Ian Fleming And The Curse of Bond (Sky Arts) earns a rating of three stars out of five. A simple rule of thumb reveals which James Bond movies are classics and which are duds. The good ones have great titles: Goldfinger, Live And Let Die, Skyfall. Naff titles warn you'll be wasting your time and your popcorn: Tomorrow Never Dies, and the truly awful Quantum Of Solace.
The two-hour biography of 007's creator, Ian Fleming: The Curse Of Bond, boasted a great title that proved misleading. Though the documentary was informative, with an impressive roster of novelists and actors paying homage, the claim that James Bond somehow took over the author's soul and destroyed him from the inside was voodoo nonsense.
What killed Fleming, who died aged 56 in 1964, was half a bottle of Scotch and four packets of cigarettes every day. He'd been living on borrowed time for three years after suffering a heart attack. To suggest he was burned out by an overdose of success, after selling 20 million books, or that he was exhausted by the effort of competing with his all-action hero, is not plausible.
And as for the idea that writer's block proved fatal - if that were possible, the streets of Hampstead and Bloomsbury would be littered with literary corpses. This cod psychology filled a few minutes at the beginning and end of the programme. Much of the rest was a paean to Jamaica, where Fleming came every year to write.
Among his guests at his villa, Goldeneye, were Noel Coward and Anthony Eden, who was then Prime Minister. Record company boss Chris Blackwell, the man who made Bob Marley an international superstar, owns the place now, though he didn't contribute. Perhaps the producers thought he wasn't intellectual enough, compared to the likes of novelists Kate Mosse, William Boyd and Marlon James.
Ralph Fiennes, who played Judi Dench's successor as M in three films, had the best anecdote: as a boy, he began reading The Man With The Golden Gun, until his father ripped the book to shreds and said, 'If you want to know why, ask your mother.' Mrs Fiennes, Ralph discovered, was outraged by the morality of the story and the villainous Scaramanga's insistence that he could only kill immediately after having sex. 'For my mother, being a Roman Catholic,' he said, 'that was obscene.'
Strangely, only four of the Bonds appeared in the documentary: no Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton. Helena Bonham Carter and others read illustrative passages from the books, though none were especially memorable: Fleming was a functional writer, who told his stories with pace, not poetry. Much more striking were the dozens of brief film excerpts - glimpses no more than a few seconds long, that conveyed the glamorous essence of the movies.
The best cameo, though, went to Ramsay Dacosta, who was Fleming's gardener 60 years ago. Apparently, the writer insisted his staff address him as 'Commander'. How's that for ego?
