Ian Fleming - Bondmaker documentary reviewed by The Times

Lovers of 007 will have enjoyed Ian Fleming: Bondmaker (Sunday), BBC One’s “dramedy” (the American term for a drama/documentary hybrid) about the author - reports Sarah Vine of The Times.

It portrayed Fleming as a real-life doppelgänger of his fictional hero, endowed with the same wit, style and insatiable appetites.

I don’t profess to be an expert on either Bond or Fleming. In my experience they both tend to be idolised mostly by arrogant young men; besides, there’s not much in the canon that appeals to the modern woman, unless your idea of fun is shivering in a micro bikini or giggling flirtatiously at a middle-aged man’s endless lecherous double-entendres.

Dramatically, however, there wasn’t much wrong with Ian Fleming: Bondmaker, apart from Pip Torren’s portrayal of Noël Coward, a caricature too hilariously awful to have been anything other than a dare. There was a bit too much moody cigarette smoking and floppy hair action, but otherwise Ben Daniels played Fleming with a convincing combination of arrogance and fragility — exemplifying the upper-class British male’s ability to combine insecurity and insensitivity. Emily Woof was excellent, too, as his long-time lover and then wife Ann (she was first married to Lord Rothermere, of the Daily Mail), a socialite often scathing of her husband’s popularity but just as frequently wounded by his boorishness.

As an hour of entertaining, lightweight drama, this worked perfectly well. But I’m not sure it lived up to its billing as “revealing the truth” about Fleming’s life. All it really did was to put him on the couch and make assumptions about the links between his private life and his creation.

It was an association that Fleming undoubtedly played up while he was alive, encouraging his public to believe that he was in part the prototype for 007. The twist here is that, far from inheriting bravery and physical strength from his creator, Fleming seems to have passed on some rather murkier character traits to Bond: a penchant for violence, his insatiable sexual urges and incurable snobbery.

Fleming, we learnt, had strong sadomasochistic tendencies, which led to several scenes of back-scratching, flesh-squeezing passion, clichéd in the extreme and no doubt a trial for the actors concerned. The son of a First World War hero, Fleming presented himself as a suave, witty and highly influential naval intelligence officer when in truth his role during the war was useful, but not exceptional. Publicly, he sometimes downplayed his own books, and yet here we saw him smarting with shame at overhearing his friends and wife mocking his blockbuster prose style. The overall effect was to create an image of a man who, disappointed with the outcome of his own existence, had created an alter ego to live out his fantasies.

Such blurring of fact and fantasy is not true biography. Too many conjectures are made in order to reinforce the argument. The same technique was used recently in the Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle, in which Holmes’s own methods of reasoning were applied to the personality of his author for dramatic effect. It’s an entertaining approach, but it needs to be handled with care. Bond exists only because of Fleming, and not vice-versa.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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