A Licence to Sell

Forget Pussy – it’s Adverts Galore at the new Bond film. Velvet’s Lauren Allchurch shares her views on the growing commercialisation of the Bond films.

Credit: Sony Pictures

Much fuss has been made about Bond’s taste for Heineken in the latest in the line of blockbusters, Skyfall. After having seen it last night, I wouldn’t say it was a particularly big deal – yes he was swigging from a stubby at one point, but in the wilderness in Turkey, shacked up with an unnamed lover, he’s hardly going to be able to sit in her wooden hut sipping his favourite tipple from a martini glass. As for the ‘blatant’ Scrabble logo on the bottom of Q’s glass – a few people in the cinema muttered in disapproval, but the clip was so brief that I just assumed I’d missed some sort of practical joke, like those ‘I’m a tw*t’ mugs you see featured in every student household.

That’s not to say I particularly enjoyed the film – the bit where Bond seems to become a hybrid of Arnie in Commando and Kevin from Home Alone setting boobytraps in the Scottish highlands is totally ridiculous (you know where the bad guy is heading – just hide a few snipers in the grass and send in the marines!) – for me, the worst part about the commercialisation of Bond was in the lead up to the film. Almost every advert – and there were 30 minutes of them – featured a Bond-themed car, phone, video game, watch – at one point there was even an advert for the Bond film (hello? I’m pretty sure you’ve already sold me on that one). I almost expected the audience to come out of the cinema shimmying along the walls, whispering ‘come in 006’ into their Sony Xperia. I know that every man from child to grandfather harbours a not-so-secret ambition to be a secret agent, but surely the Bond product mania is overkill for most of the population. If anything, it put me off – but then since I’m not in the position to be purchasing an Omega or an Aston Martin, I doubt anyone’s going to lose any sleep over that.