The Reinvention Game

Another day, another celebrity linked with serious sex offences.  The celebrity sex offenders are obviously in season right now.  On this side of the Atlantic, at least.  In the US they elect them as president.  I see that the usual BBC response to such things is in full swing, as they attempt to expunge David Walliams from existence by removing anything he ever appeared in on the BBC from the archives. Still, I guess this latest development rules Walliams out of contention to be the next James Bond.  (I'm just trying to arbitrarily tie together two entirely unconnected stories, tabloid-style).  I mean, he must surely have been on one of those hypothetical casting lists the media have been bandying about.  Personally, I say to Hell with all this talk of Robert Pattinson et al, they just need to get on with it and announce Jason Statham as the new, working class Bond.  'Martini and caviar, sir?' 'Fuck that, just get me a pint and a packet of pork scratchings.'   There's all this talk about how Bond 'needs' to be re-invented by Amazon, now that they have creative control, so what better way than to throw all that class pretension and supposed 'sophistication' out of the window and just go for a more down-to-earth approach, reflecting the low-budget nature of today's Secret Intelligence Service.  

After all, you could well imagine that a Bond played by Jason Statham would work for far lower pay than Daniel Craig or Roger Moore and instead of using expensive gadgets to kill enemies he'd probably be happy using a bent teaspoon or some similar kitchen utensil.  You could have a whole backstory where he'd attained his double-o status, his 'licence to kill, (which, according to Ian Fleming, required an agent to have killed at least twice in the line of duty), in a bar-room brawl, fatally glassing some drunken Scouser who'd spilled his beer, who was really a Russian agent in disguise.  The second kill could have been during a ruck between rival football hooligans, kicking to death a Millwall thug who is actually an undercover Muslim fundamentalist terrorist.  Instead of the Casino Royale, this Bond could hang out at some dodgy gambling den in Streatham, or maybe even his local branch of Ladbrokes.  See - it just writes itself, once you get the casting right!  Of course, nobody out there is asking for a rough and ready, working class Bond movie.  But neither was anyone asking for a reinterpretation of The Great Gatsby as a weekly police procedural series, but right now, that's exactly what one streaming outfit has in development.  Right now, the entertainment industry seems to be full of people who have no confidence in original concepts - unless they can somehow be expressed in terms of an already popular format or characters, regardless of how inappropriate a vehicle these existing concepts might be for the new stuff.