a key figure in setting the unit up. Bond vs the Nazis could make for great TV although a fresh-faced actor would be needed, as we are told Bond was only 17 in 1941, having lied about his age to get started on his war service.
Another possibility would be to go earlier than the war and follow the adventures of the schoolboy Bond, which have already been the subject of a series of YA novels by Charlie Higson and Steve Cole (although if aimed at a younger audience the series would have to handle delicately the scene in which Bond fools around with a maid when he is “12 or thereabouts” and gets expelled from Eton.)
Otherwise, we could go post-war and deal with how exactly Bond gets 00 status and his early missions (covered in Horowitz’s 2018 novel Forever and a Day) or even perhaps have Bond pass the dreaded 00 retirement age of 45 and become a private agent. Bond in old age might be going too far, however, having already been the subject of a skit by Alan Coren (“Bond tensed in the darkness and reached for his teeth…”).
One barrier to Fleming conquering television drama in the way that John le Carré or Agatha Christie have is that he didn’t have lots of different central characters: all of his novels feature James Bond (apart from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which swallows up enough of the TV schedule every bank holiday as it is). But there is at least a decent supporting cast to people spin-offs in which Bond doesn’t have to be a physical presence.
Perhaps we could have a prequel about the early career of M, who could just about have been there as a young man at the beginning of MI6 when it was founded in 1909 - or if you prefer a series based on the Judi Dench version of M, perhaps drawing on the pioneering career of the first female MI5 director-general, Stella Rimington. Or a series explaining the mysterious background of Miss Moneypenny, who could plausibly have worked as a secretary for any 1960s figure from Don Draper to Leonard Swindley before pitching up to work for M. (Perhaps the Moneypenny Diaries books by Kate Westbrook, which give her a back story in colonial Africa, could be adapted.)
Then there is everybody’s favourite boffin Q (known as Major Boothroyd in Fleming’s books), who, it was recently announced, is to be the hero of a new series of crime novels by Vaseem Khan, current chair of the Crime Writers’ Association (the first book, Quantum of Menace, will be published next year). A Q television series could provide a good role for one of our senior actor knights if they went for an old buffer Desmond Llewelyn type, or something with more of a contemporary Doctor Who vibe if they go for a Ben Whishaw figure: anything will do as long as they don’t resurrect the tenaciously unretirable John Cleese’s comedy Q from the Pierce Brosnan era.
If Amazon wants to do something based in the US, how about the adventures of Felix Leiter, PI? Fans of the books will know that Bond’s CIA pal is savaged by a shark in Live and Let Die (Fleming wanted to kill him off but relented after objections from his US publisher) and, after being left with a prosthetic leg and a hook for a hand, is forced to retire and join the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Perhaps the great Jeffrey Wright, underused as Leiter in the recent Bond movies, has what it takes to make this rather unconvincing private eye plausible.
I’d also like to see an adaptation of Kim Sherwood’s recent novels Double or Nothing and A Spy Like Me, which focus on a number of different agents in the 00 section. The premise of the series is that Bond has been captured in action and his colleagues are trying to find him while also dealing with their other missions - a cunning way of having Bond as a dominant but not overwhelming off-screen presence.
And those are the heroes: what about the villains? Every baddie, from Hannibal Lecter to The Joker to Cruella de Vil, gets a humanising origin story these days. Why not a prequel depicting the child bullying, career setbacks or humiliations in love that turned Scaramanga and Blofeld, Dr No and Mr Big and Rosa Klebb sour?
Sequels would not be possible, as being a Bond villain always ends the same way: but it’s a different matter with the more fortunate Bond girls. Nearly every book begins with Bond single after having gone into the sunset with some feisty cutie at the end of the previous one: what happens to them all? Perhaps we could have a show in which they all get together and use the skills they’ve learned from observing Bond in action to form a crime-fighting agency: the battle of wits between Pussy Galore and Domino Vitali to be the boss would be quite something.
Finally, there is a great series to be made about the half-Japanese child with whom Kissy Suzuki is pregnant in Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, whom Bond, the father, knows nothing about when he leaves Japan at the end of the book. Bond has always been big in Japan: how much more so if a Japanese son or daughter turned up on his doorstep? With all this possible material, resistance from Broccoli and Wilson is surely futile: before long the films may be only a small cog in the Bond franchise.
Timothée Chalamet had long been interested in playing Bob Dylan.