NOT A NUMBER
The Lotus Seven and The Prisoner (2005)
A thunderclap erupts over Big Ben. The shriek of a jet splits the darkening sky as a tiny green and yellow sports car howls over Westminster Bridge.
The driver, dressed in black, is in a hurry. The throaty wail of the tuned Ford engine rattles his eardrums and the wind whips at his hair as he slams down two gears, turns sharply and accelerates hard past the Houses of Parliament.
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered," the sentence is like an angry mantra in his mind. "I am not a number, I am a free man!"
Darting through traffic, the roadster overtakes a lumbering double-decker and, barely slowing, dives down into the bowels of an underground car park.
There in the shadows, under the surveillance cameras' cold electronic gaze, wait three identical vehicles and their drivers. Number 10, number 43 and number 63. A tall man wearing a familiar piped blazer and a straw boater, steps forward and extends a hand.
"Number 19?"
In case you've never seen the show, that intro is a none-too-subtle reference to Patrick McGoohan's surreal, cerebral telly series The Prisoner. I first saw The Prisoner in my teens and it's fair to say it made an impression. Never mind Bond, this was a spy show with brains, an anti-establishment attitude and swinging Sixties style concocted, seemingly, with the aid of Jimi Hendrix's medicine cabinet. Irresistible.
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BOND'S ASTON MARTIN
©Simon Clay
A classified location sometime before dawn, the temperature several degrees below zero. A lorry halts, doors are flung open and a steel ramp hits the road with startling clatter.
Inside the trailer, a 40-year-old engine turns over sleepily before exploding into life, the noise shaking the thin walls. Through a curtain of white smoke, a familiar shape reverses towards me.
Commander James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 is, for an entire generation of perpetual schoolboys, the ultimate car. And, this morning I am driving it home, back to Bond's birthplace...A place so secret only a few of 007's most devoted fans know it ever even existed.
Bond's most memorable gadget, the DB5 made its screen debut in Goldfinger, appeared again in Thunderball and to this day remains, arguably, the world's most famous movie car.
A fast, elegant coupe with stylish Silver Birch paintwork, the Aston Martin was a desirable machine before Q got carried away with the optional extras. But with onboard machine guns, an ejector seat, a tyre-slasher, a bulletproof shield and Sean Connery at his suave Sixties peak at the wheel, it became an instant icon.
In that pre-CGI era, special effects couldn't be digitally faked. They were built for real. Back in 1964, Goldfinger's production company Eon originally ordered just one gadget-equipped 'effects car' at a cost of £25,000 (five times the showroom price of a normal DB5) and one standard 'road car' for moving shots.
But with the film's success, Eon realized the car was becoming as big a star as Sean Connery and commissioned two identical, fully-functioning gadget cars for publicity and promotional work. The original Goldfinger effects car was stolen from a Florida aircraft hanger in 1997, never to be seen again, and now just three Bond DB5s remain in existence. This one, the car I'm about to drive, codename DB5/2008/R, goes under the hammer in the US in January. It's expected to fetch at least a million, maybe two.
More...
The driver, dressed in black, is in a hurry. The throaty wail of the tuned Ford engine rattles his eardrums and the wind whips at his hair as he slams down two gears, turns sharply and accelerates hard past the Houses of Parliament.
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered," the sentence is like an angry mantra in his mind. "I am not a number, I am a free man!"
Darting through traffic, the roadster overtakes a lumbering double-decker and, barely slowing, dives down into the bowels of an underground car park.
There in the shadows, under the surveillance cameras' cold electronic gaze, wait three identical vehicles and their drivers. Number 10, number 43 and number 63. A tall man wearing a familiar piped blazer and a straw boater, steps forward and extends a hand.
"Number 19?"
In case you've never seen the show, that intro is a none-too-subtle reference to Patrick McGoohan's surreal, cerebral telly series The Prisoner. I first saw The Prisoner in my teens and it's fair to say it made an impression. Never mind Bond, this was a spy show with brains, an anti-establishment attitude and swinging Sixties style concocted, seemingly, with the aid of Jimi Hendrix's medicine cabinet. Irresistible.
More...
BOND'S ASTON MARTIN
Driving the UItimate Toy (2005)
A classified location sometime before dawn, the temperature several degrees below zero. A lorry halts, doors are flung open and a steel ramp hits the road with startling clatter.
Inside the trailer, a 40-year-old engine turns over sleepily before exploding into life, the noise shaking the thin walls. Through a curtain of white smoke, a familiar shape reverses towards me.
Commander James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 is, for an entire generation of perpetual schoolboys, the ultimate car. And, this morning I am driving it home, back to Bond's birthplace...A place so secret only a few of 007's most devoted fans know it ever even existed.
Bond's most memorable gadget, the DB5 made its screen debut in Goldfinger, appeared again in Thunderball and to this day remains, arguably, the world's most famous movie car.
A fast, elegant coupe with stylish Silver Birch paintwork, the Aston Martin was a desirable machine before Q got carried away with the optional extras. But with onboard machine guns, an ejector seat, a tyre-slasher, a bulletproof shield and Sean Connery at his suave Sixties peak at the wheel, it became an instant icon.
In that pre-CGI era, special effects couldn't be digitally faked. They were built for real. Back in 1964, Goldfinger's production company Eon originally ordered just one gadget-equipped 'effects car' at a cost of £25,000 (five times the showroom price of a normal DB5) and one standard 'road car' for moving shots.
But with the film's success, Eon realized the car was becoming as big a star as Sean Connery and commissioned two identical, fully-functioning gadget cars for publicity and promotional work. The original Goldfinger effects car was stolen from a Florida aircraft hanger in 1997, never to be seen again, and now just three Bond DB5s remain in existence. This one, the car I'm about to drive, codename DB5/2008/R, goes under the hammer in the US in January. It's expected to fetch at least a million, maybe two.
More...