Journalist and Bond fan Jeremy Clarkson debates suitability of Sebastian Faulks

I am not a jealous man. I do not sit around all day coveting my neighbour’s helicopter or your new hair system. Some people are fortunate and others are not, and anyone who fights that truism is on a path that leads to madness and communism - writes Jeremy Clarkson in The Times.

That said, however, I fell to my knees and wept with envy and rage last week when I opened my morning newspaper to discover that Ian Fleming’s estate had asked Sebastian bloody Faulks to write the next James Bond book.

“Nooooo,” I wailed, in the manner of someone whose daughter has just fallen from a cliff, as I learnt that the manuscript has already been blessed by Bond movie producer Barbara Broccoli.

Getting Faulks to write a Bond book is like asking Polly Toynbee to write the next Die Hard film. It’s like casting Vinnie Jones as Mr Darcy. In the whole history of getting things wrong, this is right at the top of the list.

I met Sebastian once and he seemed like a nice chap. I have also read many of his books and they are marvellous. The scene at the end of On Green Dolphin Street where the woman howls was so powerful I thought I might have a feminine side after all.

Not a big side, you understand. Not big enough to make me even think of placing scented mini-cushions in my underwear drawer, but certainly big enough to have me reaching for the box of tissues.

And let’s be honest. Any author who can get 16 stone of beefheart blokeishness all teary-eyed and snivelling over some silly woman’s doomed and entirely fictional love affair is plainly very good at his job. But we’re talking about Bond here. And I’m sorry but when it comes to shooting people in the face with a harpoon, that job, by rights, is mine.

I suppose I should admit at this point that I’ve never read any of Fleming’s originals. But I don’t see why this should hold me back. If his estate and Broccoli were to tell me that Bond was a dark and brooding loner who managed to be both gallant and a seducer all at the same time, I think I could manage.

I’d simply begin by saying: “Bond woke up in bed with a girl who he liked very much. Darkly and broodily he hauled himself from under the sheets, kissed her on the ear and said, ‘My darling. You are marvellous. But I am a loner and I must go now because I have to blow up an oil rig’.”

Then I could get into the meat of what matters in the big wide world of Bond: gadgets, explosions, wisecracks and improbably large men who’ve had their hands replaced with spiky lumps of ebony.

Oh and the car chases. I bet I’d be a bloody sight better at those than Sebastian nancy boy Faulks with his Birdsong and his bloody Dolphin Street. Bastard.

Apparently, his new book, which is probably called Bond Joins the RSPB, is set in 1967 when 007 is damaged (yawn), ageing and is called in as a gunfighter for one last heroic mission.

Wrong wrong wrong. Bond cannot be damaged. Even if he were to fall out of a hot-air balloon and into the spinning blades of a Hughes 500 – and I bet Faulks thinks that’s some kind of lawnmower – he should emerge with nothing more than a slightly disarranged tie knot.

And he cannot age. He simply morphs from a Scottish milkman with a tattoo on his arm into a safari suit and keeps right on going.

Normally, when you compare a book with a film, the book is always better. But with Bond, a collection of old stories about a dark and brooding loner, written a million years ago by a man who spent most of his day snorkelling cannot possibly hope to compete with a film franchise that has spanned the world for 40 years. Bond is now a product of the multiplex, not the library.

And if we have to have Bond books at all, they should reflect that. Instead of worrying how 007 might have been seen by a long-dead author, the powers that be should think more how he has been seen by two billion cinema-goers.

I have no doubt at all that Faulks will give 007 layers of character so intense and so well rooted that it’ll be page 148 before he shoots anyone. And then, I bet he spends the following 148 pages agonising over what he’s done. Who cares? Who goes to a Bond film to see a man in a bar agonising? And who goes to see Charles Gray’s Bath-O-Sub being dropped into a shark-infested lagoon?

That’s why you need me to be the next Bond author. Because I get this. I’d have Bond shoot someone on page two and then, instead of analysing how this felt, I’d explain in quite a lot of detail about how the baddie’s head erupted in a thin grey and red mist as Bond leapt onto his jet pack and hurtled through a wall of noise into the night.

In fact, I’m so angry that I wasn’t asked by Mrs Cauliflower or whoever to write the next book I might write a spy thriller anyway. It’ll be about an agent who’s more shallow than a summer puddle. After shagging a netball team for fun, he’ll walk into a bar where Bond is agonising over something. And shoot him in the back of the head with a short-nosed Heckler & Koch machine pistol.

Get out of that one, Faulks. I’m going to shoot your superhero in the head. Then you’ll have to go back to your birdsong and your howling women and I’ll get what was rightfully mine in the first place.

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