Ah, no: I’ve stumbled across a smart chrome suitcase with three bleeping kill-switch buttons inside, and a device playing a disembodied voice. This is the last thing I wanted. “Hello there, Watcher,” the device purrs. “I see you’ve been keeping you busy.” I don’t really know what that means, device. “I have a little job for you … see if you can get through an entire TV preview about a new Bond-themed challenge show on Prime Video without succumbing to trope.” I think it may be a little late for that. Yep, the suitcase has started beeping very rapidly. I should probably hurry up.
Amazon has done a new series where, for some reason, Brian Cox is torturing people who like James Bond. It’s called 007: Road to a Million (Prime Video, from 10 November) and, on paper, it makes absolutely no sense at all. Various teams of two (two brothers, or a married couple, or friends who work in a noble profession such as nursing) are thrown into lush spy-themed challenges – climb a mountain and retrieve a suitcase, say, or go into the jungle and retrieve a suitcase, or go to Italy and retrieve a suitcase. When they retrieve the suitcase they have to answer a fairly tricky trivia question, and if they do they win a staggered cash prize up to the fabled £1m.
Brian Cox is watching all of this in a cravat from a secret underground compound, while chuckling wryly to himself. There are a lot of drone shots of gorgeous horizons. There are planes and boats and classic cars. It’s really weird: it’s like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire meets SAS: Who Dares Wins meets Taskmaster and The Crystal Maze and then obviously it’s overseen by Succession and, of course, the whole thing has Bond music throughout. I have to assume whoever came up with this format was tortured to the point of delirium before they barked the idea into Mads Mikkelsen’s face. “Please stop hitting me with a rope! Take ordinary citizens and make them climb a big crane! Brian Cox is there! Please! For some reason Brian Cox is there!”
And yet: this is so, so fun. We all love Bond, don’t we? Even if you don’t love-love Bond – collect a magazine where you can slowly build a model of his Jag, buy watches exclusively because Bond wore them, things of that nature – even if you don’t love Bond like that, we all secretly, quietly, really love Bond. Here, Bond is the theme, but it’s not overt – you can semi-recognise a lot of the settings from Bond films, but once our intrepid contestants get there, there’s no: “A-ha, you may remember this scene from the end of Skyfall”; it’s entirely its own thing, glorious to look at and never boring with it.
As well as being careful not to bang on about Bond too much, the show does well not to do that reality competition thing of trying to make me care about the contestants by bleeding a sob story out of them. I slightly know that two of the contestants are children of divorce, and I sort of figure a couple of them are married, but that’s about it. I am not constantly being prodded to have an emotional connection with the pairs, like a really macho episode of First Dates. I’m just shown a 30-second recap of a mountain they climbed for eight hours, given some vague backstory, and now I’m watching two other people sprint across a piazza in Italy. Bond!
Brian Cox is having a ball, by the way, and really glues this whole thing together. Without him it’s just a Bond cosplay version of Race Across the World with slightly too big a prize; with him, it’s scene-chewingly villainous and fun. He is having so much fun growling trivia questions out of a suitcase at some cheery brothers from Croydon, or switching off a TV screen when a team get eliminated, or chuckling as someone takes too long to swim to a buoy. It’s really cool. Aren’t gadgets and that cool? Aren’t boats and things cool? Hm, maybe I should go and watch Casino Royale again. Maybe I should get really into cufflinks and tuxedos. What happens if I search for James Bond’s watch? Oh, OK that is amazing. I think I may be becoming a Bond guy. Ach, man. This is going to make me so much less interesting at parties.
