ABSTRACT
In early 1991 the credit card company Barclaycard ran a television advertising campaign in which comedy actor Rowan Atkinson starred as a British secret agent. One part of this mini-series in particular revolved around the clichés of the James Bond film. The relationship between Bond and the brusque establishment figure of the spymaster, ‘M’; the films’ reliance on high-tech spying gadgets; the extravagance of the Pinewood sets; all were parodied lovingly. The ‘plot’ of this episode, in which the Bond figure demanded a series of gadgets, only to be presented with a Barclaycard by the M figure and told that this was all he needed in the modern world, was a salutary reminder of the belief current at the time that the Cold War was over, and that it had been won by the values of democratic capitalism. And beyond this, that the figure of the fictional spy James Bond is still currently resonant within British culture nearly forty years after his first appearance, in lan Fleming’s novel Casino Rayale.
