Don’t try to fix James Bond’s onscreen bigotry – just live and let it die

In the wake of the news that Ian Fleming’s 007 books are being rewritten for modern audiences, Geoffrey Macnab argues that we’re mature enough to see racism and sexism for what it is. Today’s progress is good, but censorship of the past, he writes, is hardly necessary

Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are being rewritten for modern audiences (Getty)

If James Bond wants his licence to kill on screen renewed, changes may be in order. The days when 007 could casually hand a fistful of cash to an Indian man and tell him “That’ll keep you in curry for a few weeks,” as he did in 1983’s Octopussy, are clearly over. He’s not going to get away with beating up women, either, as he does in any number of films from GoldenEye to From Russia with Love. Websites have compiled incriminating lists of Bond’s crimes against political correctness – and the rap sheet is very long indeed.

Bond’s producers are well aware that his behaviour in the Sixties and Seventies won’t fly in the 2020s. It emerged this week that Ian Fleming’s Bond novels (like those of Roald Dahl) are already being reworked for modern readers. The Daily Telegraph reports that “terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive today” are being cut out of the text. Some racist language has been deleted.

If the books are being updated to reflect modern sensibilities, should the films get the same treatment? After all, the Bond production team has always insisted that the character portrayed on screen, whether played by Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan or Daniel Craig, is very close to the “quiet, hard, ruthless, sardonic, fatalistic” secret agent dreamed up by Fleming one sunny morning in Jamaica in 1952.