Over the years, James Bond has been called many things – M’s assessment of him as “a sexist misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War” is a particularly cutting one – but his basic competence has never generally been questioned.
Sure, he leaves a trail of destruction in his wake, but does he get the job done? Yes. Most of the time, he gets a lot of it right. And can you ask for more than that from a civil servant? Yes you can, and you should. That DB5 technically belongs to the taxpayer.
But now Damian Lewis, not quite a frontrunner for the next man to play James Bond but certainly in the conversation, has piped up to point out that Bond’s a fundamentally quite incompetent spy.
“The great thing about Bond is how bad a spy he is, and how brilliant he is in recovering his position,” Lewis told The Guardian. “Bond makes endless mistakes. That’s what’s fun about him, and then [he] has to do something extraordinary to recover himself.”
Certainly, you’d presumably be hard-pressed to find an MI6 manual which includes annotated diagrams showing how to drive a motorbike off a cliff, catch up with a falling plane and yank it out of a nosedive.
Lewis was doing a bit of promo for his new documentary series Spy Wars, which looks at the real-life exploits of spies from the Cold War to today, and their “often quite grubby and banal” reasons for turning traitor or becoming unsung heroes.
