Still spying after all this time

By GREG DIXON

Dear old Roger Moore. There he is in tonight's episode of Alias (TV3, 8.30) playing the only role his God-given talent allows - a British spy.

The 75-year-old toddles into view as Edward Poole, the head of SD-9, the rogue spy agency that Alias' Sydney Bristow works for.

He evidently provides some help manipulating a vote of the "Alliance of Twelve" ... whatever that is.

But what a joy it will be to see him again.

Moore is Bond and Bond is Moore. Forever. End of story. He had an unimportant career before his seven 007 movies, and has had virtually nothing since.

This is a good thing. He's not so much an example of how typecasting can create a career of Groundhog Days, but how some actors are lucky enough to stumble into the only role they should ever play.

His Bond remains - with this year marking the 20th Bond movie and 40 years since Ian Fleming's character first hit the silver screen - my guilty choice of the franchise's "best in show".

Moore was the only actor to really suit Bond's English gallantry.

Sean Connery is a Jock, George Lazenby an Aussie, Timothy Dalton a Taffy and Pierce Brosnan an Oirishman. Moore, the son of a copper, was pure Pom and, as a bonus, spent time in "military intelligence" during his national service.

And Moore took none of it seriously at all - remember the arching eyebrow, the smirking - which, you'd have to say, was the most sensible approach to adopt for such a preposterous, if popular, role.

While Connery was Mr James Suave, Dalton some brooding Hamlet-lite and Brosnan like a over-anxious, hen-pecked tax inspector, Moore found the essential comedy in the role.

"I played it all tongue-in-cheek," he said in the mid-90s, "because I don't believe in Bond as a hero.

"It's a load of nonsense. How can you be a spy when any bar you walk into, the bartender says: "Ah, Mr. Bond. Shaken not stirred?"'

Part of Moore's appeal, too, is that he really is a peculiar sort of fellow. Apparently during the early part of his career he liked to "collect" towels from the hotels he stayed at.

That all came to an embarrassing end when a British newspaper ran a story headlined "Roger Moore Is A Towel Thief." But he still has the collection at his Swiss home.

As well, it seems highly unlikely that those other Bond bores ever received billing, as Moore did at one point, under as startling an alias as Turk Thrust II.

The man clearly has the grandest sort of sense of humour - surely a greater gift than an ability to act.

This sense of the absurd certainly explains why the old dear has recently been heard touting a Moore-Bond dynasty.

After suggesting last year that black actor Cuba Gooding jnr would make a great 007 (no, really) to replace the retiring Brosnan, Moore's now had another idea: his eldest son Geoffrey should be the next Bond.

"He's much better looking than me and much more talented, so I think he would be perfect in the role," Moore told USA Today in April.

Geoffrey, you should know, runs a restaurant.

"Maybe," Moore went on, "he could even incorporate a bit of cooking into the role."