James Bond: Sex, Spies and Soggy Towels (Ep1)

0:04The name's Hyde, Marina Hyde.

0:07Richard Osman:And I'm Richard Osman. I'm just a guy who works in the office. Now, for our club members, we've recorded the first chapter in our most ambitious bonus series yet. The definitive, yes, definitive story of Britain's finest cultural export, James Bond. Yes, we track the publishing and cinematic phenomenon from its inception through all the actors that have played 007 to The Takeover by the real-life supervid and Jeff Bezos. We begin our first chapter with the tale of Bond's creator, the philandering, chain-smoking, sex-obsessed, spy-turned-writer Ian Fleming. And it's a head of a story. This first episode is free for everyone, and you're going to love it, but the rest is strictly classified.

0:45Richard Osman:Join us for the rest of the series by heading to therestisentertainment.com. And if you act fast, you can take full advantage of our summer sale on annual memberships with the code SUMMER26. act quick and head to the rest is entertainment.com and this advert is for your eyes only unless you're in audio in which case it's for your ears only which they have yet to make the rest is entertainment is presented by octopus energy now one talent can make a career three usually gets you an official title yep and that official title is a triple threat you call triple threatening one who can act sing and dance now these days three can seem almost modest the same person might write direct produce and have another career on the side j-lo would be a triple threat huge music career started as a dancer huge acting career as well it's an amazing talent to be able to have and now uh drinks mogul as well is she you have to you have to be the mogul now i think the mogul is always the third thing now so she's a quadruple threat yeah i i sing i act and i have a lifestyle portal but uh that phrase all singing all dances it escaped entertainment and now it's used for anyone and anything that does several jobs very well all at once.

1:54Which is a pretty fair description of Octopus. It's the UK's largest energy supplier, one of the country's biggest installers of heat pumps, solar panels and batteries, and it runs a major electric car leasing business for good measure.

2:07Richard Osman:I mean, that's a quadruple threat, isn't it? Yeah, that's a quadruple threat.

2:40Richard Osman:The year is 1952. We are in Orkabessa, Jamaica. A 43-year-old man, slightly down on his luck, is soon to marry his pregnant fiancé. Looking for ways to support his upcoming family, he decides to write a spy adventure novel. Our man sits down at his desk and begins typing. He has no plan. He has no notes. Just memories from his unusual life and career. And this 43-year-old man was Ian Fleming. Welcome to our special series on the history of James Bond. I am so looking forward to these. I am so looking forward to these. Now you have to introduce yourself though. The name's Hyde. Marina Hyde. Oh, interesting.

3:22Richard Osman:I'm Richard Osman. Hi, everybody. Well, I'd be like your second in command. I wouldn't get any kind of... I wouldn't even have a double O. You'd be an amazing head of the British Secret Service. That's not what we're talking about, though. We are talking about James Bond, one of the longest-running, highest-grossing media franchises of all time. A multi-billion-dollar media portfolio. 25 official films, grossing close to 8 billion. Over 50 books by 10 different authors now, plus multiple spin-off series. The original 14 Ian Fleming novels sold 100 million copies between them. Over 30 video games, comic strips, reality TV competitions, music basically is its own genre.

3:57Richard Osman:Bond as a prefix to theme, girls and villains, all instantly recognisable. James Bond, we know what it is. Marina, where did it all begin? Well, it all comes from Ian Fleming. Now, he's born in May 1908. He's very much a product of the British establishment. The son of a conservative MP, Valentine Fleming, and he's the grandson of a sort of self-made millionaire merchant banker. So far, so relatable. Yes. Yes. But he's also sort of the black sheep of his family and pretty self-sabotaging. He's the younger brother to Peter Fleming, and he follows Peter to Eton in 1921. But he's in the shadow of his brother there.

4:40Have you ever seen the pictures of him at Eton? He's so good looking. The brother? No, Ian.

4:44Richard Osman:So you think he's good looking when he was at Eton? Yeah. Okay. Different time. It was a different time. It was a different time. I think you'd have been okay with it. He didn't last at Eton, is that right? He didn't last at Eton. He doesn't last the full Mrs. Aterm. But he can't sort of compete academically with Peter, so he focuses on his kind of wit and his style. He consciously wastes all academic potential. His housemaster objected to his attitude, hair oil, ownership of a car, and relations with women. There's a sort of mutual agreement that he leaves Eton a term. It's weird that he ended up inventing James Bond.

5:18Richard Osman:No, I don't know where he got it all from. But then he goes to Sandhurst. Is he fairly better there? Well, they try and straighten him out by sending him to Sandhurst. That'll do it. You're going to military school, that old chestnut. And he was told that he would make a good soldier if the ladies don't ruin him. But unfortunately, he then has to leave because he contracts a case of gonorrhea. Oh, Ian. I know. So his mother... That's literally... What did I just say? What did I just tell you? That's the last thing we wanted to happen. His despairing mother thinks, right, I'm going to send you to some sort of private finishing school in Austria in 1927.

5:49He's 19 at this point. And it's run by a former British spy and his novelist wife. And it's here that he finally starts engaging with education. But it's really too late for him to kind of rise through the ranks via the traditional channels like going into the foreign office or whatever. So he has to get on by the wit he's been cultivating.

6:08Richard Osman:So, again, we're looking backwards. It's 2020 hindsight, isn't it? but is a guy born into a certain world absolutely kind of trading on his good looks his wit his charm thrown out of somewhere obviously a maverick and then funnily enough just at this important age there enters a former spy uh and a novelist yeah i mean it's all it's all there isn't it and he starts to think okay i can get it together in some sort of a way and his first job is at reuters the news agency and he gets it in 1929 and he does mostly desk work so reports come in and then you have to refile them and put them out on the wires and he does it very well it's when he finally gets given the job as a foreign correspondent that he comes into his own he's sent to russia in 1933 to cover the metro vicars affair which is a court case concerning six british engineers who'd been arrested and were being tried on espionage charges which is which is a sort of perfect Bond story but I think because at that stage he's very much the youngest is he not of all the people there he's 24 he's 24 but I think he found he found ways to stand out did he not in anything like that there would have been loads of foreign stringers covering all of it and somehow he has to stand out so he becomes famed for sort of embellishing copy I have to say there's a huge amount of Boris Johnson do you know what the whole way through when we're talking you think yep that's Boris yeah that's Boris yeah I mean listen there are differences but you know good looking like i said anyway he he there's a lot of local color which he's probably all made up all of it he also thinks right how am i going to make sure my copy is the first to be filed because you have such an advantage if yours is the first stuff that drops then people are probably just going to use that he would hire messenger boys to stand underneath the courtroom windows so he could just drop his finished copy down to them and then they could run to the cable shop and wire it that's so clever instead of having to sort of walk out of the whole court building and do it isn't And there is a story as well that's even more Boris Johnson.

7:59Richard Osman:Boris Johnson famously writing his two opinions about Brexit. I think Fleming beat him by a few decades on that. Yes, he would involve writing out all the possible outcomes. And then so he'd have it ready to go, of a trial, and he'd have it ready to go. Actually, some sports reporters still do that now. And he'd have the right one ready to go. But also, remember, it had to go through the Russian census. So he had this other scheme, which he got them to pre-approve all these pre-written things, which were supposed to cover all the possible outcomes. And so he'd say, I promise I'll file the correct one, but if I can have it pre-approved.

8:32So his stuff would come out quicker than anybody else.

8:35Richard Osman:So at the moment, we have this guy. So foreign correspondents, I don't think it's any secret, is sort of a world in which people from the security services are sometimes taken or sometimes sent. So when did the world of spying come knocking for him? Well, in 1939, the Navy is looking for extra staff because there's a war on. Yes. And honestly, they really need to, they really need to, it's sort of like Hamleys at Christmas, isn't it? Yeah. The Navy during a war. Yes, you hire a lot of people from public school. Exactly the same. Yeah, when I very first worked with Simon Pegg many, many, many, many years ago on a pilot that didn't see the light of day, he was working as a toy demonstrator at Hamleys.

9:17Yeah, anyway, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, who's the Director of Naval Intelligence, feels that people from outside offer fresh perspectives. And he wants an assistant. And everybody says, all the different feelers he puts out, the answer comes back at the same time, hire Ian Fleming.

9:31Richard Osman:God, that's a great reputation to have. Yeah, Fleming is hired and he gets assigned to Room 39 and is given a code name, F-17. He's not a field agent. It sounds like he is one with that, but he's not. He's mostly a report writer. So he's not really Bond at all, but he's in that world. He's at a desk job. The agent's reports come in and have to go back to the chief and he's the sort of middle person on that. It's a sort of running joke that all he commanded were in trays, out trays and ashtrays. But he's behind, I mean, certainly one very, very famous scheme. He used his creative imagination to improve the war effort.

10:03Yes, he did. He is the guy behind Operation Mincemeat.

10:08Richard Osman:He wrote the songs. Yeah. In 1943, this is the attempt to hoax the Nazis. They dress a corpse in a Marine uniform. they hide fake official papers and battle plans on it and they leave it where the Germans will find it then the Germans see the uniform and think oh my and they've even got the battle plans and then they treat the misinformation as valuable so they know in a way what their enemy is going to do in advance and it's an incredible story so Ben McIntyre wrote a book about it which is incredible there's a movie about it which Ian Fleming is in and of course the musical which has been enormous which Ian Fleming is also in I think there's a more interesting scheme he comes up with Operation Ruthless was one of his as well wasn't it?

10:45Yes. Now, Operation Ruthless, this is an attempt to steal a German code-breaking machine.

10:51Richard Osman:I love this story. If I was a spy, this would be the sort of thing I'd come in on the Tuesday. Yeah, I mean, this is sort of what you do do. I've had an idea. It is, yeah, it is a little bit. OK, so his plan is get a German bomber plane, dress British agents up as German soldiers. Then you have the plane tag along the end of a German bombing raid. Then you pretend to crash the plane into the channel. So other German planes send out an SOS on its behalf. Then when the German rescue boat comes to get to that plane's aid, the British soldiers hijack the ship and steal the Enigma machine that is aboard it.

11:25Richard Osman:I cannot see a possible thing that could go wrong with that. The only thing was that they sadly cancelled it. I think otherwise he would have aced it just like he did with Operation Mincemeat. Well, I think if it has a flaw, if you're one of a squadron of German bombers, you probably know if there's five of you or six of you. like sometimes there will be fewer of you coming back than there were going out well you know why yeah rarely going to be more of you coming back how the heck did that happen it's a hell of a thought isn't it yeah but he so he comes up with these kind of ambitious barely plausible plots um and he spends about six and a half years doing this and what's his what's his rank at the end of this commander commander they commander that all the pieces are there but then the war is won in 1945 so he's out of a job and this is the point at which he thinks i'm going to buy a piece of land in jamaica where he which he loves which by the way is the sort of thing that someone without a job can do if they've been to eton yes yes yeah it's not a lot of people going yeah well i think when my granddad came back from the war he didn't have the option to buy a plot of land in jamaica and he builds golden eye which is this amazing house um and um he thinks i'm going to have a my sort of winter bachelor pad out there and he really really was like one of london's uh most prolific bachelors yeah it's interesting there's there's one relationship that absolutely goes through his life which i think essentially had an affair with probably the wrong person if if i'm thinking of the right person anne he has a relationship with anne charteris uh she's a socialite but she's already actually married to one of his friends of shane o 'neill and she's got two children with him anyway they start this affair in 1936 but then shane her husband is killed in action in world war ii so she wants to remarry but fleming finds the whole idea of marriage quite appalling um so she does marry but she marries esmond harmsworth basically viscount rothermere the owner of the daily mail can i say give one piece of advice to ian fleming now by the way absolute sidebar but shane o 'neill and uh and charteris's great grandson is fred again the dj how about that how about that um give him your piece of advice yes do not have an affair with the wife of the proprietor of the Daily Mail.

13:36And by the way, that's been good advice from 100 years ago all the way through to now. Does he take it? Still don't do it. He doesn't take it. He keeps going with this affair. And it's very, very scandalous because they're not very subtle about it. They keep going with this affair. And she goes out to Jamaica. They're all these kind of, they barely try to hide it at all.

13:56Richard Osman:And she's very well connected, right? She's in a sort of literary world. Because even though he has gone to Eton, he is not from the absolute top top draw okay so she's friends with all people like i don't know evelyn warren somerset mormon um noel coward fleming really likes all that prestige and to be in that kind of artsy set and also he hadn't been in the world of writers before no as well so again looking back with 2020 hindsight you see all you know he's a commander he's just left the war he's having this ridiculous affair he's just been coming up with extraordinary stories and suddenly he's around writers as well.

14:29Yeah. Their affair is sexually adventurous, if I may euphemise. People, when they go and stay at Goldeneye, are always wondering why all the towels are wet. And it's because they used to use iced towels because they were really into S &M. And in order to sort of soothe all the welt marks, they needed a lot of iced towels.

14:49Richard Osman:That is quite a lot to process. It is quite a lot to process. And in fact, there's actually a whole cache of letters from between they wrote to each other obsessively all the time there will be people listening to this there will be people listening going I told you when we went down to John and Maureen's there were loads of iced towels in the bathroom the towels were freezing cold they were absolutely freezing cold let me tell you what John and Maureen were getting up to let me voice it in Anne Rothermere's voice she said it's very lonely not to be beaten and shouted at every five minutes I must be perverse and masochistic to want you to whip me and contradict me particularly as you are always wrong about everything anyway they get along very well like this and it becomes even more scandalous in sort of 1948 we're getting very close to the introduction in 1952 here so in 1948 1948 she becomes pregnant with fleming's child actually rothermere thinks it's his child um and very sadly the child is born prematurely and it dies after eight hours this is a slightly unbelievable fact but here we go fleming and rothermere are on the golf course together at gleneagles while this child is born i don't really not to say about that.

15:53And Rothermere always thought it was his child, but he learns the truth in 1951 and divorce follows shortly after. And Anne becomes pregnant again. And this time it's Fleming's and Fleming thinks, okay, a very rare bout of conscience afflicts him. And he thinks I better marry her. Anne says, he entered marriage with characteristic gloom and foreboding. He told me, I can promise you nothing. I have not an admirable character. I have no money I have no title marriage will be entirely what you can make it

16:25Richard Osman:oh be still my beating heart that's like that's like Taylor Swift from Travis Kelce's 20 minutes of vows isn't it from their from their golden book so we find ourselves where we came in 1952 he's in GoldenEye he's got a baby on the way he's getting married in terms of the world that he's used to and in terms of the wife that he's marrying he does not have money and so he sits down to write

16:51This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's Rewards. Now, a big mistake that people make is leaving the cinema as soon as the credits roll, because there might be a bonus scene right at the end.

17:01Richard Osman:Absolutely one of my favourite things. There might be one in the middle. Yeah, you never know. In Marvel's ones, there used to be a mid-credits scene, and then there'd be an end-credits scene. I remember the first one I really remember, well, two, I remember Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where he tells you to go home at the end, but also Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds, where they would do bloopers. It just feels like a secret little glimpse into a different world. And it doesn't quite have to be over. Yeah, exactly. And it's just a lovely little added bonus. You've done everything. You've made your show.

17:27Richard Osman:You've given everyone everything. It's just a lovely little extra. Which is also the idea behind Lloyd's Rewards. Extra value appearing inside something you were already doing anyway. Your daily banking. From shopping to streaming, you can bank on Lloyd's to help your money go further. It's rewards like this that make 14 million people bank on Lloyd's. search Lloyd's Rewards in your app eligibility criteria, terms and conditions apply retailer offers and cashback amounts may vary UK residents 18 plus

18:01I mean again the way he puts it is yeah it's the Travis vow here I was on the edge of getting married and I was frenzied at the prospect of this great step in my life I really wanted to take my mind off the agony so I decided to sit down and write a book Wow. Roughly the equivalent of digging a very large hole in the garden for the sake of the exercise.

18:20Richard Osman:My God. I mean, when people say, you know, different ways, different reasons for writing a book or how you start. I mean, this is there's many, many different ways. But this book becomes a big outlet for his libido and his imagination. But he is also trying to make a lot of money because she comes from people who have described her as unthinkingly rich, which I think is quite a good description. So he has to make her a lot of money. But there's another angle that's still bubbling along, which is that he does always feel like the second fiddle to his brother, Peter. Peter is an intelligence agent.

18:53He also writes books. And Ian Fleming's New York editor said he wrote because he got tired of being Peter Fleming's younger brother. He was determined that Peter Fleming should be known as Ian Fleming's elder brother. And by God, he is. But we're not there yet.

19:06Richard Osman:We're not. So he starts writing in 1952. Can I take you through Ian Fleming's writing routine? It's a question people always ask about writers. So he starts writing sort of Jan, Feb, 1952, just weeks before the wedding. His daily writing routine is a morning swim, which is all right if you're in Jamaica, before doing three hours of writing from 9 till 12, which is about 2 ,000 words. That's quite like you. Really like me. Yeah, that's you. I mean, apart from the swim, that's really, really like me. If you were in Jamaica, you'd do the swim. I would do two and a half hours in about 1 ,500 or 1 ,750.

19:38Richard Osman:So this is the first time in this story I felt any sort of kinship with Ian Flaming. It's the first time he's become less Boris Johnson and a bit more me. Yeah. So he'd do that right for three hours. Then he would sunbathe until lunch. Yeah. Then a little snooze. Very nice. Again, absolutely on board with all of this. Return to his desk at about 5 p.m., which, by the way, I would just say, sunbathe until lunch, then a little snooze. I mean, that's a long snooze if he returns to his desk at 5 p.m., but I digress. I'll do it. You know, he's taking the bins out or something. Anything to not write.

20:09Richard Osman:And then at 5pm, he looks over what he's done, improves it, makes it look better, fleshes it out or whatever. And at 6.30, he puts his papers away in time for a cocktail. And in a little over a month, six days before he got married, he had finished the manuscript, 62 ,000 words. And that manuscript was called Casino Royale. Men, what's stopping you from doing this? Yeah, I would love to. 62 ,000 words I'd love. I'd do 90 ,000. 62 ,000? I could knock that off before a wedding, I reckon. Anyway, so he's written this book, It's Casino Royale. Can you please tell me about the plot of Casino Royale?

20:42Richard Osman:Yes, I mean, sort of, I can. The broad idea comes from his days working in Navy intelligence. In the book, he plays a high-stakes game of Baccarat with the Smurfs official, Le Chiffre, to try and bankrupt him. The one played by Mads Mikkelsen in the movie with the bloody tear. Exactly. Maybe the worst poker tell ever. Sorry, you're a high-stakes poker player and you cry bloody tears when you're losing. Okay. But perhaps it's like a double bluff. Perhaps it's like, oh, he's crying blood again. I think the crying blood is involuntary, but maybe not. Either way, Ian didn't know anything about Mads Mikkelsen back then.

21:16No.