Well, this is odd. As the Bond film franchise languishes in a post-Daniel Craig inertia – Barbara Broccoli stating last week that “it’ll take some time…it’s a whole reinvention – we are presented with… this. A half-fictional, half-reality TV game show that seems afraid to mention James Bond, in which a Bond-esque villain called The Controller, played by Brian “F*** off” Cox, sends pairs of real people out to do a variety of Bond-challenges at Bond-y locations around the world.
It looks fantastic, Amazon Prime having clearly spent half of Fort Knox’s bullion reserves on giving it the full Bond cinematic treatment, and, crucially, it has the actual Bond music. But it doesn’t quite work.
The major problem is the semi-fictional approach. It’s not entirely without precedent for game shows. The Crystal Maze had a fictional conceit of sorts. Then there was Spy School, the ITV show in which schoolkids tried to solve puzzles in order to defeat the evil Goldfist and become proper spies – that’s probably the closest relation to 007: The Road To A Million.
Though sadly they haven’t really committed to the premise in the same way – there’s no suggestion that the contestants are training to be a 00 agent or anything. Instead we simply have Cox as The Controller, not so much a villain as a voyeur, sitting in front of a bank of screens ‘watching’ pairs of contestants attempting his challenges at locations around the world.
I say ‘watching’ as we cut from the action with the contestants in the field back to his reactions and without being too cynical I’m pretty sure they only had a day with Cox in the studio, judging by the somewhat samey, perhaps even exactly the same, grizzled reaction shots. Cox carries it off by the sheer weight of his presence, but he has no proper interaction with the real people performing for him, and it all feels like a bit of a waste.
Even Cox expressed in an interview that he thought he was being cast for a proper Bond film, saying he would have been a perfect Bond villain – “For years, I thought I’d love to be in James Bond. I thought this was it, and it wasn’t” – and it makes you think: why aren’t the Bond producers behaving like the Marvel or the Star Wars team at Disney? You’ve got one of the world’s biggest franchises, just crying out to be milked with expanded universe films and TV series, while you sort out the main series.
Off the top of my head, how about Cox in a rebooted Goldfinger limited series? I’d watch the shit out of that. Or a Joker-style origin story about Jaws? A young James Bond set in his pre-Secret Service hijinks Naval days? A ‘Ms. Bond’ with his daughter at high school thwarting assassination by her father’s old adversaries who are disguised as supply teachers?
Stop getting Bond wrong!
But anyway, The Controller is not the main draw here, it’s the challenges and the contestants. Basically, at locations recognisable from the film series, they have to pass some kind of physical challenge to get a silver briefcase, and then answer a multiple choice question delivered on a screen inside it. If they succeed they win cash, and go onto the next location in a different country, to try to win a higher amount of cash. It’s like Race Across the World without the travel anxiety, or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on a gap year.
There are eight pairs, married couples, brothers, workmates, father and son teams. They all start off in the Skyfall location of the Scottish Highlands. Everyone is dressed really inappropriately. In SAS Who Dares Wins, the contestants are at least kitted out in military gear; here, we’re left with the spectacle of a couple of lads from Croydon wading into the freezing ocean wearing skinny jeans.
Those lads turn out to be good value, brothers James and Joey, and actually the entire series grows in stature if you stick with it. It’s two or three or five episodes in before you hear about most of their backstories. Most are united by money struggles, for which this show dangles an answer in a faintly distasteful way, but of course the escape from their usual lives is the real value here.
The husband and wife pairing, Kamara and Josh, are the pick of the bunch – one great moment has Josh stepping aside to let his wife do the scariest trial of the whole thing: climbing up a massive crane in high wind to retrieve a briefcase, like in Craig’s brutal chase at the start of Casino Royale. It’s properly nerve-shredding. Kamara is amazing at it, Josh looks like a wuss. But we then learn in a later episode that he was stabbed when he was younger which had knocked his confidence as a person. It’s a nice delay on this information.
The show gets better and better. As more couples are knocked out, more iconic Bond film locations come into play, from the Jamaican beaches of Dr. No to the cable cars in Rio from Moonraker. Ski action happens. There’s even THE iconic car. Despite its curious ‘Don’t mention James Bond’ approach, Bond fans will (eventually) be rewarded.
A decent prestige quiz show then, but is a decent prestige quiz show the best option for the Bond franchise? You can’t help but feel this will be an unnoticed flare for a brand lost in no man’s land.
