When the young JG Ballard moved to postwar Britain, what he found was "Bucharest with a hangover". An "exhausted ferret-like people" occupied a "wasteland" of "rubble" and "ration books". Apart from the ferret thing, his account tallies with others. Material progress would come but full restoration of the national spirit would wait until — I think we can pinpoint it — the opening credits of Dr No. Instead of porridge-grey: violent colour. Instead of boredom: the sexualised dancing of male and female silhouettes. Even the foreign-ness of the drumming was subversive in 1962.
Had the James Bond films traded on their technical merits, they might not have made it past the story board. The plots were and remain on-location set pieces welded artlessly together. What propelled the franchise was its offer of glamour in a world that was direly short on the stuff. Here was intercontinental travel when it was too pricey for most. Here was sexual licence when mores were only fitfully loosening.
As these things became normal, Bond lost his reason for being. What stands out about the Roger Moore years is the desperate groping for exotica (locations included outer space). The nadir of the franchise, just either side of the millennium, reflected the onset of globalisation, when there was nothing more banal than an itinerant yuppie with advanced communications technology.
Dazzling locations: Instagram is full of them. People who live over and above state sovereignty: an entire class, flitting between a dozen or so great cities (and Geneva), meet that description in real life. A man with no children but lots of transient lovers: this has not been remotely taboo for a couple of generations now. Bond is no longer radical. After the giant turkey that was 2015's Spectre, I thought that the franchise should obey the recurring verb in its titles, and "die".
I no longer do. Much is said about No Time to Die — whose title was announced this week — being the first Bond film since #MeToo. But it is also the first since the start of counter-globalisation. As such, it affords Bond another shot at relevance.