British Intel is Like the Babylon Bee, Only They Are Serious

It’s a long way from James Bond, Mrs Momeypenny.

The above is an image of what many people consider the best Bond, Sean Connery (seen here, from memory, in a scene from Dr No). Personally, I prefer Roger Moore-English, wittier, with more memorable and overblown villains and gadgets, and actually closer in his charm hidden psychopathic coldness to what a playboy killer would be like. But whether you like Connery or Moore, and however gloriously mad and ridiculous the Bond frsnchise got, it was based on something real.

Connery’s marvellously unimpressed look here reflected something real in both his personal character, the kind of character that must go into the psyche of a successful hard man or killer on State business, and a quality that used to be quintessentially British.

All action heroes from Bond to Rambo are of course ludicrously competent at killing and surviving attempts to kill them, capable of feats of daring beyond those of most mere mortals. The action hero is the man beyond all other men, as is the more modern film antihero found in revenge sagas or the older gunslingers of the Western genre. Whether spy, assassin, cowboy or cop, the action hero has a “very particular set of skills” framed entirely around being able to end other lives, often in spectacularly improvised and gruesome manners.

But what Bond had was more than that. Bond had style in deadly combination with extreme competence. He had insouciance, a sense often verbally as well as physically expressed that nothing, no matter how deadly or perilous, ruffled or perturbed his calmly mocking attitude to danger and, well, life. Much Bond humour derives from deadpan British understatement and equally British sexual innuendo, a curious mix but both things that rely on a sense of laughing distance from events. The naughty seaside postcard and the dismissive treatment of deadly threat as an opportunity for a wry aside are both based in the same things which made the British Tommy so fearsomely competent even in the final days of Empire.