Bonding process

HALF the world has seen James Bond, making the British secret service agent anything but secret. Now in the year when Die Another Day will become the 20th Bond film in a 40-year franchise that began with Terence Young's Doctor No - the one with that Ursula Andress swimwear scene - producers Eon Productions have Bonded with the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television for Bond, James Bond. 007 heaven in exhibition form.

The exhibition is part memorabilia festival, part history lesson, bigger part fashionably interactive exercise for cub secret agents, wrapped in a behind-the-scenes exploration of the creative talents and skills of the process, in the manner of The Art Of Star Wars show at Bradford last year.

Opening with one of those clipped-accent recollections of the Cold War - the paranoid era that gave birth to Ian Fleming's secret agent and the space race - and moving past an old chunk of the Berlin Wall, Bond, James Bond offers up its first indulgence for Boys Who Never Grow Out Of Liking Toys. A walk through the gun barrel tunnel, the silhouette designed by Maurice Binder and used in the opening credits for 14 Bond movies. Dinner jacket at the ready... gun (rather than a Walther PPK handgun you must make do with looking at an exact replica, designed by David Kleinman's for 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies)... you will be issued with a hi-tech swipe card, pictured above, following a brief in M's office.

Now you must face the challenge of proving you can shape up for top secret agent status. To do so, and here is the interactive bit, you must gather useful intelligence from video displays and computer screens, with a six-minute time limit on each one, answering questions as you go from terminal to terminal, having decided to set yourself easy, middling or hard challenges (and you cannot alter that level mid-mission).

The questions, by the way, are accessed by pressing the picture marked Top Secret: only obvious once you have done it for the first time.

Each computer screen is divided into Subject, Biography, Video and Photographs, and for those proud of York's Bond connections there are profiles of composer John Barry and Dame Judi Dench, MI6's M since 1995 in the MI5 age of Stella Rimmington.

As with The Art Of Star Wars, it is pleasurable to step back from the computer rush-hour traffic to study concept drawings, such as Dominic Lavery's Q, Jet Boat Idea 2, for 1999's The World Is Not Enough, or Ken Adam's drawings of the gadget requirements for Bond's Aston Martin DB5, such as the machine gun and flame thrower from the fog lamps.

How useful those might be on a troublesome day on the York bypass today let alone in Goldfinger in 1964.

Ah, here come more toys for boys: the props in Q's worskhop. The impossibly small crocodile mini-submarine used by Bond to gain access to Octopussy's private island. Bond's pen with the anaconda-killing needle from 1979's Moonraker. The ski pole gun from 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me. Mere toys, or were they ahead of their time? After all, Bond had a car phone in 1963, a tracking device in 1964, in the days when the American CIA attempted to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro by inventing exploding cigars.

Disappointingly, there are no Bond clothes, no dinner jackets through the ages or shocking fashion faux pas as sported by flared Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton, the Shakespearean Bond. Instead, you notice designer Lindy Hemming's notes - "technical ski fabric, v. tight fit" and such like - for Sophie Marceau's Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough and how sumptuous Julie Harris's red velvet dress for Jane Seymour's Solitaire in Live And Let Die still looks nearly 30 years later.

The distractions of the Bond's Women section keep calling, not least the film sequences of Ursula Andress, Diana Rigg's Tracy Di Vicenzo and Grace Jones's May Day, or Wai-Lin's slim-hipped catsuit - another hot, hot, hot Lindy Hemming creation - from Tomorrow Never Dies.

Enter the mock-up of Scaramanga's Fun House lair from The Man With The Golden Gun, and the elaborate display of Rosa Klebb's flick-knife shoes, Oddjob's bowler hat, Jaws' teeth and Scaramanga's golden gun is a reminder that the Bond movies' iconic impact rests largely with its past - like so many aspects of British life.

By contrast, story boards and models exploring the pre-title plane sequence from GoldenEye confirm the series can still pull off memorable stunts.

A countdown simulation of the destruction of a villain's lair, Bond promotional posters through the years and across the world, and a debrief module that reveals whether you cut the mustard as an agent, complete this Bonding experience.

You won't be shaken, except by that explosive finale, but you will be stirred. As Guy Hamilton, director of four Bond movies, puts it: "James Bond is everything I liked as a boy: fun, danger, lovely girls, and it's always packaged five years ahead."

Oh, James.

Bond, James Bond, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, until September 1. Tickets: adults £6, concessions £4.50; ring 01274 202 030. Website: www.jamesbondexhibition.com

Updated: 08:31 Saturday, March 30, 2002