Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond is fanciful but attractive tosh
“For God’s sake Ian, this isn’t a game”
Dating back to 2014, Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond is a miniseries written by John Brownlow and Don Macpherson, telling a fictionalised version of the military career of Ian Fleming who, as you may know, went on to create the character James Bond in a series of novels. And as is often the way in these things, with such a deliberate framing in mind, we’re invited to imagine that much of the inspiration for his writing came from real life.
Dominic Cooper plays Fleming as a louche society man, not even the outbreak of WWII intervening with his playboy lifestyle. But with the shadow of his father, killed in WWI, and his already-enlisted brother looming large, he’s pressed into service as a commander in the Royal Navy, with a neat sideline in espionage. Among his exploits include the now-more-famous Operation Mincemeat plus a fair deal of sleeping around and ordering martinis etc etc.
It’s a watchable set of four episodes but has an air of familiarity about it which means it rarely excites. There’s a lot of Cooper being rakishly charming as Fleming as he ignores instructions and goes about his own way, whether it is defying his mother Evelyn (Lesley Manville in pinched society mother mode), flirting recklessly with Lara Pulver’s Ann O’Neill who already has a husband and a lover, or making Sam West’s Rear Admiral Godfrey tear his hair out with frustration.
Because there is this air of the fantastical – at one point, he experiments with nerve gas hidden in a fountain pen to his colleague Second Officer Monday (who might as well be called Moneypenny, played with lovely delicacy by Anna Chancellor) – it never really quite gains any emotional ballast. When it comes to the shagging around, with or without Ann, that’s not so much of a problem but there’s something trickier around his cavalier attitude to serving, when so many are losing their lives. Fleming may be rich white man’s privilege writ large but given all that is Bond, would we have expected anything less.
