On any other day of the year, a documentary about the life of Roger Moore simply would not work. This is because, on the whole, not a lot actually seemed to happen in it. Oh, sure, there was The Saint and The Persuaders and James Bond, not to mention a surprising amount of marriages. But if From Roger Moore With Love demonstrates anything, it is that he wasn’t particularly fazed by any of it. Fame came, and Roger Moore was Roger Moore. Marriages ended, and Roger Moore was Roger Moore. Even right at the end, there was no existential suffering to speak of. This is because, by all accounts, Roger Moore was Roger Moore. As subjects go, it’s not far from making a documentary about a tree.
However, this is Christmas Day, and who wants to watch anguished tales of inner torment on Christmas Day? The family’s around you, you’re full to the point of bursting, so what better than an hour and 20 minutes of a handsome, placid man quietly enjoying his life?
The Christmasiness of it all also helps to smooth over the bigger issues about the documentary, namely that it doesn’t seem to know what it is. As a career memoir, it hits all the buttons it needs to, hopping from Moore’s knitwear modelling days through The Saint to Bond and Unicef, without meaningfully lingering on any one thing.
Slightly more successful are the attempts to delve into Moore’s personal life. We learn that the love letters he wrote to his first wife included lines like, ‘I would love to spank your pimply (gooseflesh) bottom’, and that his second wife spent nine years denying him a divorce. His third wife, in his longest marriage, made him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. When that one ended, news of his impending fourth marriage only reached his children when it hit the newspapers. Perhaps a different documentary would have tugged more at this thread, about why someone so handsome and famous would be so relentlessly passive in the face of all this romantic upheaval.
We do get to meet all the Moore children, however, from which we can only presume that the man had a juggernaut of a genetic profile. His children, both male and female, are essentially little Roger Moore clones. Like their father, they all look 40 years old whether they are 20 or 60. They are chiselled and tanned and wry and louche. In one moment, one of his sons mimes popping and pouring a champagne bottle with such slick verve that it’s like watching his body briefly being possessed by the spirit of his father.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that the big get of the documentary is a trove of VHS tapes that Moore had recorded throughout the golden stages of his career. But even then, nothing much comes up. During a party in a beautiful home, Elton John lands a helicopter on the tennis court and David Attenborough grins into the camera for about two and a half seconds. But that’s really it. The rest of it is just footage of a nice man and his nice family having a nice time in a succession of nice homes. Which is, well, nice. But that’s about it.
Perhaps this explains the oddest thing about From Moore With Love, which is that it is narrated by Steve Coogan doing a Roger Moore impersonation. My assumption is that Coogan was brought in to try to pump a little life into Moore’s life. This works best during the portion about Moore’s early career shepherded by the director Brian Desmond Hurst, who, it is claimed, might have been somewhat taken with his discovery. “Brian clearly saw something inside me,” quips Coogan as Moore, arching an entire vanload of eyebrows. “I know what you’re thinking, and it wasn’t that.”
But even this seems like a desperate attempt to inject some of Moore’s public persona into what appears to be a very nice, if not particularly interesting, man. He was certainly capable of more; one early clip showed him flirting so hard with a female journalist that even watching seems like an intrusion. Still, that isn’t what interests this film, which is determined to be an undemanding – if slightly confused – look at how nice it was to be Roger Moore. But, hey, if you’re going to fall asleep on your sofa to anything on Christmas Day, why not this?
From Roger Moore With Love aired on BBC Two and is available on iPlayer
