I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
It’s the final month of the BFI’s 2015 calendar and rather than looking behind, most of the highlights of December are previews of forthcoming TV shows, complete with Q&As with cast and crew. Well, I say look ahead, but they’re almost all all period dramas – ITV’s Peter Pan reimagining Peter & Wendy, BBC’s massive 20-part (Ed: surely shome mishtake?) Dickens crossover Dickensian and ITV’s dying Churchill biopic Churchill’s Secret. But there’s also a preview of a new David Walliams kids book adaptation, a season of plays and TV films about love and a Missing Believed Wipe mini-season dedicated to continuity footage – yes, an evening dedicated to things like this:
There’s been a decades-long quest in the US to create ‘the American James Bond’. This is somewhat ironic, since the first ever adaptation of a James Bond book was the 1954 US TV series Climax! Mystery Theater‘s Casino Royale, starring Barry Nelson as ‘Jimmy Bond’. (Let’s twopher this one and call it this week’s Wednesday Play… on Tuesday)
But ever since Bond hit it big at the movie box office, there have been attempts to create an equally lucrative and iconic US James Bond, such as Napoleon Solo in The Man From UNCLE, whom they even asked Ian Fleming to help develop, although all he ended up giving them was the name. However, so far, the US has had very little success, although many people argue that the Bourne series is the American equivalent of the Bond movies.
It’s also ironic, because why would you want to create an American James Bond? He’s quintessentially British. And I don’t mean suave, sophisticated, good with women, etc – we’re really not any of those.
No, James Bond’s attitudes to his job are quintessentially British – there’s no real patriotism, no great love of country, no belief in the fundamental awesomeness of the British political system. To Bond, Britain isn’t best and there is no ‘British exceptionalism’. Instead, he is a blunt tool who risks all for Queen and country, because it’s a job and the alternative to the status quo would probably just be even worse than it already is. That’s peak British, that is.
So Agent X is probably the first TV series or movie that really offers a truly American version of James Bond. Created by William Blake Herron, who co-wrote The Bourne Identity, it stars Sharon Stone as the first female vice-president of the United States. On her inaugration night, her strong grasp of Latin and Masonic symbols enables her to discover the true reason the vice president has bugger all constitutional duties – there’s a secret article in the original US constitution that gives her the power in times of national emergency to command a nameless secret agent to do whatever it takes to protect the country from enemies, foreign and domestic. Agent X is that man, a self-sacrificing, small town, everyman patriot, foresaking any kind of personal life to defend the United States and her Constitution, all for no reward.
That’s peak American, that is.
Shame that although it’s a step in the right direction, it’s still rubbish. Even worse than the worst Roger Moore James Bond movie you can think of. Maybe not the worst Pierce Brosnan movie, though.
