Sky Atlantic and the BBC take a fairly wishy-washy approach to the life and times of Ian Fleming. On the one hand, they tell us over and over again how creative he was and on the other they insist he was unable to come up with a single original idea. We follow Ian around as he lives the life of a rich, spoiled brat who collects pornographic prints. Then WWII rolls around and he lands a job with the Navy. He very badly wants to be a spy and writes up all kinds of plans and designs all kinds of gadgets and has a female associate named Monday. At every step we see hints of Bond stories and Bond characters and there are several times when they play a few chords of the Bond theme song as Ian does some daring do.
But the Spy Trade is only half of Ian’s story, just as it was only half of Bond’s. Ian is shown to be a womanizer who likes a woman with a nice mottling of bruises. He likes to hurt women and lucky for him, he finds a woman who likes to be hurt. Only problem is she is married, but this is a small hindrance to a man of action like Ian Flemming. He keeps several women in tow and appears to actually care for one of them. This relationship meets a bad end.
In the last episode of the four part series our hero Ian goes on a top secret mission to capture Nazi Atomic technology, an interesting idea. Among the fun little things are a note To The Spy That Loved Me and a shot of Ian staying at the Goldeneye resort in Jamaica. I’m not a huge fan of James Bond, so I’m sure there countless other little nods to the books and films that I didn’t catch.
Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond was a fun show that took itself a little too seriously from time to time, not unlike the Bond books themselves.
