In 1972, Rick Sylvester skied off the edge of Mount Asgard in Canada in one of cinema’s most electrifying stunts. It’s the bit in The Spy Who Loved Me where Bond is chased over the edge of a cliff to his certain death. Except it turns out that Bond takes a parachute with him when he goes skiing just in case –a union jack parachute. In his brilliant book about Bond and the Beatles, Love and Let Die, John Higgs quotes the film’s writer Christopher Wood: “All over the world, instead of howling and throwing stones at the union jack, they were bursting into spontaneous applause.”
When we were working on the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, the designer Mark Tildesley came up with the notion of having Bond help the Queen use another union jack parachute to sky dive into the Olympic stadium.
Apparently, all you need to do to get people to love our flag is attach it to a national icon and drop them from a great height.
We’re going to be seeing a lot of that flag in the next few days. I don’t know how I’m going to feel about this. A flag carefully placed in the background of a cabinet minister’s Zoom room makes me think of AA Milne’s definition of a patriot as “someone who hates everything about the country apart from its flag”. (A couple of years ago, I got a letter from a senior royal, took it round to my mum so she could show off a bit to the carers who were helping her with Dad. When I asked for it back she said: “Oh, I put it in the recycling. I thought you’d already read it.” “Yeah, Mum, but…”)
However, by a twist of fortune, I’ve been involved in the creation of two of the most replayed images of the Queen. She acted in comedy sketches twice in her life. Once with James Bond and once with Michael Bond’s creation, Paddington. Both times, I was part of the writing team. I should have been by royal appointment gag writer to HM.
There was no intention for her to appear in the first one. The producer Tracey Seaward went to what she thought would be a routine meeting at the palace to ask what the Queen would be wearing so that our actress could dress like her. It was the Queen’s dresser, Angela Kelly, who said: “Oh, she wants to be in it.”
She put herself up for that moment. It’s a moment that was meant to amuse people for one night only. If she hadn’t been in it herself that is all it would have been. But the way director Danny Boyle timed that turn of the head – that great reveal, “my God, it’s really her” – means that 10 years on, it’s one of her defining moments.
Moments like this happen incrementally. Part of their power is surprise. When we are surprised, our prejudices and opinions evaporate for a moment and we’re briefly open hearted. Surprise is the nemesis of cynicism. One of the most common reactions to that moment was “I never felt patriotic before”. Maybe. Maybe you felt something like patriotism – some love for the best of this place, but didn’t know how to articulate it without condoning the worst. Maybe.
It used to be said that millions of people had dreams in which they had tea with the Queen. Even our dream life is going to have to change. Watching her have tea with Paddington will have to do instead. It’s easy to see why that was so powerful. In retrospect, it was valedictory. A woman waving a happy goodbye to her grandchildren and great grandchildren, an image of love and a happy death.
But Paddington is an evacuee, a refugee, one-time prisoner, pretty much every category of need that is mentioned in Matthew 25. Here, he is being welcomed with tea and good manners. This is a strong statement of a set of values that are not uncontested in the corridors of power. To have them exemplified so joyfully at such a moment meant something.
One of the reasons the Queen’s death feels so huge is that she was a living connection with that postwar consensus, that attempt to build a better nation and a rules-based world. A vision that is being demolished even as we plan her funeral. Ten years ago, we lived in a world of divided opinion. Now, we live in a world of divided reality.
A conspiracy theory went round that the establishment had employed Paddington’s producers Framestore and Heyday (and me and the other writers James Lamont and Jon Foster, plus Ben “Paddington” Wishaw) to create a deep fake queen. No one seemed to question the reality of the bear.
I’m writing on Friday night. It won’t be long before the mourning gives way to the furious name-calling that characterises our current political discourse. The sides in these culture wars are like custard. The harder you jump on them the more solid they become. No one changes their mind. I don’t know much but I do know that the fury is in someone’s interest and it’s not ours.
People often quote GK Chesterton’s line: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” But I love these (edited) sentences that precede it: “It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely move to Chelsea. Nor is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then he will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico might be fairer than Florence.”
The most emotional moment in that encounter with Paddington is when the bear says: “Thank you, Ma’am. For everything.” People will ask: “What everything?” Well, make your own list. But I’m thankful for the way she used the peculiar power of her archaic role to allow us to glimpse, however fleetingly, that we share something good and that we need to defend that.
• Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a screenwriter and novelist
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