Thirty years ago, Pierce Brosnan announced himself as 007 with a dizzying jump from a vast, vertiginous concrete dam in one of the best openings to one of the best Bonds, GoldenEye. The 72-year-old makes a slightly more relaxed entrance today, but he’s every bit as unruffled as the suave super spy. A sharply cut navy blue suit. A lustrous, swooping grey mane. He strolls into the room with the composure of a man who knows exactly how to occupy a space without crowding it.
Back in 1995, he was joining a franchise born of the international success of a famous series of novels. So too now, as he arrives on our screens in The Thursday Murder Club, adapted from the first of Richard Osman’s bestselling blue-rinse detective stories. They’re a crime-fiction phenomenon: four OAP sleuths, astronomical sales and, inevitably, grumblings about their cosy, middle-class view of Britain. Too sanitised by half, some have said. That, Brosnan responds, “is a lot of hogwash”.
