There have been madder proposals for the next James Bond than Gillian Anderson. At some point in the 1980s the vegetable-faced cricketer Ian Botham (whose name has never previously been placed in the same parentheses as the word "suave") was suggested as a replacement for the already ageing Roger Moore.
Killing communists in cold blood was, at that point, the sort of thing a British hero was still expected to do, but nothing confirms an Englishman’s patriotism more than making monkeys of Australian sportspeople.
Anyway, the notion soon withered. Botham returned to his cave. Moore continued to perfect the art of acting with one eyebrow alone. Unless I am making this up, other contemporaneous contenders included Leslie Crowther, Roland the Rat and the marmalade cat in the Coronation Street credits.
Anderson will not be replacing Daniel Craig any time soon. Now, having stated that, let me quickly climb down from the shoulder of those men's rights activists seeking to carry me triumphantly to Robert Bly Concourse.
I am not suggesting that a film starring Gillian Anderson as a ruthless British agent would not be worth watching. Indeed, having observed the once-promising Craig series decay into redundant mulch, I suspect there is every chance that such a project would be preferable to Margin of Complacency (or whatever the next Bond film ends up being called).
The imperial thug created by Ian Fleming six decades ago has certainly gone through transformations. The people who argue that the black actor Idris Elba – plagued daily with suggestions that the ermine is his – cannot play the part because Fleming's creation was white wilfully ignore the intelligence that no actor has seriously attempted the Fleming version since Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever. That was in 1971.
Bond is now a hugely heightened version of the contemporary MI6 agent. He hasn’t been a raging racist for a while. So a black actor could, without too much of a jolt, step into the agent’s Tom Ford slip-ons.
To make him a woman would, however, be to make him into a different character. You may like that idea. The notion of a Jane Bond may appeal. But the folks at Eon productions will take reinvention only so far.
When Judi Dench took over as M she was stepping into a job left vacant by an older operative. She wasn’t occupying the business end of Dr Who regeneration. (Now there’s a character who could become a woman at some stage.)
Anderson was, I suspect, being only semi-serious when she posted an image of herself in the role of that superspy.
Nerds heard
All of this is worth clarifying because we are in the midst of an unusually foolish and tiresome period of nerd-herd misogyny.
In a few weeks we will get to see the new all-female remake of the passably amusing 1984 comedyGhostbusters. Yes, the trailer wasn't particularly good. The actors seemed comfortable enough in the roles, but the jokes did not come at the rapid pace we hoped.
There is, however, no way that it was the worst such promotional clip ever released to the internet. Yet that is what the figures at YouTube suggest. That clip has become the most disliked trailer ever on the video-sharing website.
Almost 850,000 people have bothered to offer fat, orange, Cheeto-stained thumbs down. Even without glancing at the comments it becomes clear that a special class of belligerence is at play.
Hats off to Mike Sampson at ScreenCrush, who has made the effort to crunch the relevant numbers. When news emerged that Ghostbusters had broken this unhappy record he calculated that the ratio of views to dislikes was an unprecedented 56:1. (It has since gone down a little.) That was "almost exactly four times the amount of dislikes per view" of Justin Bieber's "most disliked video" ever on all of YouTube.
In other words people were taking time to access the video with the express purpose of disliking it. People are booing the thing in cinemas. Why?
“150 Million for 4 vaginas to star in an extremely shitty movie to appeal to the PC police and a nonsensical female liberation movement,” a fairly typical comment explains. There’s more.
When did fans of popular entertainment become so doggedly unpleasant? Well, on balance they’re not. But the loudest, most aggressive voices always end up dominating the supposed democracy that is online comment. That’s the thing about volume.
No serious effort is being made to make Gillian Anderson into 007. The idea doesn’t really make sense. But I still hope it happens, just to annoy the braying idiots.
Oh, and by the way, we still don’t know for sure that Daniel Craig is abandoning his post. Strange world.
