Colleagues report on activities they’ve enjoyed with him he has no memory of them, also they’re completely out of character. In work, the business in which he’s a partner, he’s in opposition to a mooted merger, and how much it’s worth depends on the non-revelation of a top secret technical development that he’s working on. He returns to his family, his two young children and his wife Eve (Hildegard Neil), with whom he suffers the middle aged tragedy of a marriage that has long since lost its spark. During the operation he dies for a moment, and after successfully resuscitating him the surgeons briefly find two heartbeats appearing on the monitor.
Then he crashes, and it’s serious enough for him to need life or death surgery. A strange smile plays on his face as he weaves his Rover dangerously through the traffic. Moore plays Harold ‘Pel’ Pelham, a stuffy and conservative city worker who, while driving home after work, becomes strangely possessed with a devil may care attitude and starts speeding along the motorway. As he wrote in My Word is My Bond, ‘ I always reflect that it was one of the few times I was allowed to act.’ It’s certainly a welcome film to write about, and one that hints there was a lot more to ‘Rog’ than a pair of performing eyebrows. Before then, he was probably best known for depicting Simon Templar aka The Saint, though neither role stretched him as a performer and Moore himself noted that playing The Man Who Haunted Himself gave him a lot more to do. It’s impossible to get beyond his lengthy stint as James Bond of course, and while I feel his entries have dated rather badly the truth of it is that I grew up with him playing and therefore being 007. There’s an enormous body of his work from the small and large screen in existence. The impression I get is that he was a lot of fun, didn’t take himself seriously and would have been very good value on the stage, recounting memories from his storied days as a major star. My feelings about his acting might be mixed, but I have a great deal of affection for the man and very much enjoyed both his autobiography and Last Man Standing, a collection of anecdotes about his peers that verged on the lovably scurrilous.
It’s a personal regret that I had the opportunity to see him during his recent ‘An Evening With’ tour and turned it down. Roger Moore passed away in May this year, aged 89. When it’s on: Sunday, 20 August (8.00 pm)
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