James Bond becomes legal tender in new set of 10 pence coins

The Royal Mint launched a new set of 10 pence coins last week. The 26 designs – one for each letter of the A-Z of Great Britain – celebrate aspects of life that are ‘quintessentially British’, and James Bond is among them, representing the letter B.
 

B: Bond (photo: The Westminster Collection)

The coin, like the various postage stamp issues that feature Bond and Bond’s appearance in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, provides another indication of how deeply embedded Ian Fleming’s creation is in the cultural environment. 

The design itself takes its cue from the iconography of the film Bond, depicting the gun barrel and the 007 logo from the EON series. This is perhaps a little ironic, given that both elements were designed by Americans (and, of course, the films themselves would not have been possible without North American producers and finance). There’s a metaphor about modern Britain in there somewhere: Britain cannot go it alone? She is, in Tiger Tanaka’s words, a once great power? Or to be less cynical, Britain is global in its outlook and welcomes foreign investment, ideas and people? You decide. 

In any case, one could argue that James Bond of the cinema is more quintessentially international than British. Bond is distinctly un-British in behaviour and style (in sharp contrast to, say John Steed and Harry Hart), the threats are global, the cast multinational, and Bond barely spends any time in the country. That said, there's no mistaking where Bond’s loyalties lie (the Union flag parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me is, of course, iconic and character-defining), and recent films, particularly in Skyfall and Spectre, have had more of a domestic focus. 

Regardless of the pitfalls of defining what is quintessentially British, I’m rather thrilled that James Bond has been celebrated on the face of a coin. It’s testament to the character’s continued currency (if you excuse the pun) in popular culture, and is curiously appropriate, given Ian Fleming’s interest in coinage (as reflected, for example in Live and Let Die). Indeed, it’s only a matter of time before Ian Fleming himself appears on a £10 note.

Why 007 is the magic number - revisited

Back in 2011, I considered the factors that made Bond's code number, 007, such a successful meme in the cultural environment, the number being memorable and highly recognisable the world over. I suggested that its effective use as a symbol and trade mark, its adaptability (for instance the seven being depicted as the handle of a gun, and the incorporation of 007 into film titles), and the common way that it is pronounced – double oh seven – are strong contributing factors.

Since then, there's been some interesting research by mathematician Alex Bellos on how numbers are perceived in culture and the role numbers have in daily life, and I was reminded about this recently. The work may add another factor to what makes 007 so successful.

For part of his research, Alex Bellos carried out a survey among members of the public to find out their favourite number. Top of the list, out of an infinite sequence of numbers, was seven. When asked to characterise the number seven, respondents suggested words such as magical, intelligent and masculine, but also awkward and overconfident (most of which could apply to Bond!).

Alex Bellos describes his research in the book, Alex Through the Looking Glass (2014, Bloomsbury). In it, he writes about the cultural significance of the number seven – there are seven days a week, seven wonders of the world, seven deadly sins, and so on – but he dismisses the idea that these are what makes seven so special.

Instead, the number's significance, Alex Bellos suggests, lies in its oddness. Seven has unique arithmetic properties (for example, it cannot be multiplied or divided within the group of numbers one to ten). And when asked to think of a number, people are most likely to think of seven or a number ending in seven.

Returning to James Bond, we can therefore also suggest that 007 is successful, because seven is an odd number in more ways than one, and because of the way the number seven is brought so readily to mind. Alternative code numbers, say 002 or 005, just wouldn't be so good. While people would recognise the name James Bond easily enough, they might be more hard-pressed to remember his code number.

As I intimated in my 2011 blog post, Ian Fleming's creation of the code number 007 was inspired, and has surely contributed to James Bond's longevity and popularity.

Double-O-Seven or O-O-Seven?

As I was trawling through the archive of the Daily Express, I stumbled on an interesting article from the edition dated 14th September 1966. It was interesting not so much for its content – alas I didn't make a note of what it was about – but rather its headline: “Little Mrs 006 does an 007.” The use of the indefinite article 'an' suggests that the headline writer intended '007' to be read as 'O-O-Seven' (that is, Oh-Oh-Seven), as opposed to 'Double-O-Seven'.

Although Ian Fleming was clear on how Bond's code number should be pronounced – in Casino Royale (1953), Head of Section S thinks the Le Chiffre job will go to “one of the Double-Os” (Chapter 3), and in From Russia, with Love (1957), the Soviet dossier on Bond mentions Bond's “double 0 numerals” (Chapter 6) – the headline suggests that the alternative O-O-Seven had a degree of penetration in popular culture.

The use of O-O-Seven was not confined to the Express. For example, the Bond parody Loxfinger (1965) by Sol Weinstein gives the protagonist Israel Bond the code name 'Oy-Oy-7', and in the Bond spoof, Carry On Spying (1964), agent Charlie Bind (played by Charles Hawtrey) explains that his code number, Double-O-Oh, comes from his instructors looking at him and saying, “O, O, Oh!” A somewhat egregious use of O-O-Seven is found in the film From Russia With Love (1963). Robert Shaw's Red Grant tells Bond to “take it easy, O-O-Seven.” It could be argued, of course, that this is a deliberate mistake offering Bond a clue that Grant is an enemy agent, but unlike the red wine with fish, Bond never picks Grant up on it. In any case, simply by being uttered in an official Bond film, the use of 'O-O-Seven' gains some validity and prominence.

While 'O-O-Seven' has never seriously competed with 'Double-O-Seven', it nevertheless exists as an alternative form of Bond's code name and meme in its own right. Indeed it continues to be used; the details escape me, but I recall the BBC newsreader, Philip Hayton, who presented the news on the BBC between 1987 and 2005, announcing the new 'O-O-Seven' (probably Pierce Brosnan). Its use may be attributed to a lack of familiarity with the books or the films, but even with regular exposure to the correct form, 'O-O-Seven', once established in individual minds, has a good chance of being replicated simply through force of habit.

Quantum of gadgets: How to measure fantasy levels in the James Bond films

Peter Hunt, the director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) was keen to re-introduce some realism to the Bond series. ‘It’s one of the best Fleming stories’, he noted. When director John Glen embarked on the production of For Your Eyes Only (1981), he said, ‘It was time to get back to the spirit of Ian Fleming’s books.’ Of the actions scenes, Glen says, ‘I endeavoured to make them as realistic as possible.’ Later, when preparing for Licence to Kill (1989), Glen said, ‘This was going to be a harder-edged Bond film than any that had gone before’. Director Martin Campbell described Casino Royale (2006) as ‘more realistic and emotionally involving’, adding, ‘How many control rooms can we blow up? How many madmen can take over the world?’.

There is a pattern of excess followed by purge evident in the evolution of James Bond films. The series follows a trajectory of increasing fantasy, then is reset to something approaching plausibility. The films then recommence an upwards path towards greater fantasy as the cycle is repeated. The films mentioned above are those which critics and makers of the Bond films have acknowledged counter the excesses of previous films and bring a more human and realistic Bond (as Fleming wrote him) to the screen. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service followed You Only Live Twice, which included a volcano lair complete with rocket-launching pad and monorail. For Your Eyes Only brought Bond down to earth after he had been in space in Moonraker. The Living Daylights, the film that preceded Licence to Kill, was relatively realistic, but there was still a touch of Roger Moore silliness that did not sit well with the student of Fleming’s works, Timothy Dalton. Casino Royale avoided the quip-heavy dialogue and edge-of-world-war-three antics of Die Another Day.

The pattern is obvious enough when we watch the films, but can we measure the pattern in any way? One possibility is to take the total number of gadgets per film as an index of fantasy. The more fantastic the film, the higher the number of gadgets it contains. The chart shows the frequency of gadgets for each film (placed in chronological order). We can see that the number of gadgets rises with each successive film, beginning with Dr No (1962), until You Only Live Twice (1967), which sees a slight drop. There is, however, a much steeper fall with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. There is then a prolonged period of fluctuation, with frequent rises and falls until GoldenEye (1995), which heralds a relatively steady increasein the frequency of gadgets, reaching a peak with Die Another Day (2002). Casino Royale featured relatively few gadgets, and its sequel, Quantum of Solace had even fewer. Interestingly, the number of gadgets Bond uses does not always move relative to the total number of gadgets. In Live and Let Die (1973), for example, Bond relied on his wits (and charm) more than gadgets, but the film itself represented a peak. (The additional gadgets refer to objects like cars, which have been counted once in the total per film, but contain a range of other gadgets.)

The chart suggests that the frequency of gadgets does have validity as a fantasy index, and identifies the films long regarded as being relatively realistic and closest to Fleming. It also shows that the peaks and troughs in the cycle of excess and purge are more frequent than the traditional focus on the four films mentioned at the start of this piece would suggest. To these, we can potentially add The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), which is relatively gadget free.

From an evolutionary perspective, the changing frequencies in gadget numbers are the product of selection pressures that act on the meme for gadget choice. For example, in the 1960s (which included films from Dr No to You Only Live Twice) the cultural environment favoured zany and surreal films, and this was manifested in the selection of an increasing number of gadgets put to outrageous use. The cultural environment changed in the late seventies, which saw the rise of the blockbuster, led by Jaws and Star Wars, that favoured spectacle and inevitably more gadgets. The Spy Who Loved Me (1976) and Moonraker (1979) are certainly products of this environment. More recently, films makers have adapted to an environment that has demanded harder-edged, realistic portrayals. The series of Bourne films is an early response to this, and the Bond producers followed suit with Casino Royale.

007 is the magic number

James Bond goes by two names. There’s James Bond, of course, but we also know him by his code number, 007. The two are interchangeable. It would be difficult to find anyone who does not recognise that 007 refers to James Bond. In fact, it seems that 007 is better known than James Bond. A Google search for James Bond brings up 36 million results. A search for 007 has 234 million results. How has Bond’s number become so successful that it has eclipsed the name James Bond as the identifier of Ian Fleming’s spy?

If we trawled through the vast amount of literature available on Bond lore, we’d find some competing theories on how Fleming came by the number 007. Fleming was well-read, so he was no doubt aware that Elizabeth I’s favourite secret agent and astrologer, ‘Dr’ John Dee, signed his communications ‘007’, the double zeros representing eyes. Then there’s the view that Fleming took the number from a short story by Rudyard Kipling, ‘.007’, about an American locomotive. According to Philip Gardiner, author of The Bond Code, Fleming was making an astrophysicist’s joke – 0.007 apparently relates to the mass of hydrogen required to bind the particles that form an atomic nucleus.

The truth is likely to be much simpler. Following the successful interception during the first world war of a top-secret German document identified in German diplomatic code as 0075, all classified documents in British military intelligence were given a double-0 code. This continued into the second world war. Fleming himself mentioned in an interview that top-secret signals were prefixed with the code. There is no doubt that he saw the code ‘00’, followed by a number, very frequently, and it stuck with him.

Quite why double-0, and 007 in particular, appealed to Fleming so much is uncertain, but some of the reasons could be the same as those that ensure that 007 remains well known today. The number has an aesthetic quality – it looks good, probably due to the juxtaposition of the round with the angular. Then there’s the manner it’s said, which gives the code name a rhythm, moving the mouth and tongue in a mildly pleasing way. The code is not ‘zero-zero-seven’, or ‘oh-oh-seven’, but ‘double-oh-seven’. Even Fleming pronounced it this way. It is also worth considering the size of the number. A three-digit number is easier to remember than a number with more digits, but it is long enough to give it an distinct identity. A one or two digit code is more likely to be confused with other, non-Bond-related, numbers.

There are other advantages that 007 has over the name James Bond. ‘007’ is effectively a logogram, like Japanese kanji, that stands for a word (in this case James Bond). This is very useful. For instance, the use of 007, rather than James Bond, is better in non-English speaking countries. This is evident by the non-English titles of Bond films, among them ‘Agent 007 Versus the Satanic Dr No’ (Spain), ‘To 007, From Russia With Love’ (Italy), ‘The Queen’s 007’ (Japan, OHMSS). The number uses fewer characters than James Bond and is therefore good for newspaper headlines. The film producers made the number more memorable by turning the seven into the butt of a gun. Effectively the code became a symbol and trade-mark.

The code number 007 is a highly successful meme. It has fecundity, being replicated often, it is replicated accurately, and it has longevity, surviving so far for almost 60 years. Why Ian Fleming chose 007 may be a matter of debate, but one thing is certain: to paraphrase the grail knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, he chose wisely.

References:

Gardiner, P, 2008 The Bond code: the dark world of Ian Fleming and James Bond, New Page Books, Franklin Lakes
Macintyre, B, 2008 For your eyes only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, Bloomsbury, London
Nourmand, T, 2003 James Bond movie posters: the official 007 collection, Boxtree, London