The Worst of Bond

So it's half a century since 007 appeared on the silver screen.

Fifty years, twenty two films and not a single Oscar. Not a great record really for a British icon. I suspect if the Carry On team had made it through fifty years even they might have won something.

I enjoyed the Bond books. I liked the concise Chandleresque style, the celebration of gluttony and alcoholism and the chance to get inside the mind of the sort of right wing nutter I usually only meet on the Guardian's Comment is Free section.

I even liked John Gardner's books, which started off not knowing if they were a sequel to the books or the films and were at first a pastiche of both before developing a quirky style of their own.

As for the films though? I remember happily watching Goldfinger every Christmas when I was young, I remember thinking From Russia With Love was surprisingly good when I rewatched it recently, I may be the only person in the galaxy who thinks On Her Majesty's Secret Service is good in part because of George Lazanby and not just despite him, I enjoyed the Daniel Craig reboot and thought Skyfall was a very good Judi Dench movie. But the rest of them? So so.

Various nominations for the best of Bond are flying around at the moment, but what about the worst of Bond? Here are my nominations.

Worst Car Chase - Dr No 

You can usually rely on some four wheeled action in a Bond.

Who can forget Goldeneye with Famke Janssen in her attractive Ferrari 355 taking on Pierce Brosnan in his Aston Martin DB5? Or Never Say Never Again with Barbara Carrera in her sexy Renault 5 Turbo being chased by an fifty-something Sean Connery riding a motorbike in a toupe?

But when it all began in Doctor No the budget didn't quite run to that sort of thing. So here we have a rather tragic back projection, with the inevitable tire squeal even though this is a gravel road, cars going over the same bit of road twice and the one that goes over the cliff at the end is not the one that started the chase. But worst of all we have Mr Bond, in his sports car, being menaced by a hearse.

Yes, a hearse.

Oh dear.

Worst Joke - Goldfinger

Connery's Bond was known for his wit. Really though this was just metaphors taken literally, such as, to a man shot by a spear gun, "he got the point". To a man electrocuted in a bath, "shocking" and so on.

Bond was also a bit of a snob then as well. In From Russia With Love he had Robert Shaw, one of the best Bond villains ever, bumped off after he revealed himself to be a SMERSH agent by ordering red wine with fish. Actually a lot of red wines go well with fish, but clearly it's not the done thing in the Secret Service.

In Goldfinger Bond decides to try to combine wit with snobbery when he comes out with "My dear girl there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs". 

Bond appeared in the movies pretty much the same week the Beatles appeared on the air waves.

Both are sixties icons, but only one is cool.

Worst Fight - You Only Live Twice

Over the years Bond has fought Her Majesty's enemies with a wide variety of weapons; rifles, pistols, machine guns, knives and a sofa.

Yes, a sofa.

Roald Dahls's script for You Only Live Twice, the first film where they ditched Fleming's book entirely, is pretty much the archetypal Bond film. Travel to an exotic location, superpower confrontation, lots of seemingly random violence, some (implied) sex and a showdown with the supervillain in his preposterous secret base. Indeed you can argue they've been remaking the film over and over again for the last 45 years.

Since then nobody has beaten the Nehru suited Donald Pleasance as a Bond baddie, but 007 has at least found more dangerous weapons to use.

Worst Outfit - The Spy Who Loved Me

If the image of Bond in the sixties is Sean Connery in a dinner jacket, for the seventies it has to be Roger Moore in a Safari suit.

Before I go any further though I should add that it is the decade that is at fault here, not Mr Moore, who had been quite dapper himself in the sixties when he played The Saint.

Of all the fashion disasters he was forced to endure though, the prize goes to the yellow ski suit in this film. It even has flares.

The real thing is perhaps not as bad as the Action Man version, and Bond does at least accessorise well with rocket firing ski sticks and the Union Jack parachute, but it is a Grade A seventies fashion crime.

The ski jump is good, I'll admit, and all the more impressive for being done without CGI, but the rest of the film is the familiar story of exotic location, superpower confrontation, lots of seemingly random violence, some (implied) sex and a showdown with the supervillain in his preposterous secret base - in this case a ship.

The Bond franchise itself was tanking by this point and with a ludicrous sub-Star Wars space battle in Moonraker the series really did Jump The Shark. Moore carried on even though he was clearly too old to be seducing anyone without a bus pass, until eventually put out to grass, with his Safari suits, in the nineties.

Worst Car - Tomorrow Never Dies

Bond of course always had the cars. The Aston Martin DB5 with the machine guns is justly famous. The Lotus Esprit submarine justly less famous. I mean, a Lotus that goes underwater? Come on. Most can't even keep out the rain.

However by the nineteen nineties we had a corporate Bond for a corporate age in Pierce Brosman, and guys in suits had realised there was money to be made in product placement. Out went venerable British machines, and in came whoever would pay the most money, in this case BMW.

But which Beamers would he take. The 320is that had recently won the British Touring Car Championship? No. The 'repmobile racer' the M5? Nope.

Instead they went for the 750il, the one that accountants drive.

Whilst it's amusing to think of 007 fuming at side junctions 'cos nobody would let him out, this isn't really the hard living image Ian Fleming did so much to popularise (and practise). This really was Bond plc and the rest of the film is just as dull, nothing but exotic locations, superpower confrontation, lots of seemingly random violence, some (implied) sex and a showdown with the supervillain in his preposterous secret base - in this case a ship.

(If you liked this, why not read my other blog on crime fighting cars of the sixties and seventies.)

Green Water Navy

Trouble Over Oily Waters

One hundred years ago this year Winston Churchill made a momentous decision. The world's greatest navy was to stop running on Welsh coal and go over to Persian oil. If you want a date in which the world entered the Oil Age, this is it.

There were sound technical reasons for doing this - more power, less smoke and less shovelling being the main ones - but a lot of people still thought he was mad. The British Empire at that time covered a quarter of the globe, but mostly this was the quarter with no oil in it. Before the Navy could defend the country, it would now have to defend its own fuel supplies.

The critics may have had a point, as two years later a British and Indian army invaded Iraq to safeguard its fuel, suffering a disaster at a place called Kut in the process. We invaded again in 1941 and embarked on ‘regime change’ in Iran in the same year. We then handed the title of Top Nation to the USA and they did a bit of regime change of their own in 1952.

They also launched an invasion in 1979 that was disrupted by the weather and ended in a massive helicopter pile-up in the desert, whilst Iraq has subsequently been invaded not once but twice.

That's quite a lot of blood for quite a lot of oil. Our politicians don’t seem to see a problem with this, but the greatest navy in the world has other ideas and this summer the mighty USS Nimitz led a task force on manoeuvres near Hawaii where the ships and aircraft used a 50:50 mix of conventional and biofuels. 

In The Navy

Now the USS Nimitz is an aircraft carrier I’ve actually heard of, as in 1980 it was sucked through a time warp back to 1941 – unless that was just a film.

It was also the subject of a reality TV series in 2008 in which we discovered she has a Wiccan coven on board. Not that this is a big surprise as the US military is pretty pagan-friendly these days. You can have ‘Wiccan’ on your dog tags and, if you don’t make it home, a pentacle on your gravestone. 

Since last year they are also gay-friendly, and now they’re growing their own fuel some may be thinking they’ve turned into a bunch of floating hippies. Further evidence of this is the case of the USS Acadia that had to return home from Gulf War I as thirty six of the crew were pregnant, gaining itself the inevitable nickname of ‘The Love Boat’.

However the Navy still drops bombs, fires missiles, lands marines, launches fighter planes and engages in various other non-fluffy activities. And that’s the point of the Great Green Fleet experiment as, apart from a few nuclear powered vessels, all of this requires oil.

Face.…Palm

Biofuels are carbon neutral, meaning the carbon dioxide they release when burnt is balanced by the carbon dioxide the crops they were made from used whilst growing. However they don’t have a totally unblemished record. 

First there was the ‘splash and dash’ racket, whereby small quantities of oil from crops was added to ordinary petrol in order to qualify for the lucrative US government subsidy. 

Then some uncomfortable truths were found about the palm oil that was being used to make biofuels. Grown on cleared rainforests or swamps, which are massive carbon sinks, palm oil was actually responsible for more greenhouse gases than ordinary oil.

Finally there is the problem that agricultural land is finite. As well as preventing climate change we do also have to feed seven billion human beings. Fertiliser production itself produces masses of carbon dioxide, so we really want to use as little as possible which means less intensive, not more intensive, food production. We may not have land spare for growing food.

However, despite these rather serious problems, if you want to run a jet fighter without damaging the climate or having to invade Middle Eastern countries, biofuels may well be your only option.

End of the Oil Age?

This has not been popular with a Congress awash with oil money, even though US politicians like to boast about “supporting the troops”. However the Navy is sticking to its guns and claims the exercises have been a success and is planning a permanent Green Fleet by 2016. 

The US Army too, fed up of having to guard its oil tankers from insurgents, is to launch a program of experimental fuel cells, electric and hybrid tanks.

Churchill got some stick in 1912 too, but his oil powered navy went on to win two World Wars.  His decision also turned out to be a landmark in history, a point where the Coal Age ended and the Oil Age began. Whether the voyage of the Great Green Fleet will in years to come be regarded as the moment the Oil Age ended is for future historians to decide.

Isles of Wonders

Pandemonium

So the Olympics have been and gone. Both of them.

Depending on your point of view they were either a much needed boost to the spirits of a depressed nation, or £9 billion we’ll never see again.

The sport was all right, especially the wheelchair rugby, which may actually be more violent than Gaelic Football, but in my opinion though the Gold medals should have gone to the opening and closing ceremonies.

Danny Boyle’s opener saw Glastonbury Tor standing majestic as the Industrial Revolution rolled away the green fields of England, Lord Voldemort menaced the NHS, Mr Bean played the keyboards and the Queen dropped in by parachute.

Seven weeks later the Paralympics ended with a steampunk Fire Festival featuring an invocation of the four seasons taken from The British Druid Order Gorsedd ritual. This means 750 million TV viewers heard Lance Corporal Rory Mackenzie speak a dozen or so lines written by Bobcat and Greywolf. How cool is that?

But whilst the spirits were being called and the ancestors awoken, how about the legacy of the games for our planet and our descendants? What about the claim that these were to be the ‘greenest games ever’?

Like claims about ‘greenest governments ever’, such statements are usually swiftly made in the hope that they will be at length forgotten. Previous games have been so spectacularly un-green that London could probably have made good its boast just by recycling the empties. A major let down was expected, especially when it was announced the corporate sponsors would include junk food manufacturers, dodgy mining firms and the company the Indian government is still after for gassing Bhopal.

But this didn’t happen. They organisers aimed high, set themselves ambitious targets and even installed an independent watchdog to give them an end of term report. And whilst they didn’t get the top grade, it was a comfortable pass. 

The US Basketball team on the tube

Less than half the promised renewable power materialised, the torches weren’t as eco-friendly as had been planned and the ethics of the clothing manufacturers in Southeast Asia proved as impenetrable as many warned. But the recycling is going well, with all those hospital beds heading off to Tunisia soon, and it really was the public transport games, with over 95% of spectators arriving by bus, train or tube. 

Alas the Critical Mass cyclists who tried to make their way to the opening ceremony via the new cycle lane that had appeared were stopped by some fairly robust policing, but the Games still showed you really don’t need a car in London. 

So all told they were probably the greenest, and the most pagan, games for a few millenia.

Transition Towns

The Power of Community

200AD and the Roman Empire was a single pagan civilisation stretching from the borders of modern Scotland to what is now Iran. But the Empire was changing. The frontiers were now fixed and the army that defended them paid by taxes and not plunder. 

Ostrogoths attack Rome 541CE (Angus MacBride)

Then the crisis came. Barbarians overran the frontiers and the system of free trade that had made the empire rich collapsed. Order was restored, but at a cost of years of austerity and high taxes.

Those taxes were in turn levied increasingly on the poor whilst the rich not only got richer, they retreated from public life and spent their wealth on themselves and their country houses rather than in the cities and on public buildings. Ordinary citizens felt increasingly abandoned by their superiors, left to fend for themselves in an increasingly dangerous world.

During this century of chaos one group of citizens stuck together. An unusual sect, they were egalitarian enough to allow women to rise to senior positions, something unheard of in the Roman world. When disaster struck and the rich ran for the hills, their leaders stayed to help. If members of the community were enslaved by barbarians they pooled their resources to buy them back.

Although their ideology was considered somewhat weird by most citizens, their undoubted sense of community drew them an increasing number of supporters. In due course the Emperor himself was to join them. 

Ninety years later the western half of the empire, militarily strong but economically weak, collapsed. Economic power moved east and the Germans took over the running of Europe. However this sect, now much changed and not always for the better, survived and is with us still.

They are of course, the Christians.

A History of Oil

Oil is the problem. 

Indian soldiers in Mesopotamia

In 1912 we entered the oil age when Winston Churchill made the decision to switch the Royal Navy from using British coal to foreign oil. The first oil war began two years later when British and Indian forces invaded Iraq to protect the Navy’s Iranian oil fields. We invaded again in 1941, 1991 and 2003. In fact in the 100 years of the oil age, the British Army has been in Iraq for 41 of them, whilst next-door-neighbour Iran saw British backed regime changes in 1941 and 1953. 

But foreign wars weren’t the only problem with oil. 

Between our second and third invasions of Iraq scientists had been warning with increasing frequency about the dangers of climate change. As oil replaced coal the rate of increase in Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere accelerated, and this was a problem that couldn’t be solved with tanks.

Give Me A P Please Bob

As fans of Geoffrey of Monmouth know, Totnes was where Brutus the Trojan landed on these isles to found Britannia. It was also where, in 2005, Robert Hopkins and friends started the Transition Town movement.

Transition Towns are the big idea of the moment in sustainability circles. They are a more optimistic reaction to the end of the age of oil than the Dark Mountain lot.

Transition movement revolves around three Ps.

Peak Oil is the moment when we have used up half the world’s oil. We can search the deep ocean floor for new fields, extract more from existing wells with new technology and move to unconventional sources, but this all costs more. 

The modern world eats oil, runs on oil and is mostly made out of oil, but with China, India and Brazil all wanting more of the black stuff, it will soon cost a lot more. The Chancellor can knock a penny or two off fuel duty to keep motorists happy, but he can’t reduce the cost of artificial pesticide, aircraft fuel or plastic. 

Permaculture though is part of the solution. 

It is the practise of feeding ourselves, wherever we live, in a way that doesn’t mortgage the future. Small scale, low impact, diverse and imaginative projects allow people to grow food almost anywhere. An increasingly popular sub-branch is guerrilla gardening, the planting of any disused area of land with fruit and vegetables for general consumption. If the kids nick all the strawberries, that’s just great.

The final P is People.

As is becoming increasingly obvious as one scandal after another breaks, our society is not about to reform itself anytime soon. Politicians have been caught fiddling their expenses, the media is out of control, the bankers have been quietly profiting out of the Credit Crunch but this unhallowed triumvirate is still running the country. 

Transition in Your Street

But you know what? We don’t need them.

As the people of Ancient Rome realised, when the going gets tough the last people you’re going to find hanging around to help out are politicians, media moguls and bankers. Just as it was left to the likes of Charmaine Neville, a singer in a jazz band, to borrow a school bus and rescue the sick and elderly from flooded New Orleans when hurricane Katrina struck, the people who will help you survive Peak Oil probably don’t live in a tax haven.

Whether or not there was a Charmaine Neville to borrow a chariot and rescue her neighbours when the barbarians overran the Roman Empire is not known. What we do know though is that whilst the Christian Bishops were becoming the new administration on the continent, most of Britain returned to paganism, but not the Roman sort. Something kept society going in the changed world of the fifth century, but it wasn’t the Christian Church.

And that is where I think Pagans can help the Transition movement. 

The hardest transition of all to make is the one inside, the transition from seeing the natural world as a resource to be fought for and exploited to one which should be shared and venerated, but I would hope this is a transition most of us are at least part way towards making.

So why not join the Transition movement and help future-proof your community, because at the end of the day your community are the people who’ll be there in a crisis.

If your town isn’t on the list yet, round up some friends and make it so. We put my home town of Glossop on the list, and it wasn’t that hard.

The society that oil built is coming to an end. Help to become part of what comes next.

(This article first appeared in the Lammas 2012 issue of Pentacle magazine)