Bond’s queer tête-à-Tate

When Daniel Craig’s Bond meets Catherine Tate’s Nan she almost immediately sees something queer about him which has always hidden in plain sight - at least for those of us who have known where to look.

Nan: You married darlin’?

Bond: No. No. Not presently.

Nan: ‘Cos of the ‘erm [points at his appearance]

Bond: What does that mean?

Nan: I imagine a lot of women have a problem with a grown-a*sed man like you sipping on your cocktails…

Bond: Hang on. I’ll have you know that a Vodka Martini is a very sophisticated, manly libation.

Nan: In a very dinky little glass.

Bond: Wha---?

Nan: My old man Teddy, he was the same: loved a Babycham! He was like you. Very well turned out. ‘Particular’. ‘Confirmed bachelor’ before we met. But back then it wasn’t as accepted as it is now. Look, you just need to find the right girl, sweetheart, someone who’ll turn a blind eye when you pop out one of your ‘international missions’. My Teddy was the same. Twice a week, he’d slink off for a quick ‘debrief’. I didn’t ask no questions, he was very discreet, we had a very happy marriage. But you don’t got to worry darlin’, people don’t care no more.

Bond: I’m… [raises an over-compensating-for-something sized Martini] seeing someone right now, thank you very much. She is a doctor.

Nan: Oh, well… tell her to be on her toes.

[From the BBC Comic Relief broadcast on Friday 19th March 2021 and the video above]

In the guise of her brilliant comic creation, seventy-five year old Joanie Taylor, Catherine Tate reminds us that it wasn’t that long ago that gay men were living such compromised lives.

For people of Nan’s generation, there are specific signifiers of homosexuality: the clothes, the drinks, the slinking off to places which women do not frequent. As I have explored repeatedly on this website, Bond is, in many ways - including these - the quintessential stereotypical gay man.

Nan trots off some euphemisms, common throughout the middle decades of the 20th Century. If you wanted to talk openly about homosexuals in polite society (or behind their backs), you might have described someone as ‘particular’ or point to their status as a ‘confirmed bachelor’. Let’s not forget the always-useful ‘it’, that most innocuous of pronouns which can stand in for anything, but was often used to refer obliquely to homosexuality. When Alfred Hitchcock set about the production of this 1948 film Rope, the story of two male lovers who murder their friend before getting caught by their gay professor, he described it as a movie about ‘it’.

The genius of Tate’s writing is she never names ‘it’, but keeps circling around it. The comedy relies on Bond’s agony as he tries to assuage her claims. If he was to just come out (as it were) and ask her ‘Are you trying to say I’m gay?’ then the joke would be over instantly.

It’s to Craig’s credit that he throws himself into imagining how defensive Bond might get if someone was to start critiquing his effeminate choice of drink. The solution: get a bigger Martini glass. It’s entirely fitting that ‘Babycham’ is also named as a gay drink. As fans of Fleming’s novels will know, the drink Bond orders most frequently is Champagne (although not the low alcohol Babycham variant I have fond memories of drinking as a child every Christmastime).

Should we write off Nan as an unabashedly bigoted relic of an earlier age? Her earlier appearances in Tate’s work (including a six episode sitcom) might lead us to do so. And pruriently prying into someone’s private life rarely endears anyone to us.

But then, she relates her own experiences with her husband Teddy and the arrangement they came to. This was the lived reality for many couples throughout the 20th Century (and of course it continues for many today). She doesn’t dwell on her own pain, although her own life - as a ‘beard’ for her husband - must have been just as compromised as his. Despite her claim that the marriage was a happy one, perhaps this is the source of Nan’s customary bitterness?

To her credit, Nan goes on to acknowledge how ‘it’ is much more accepted nowadays and she tells Bond that people “don’t care no more”. This segues into the big reveal (which I won’t spoil - watch the video above if you haven’t done so already). Suffice to say, Nan has become something of a progressive - and not just in terms of sexual orientation.

In a couple of minutes, Catherine Tate has condensed a large swathe of the history of changing attitudes to homosexuality and given us a little hope that even the most bigoted people can change their minds.

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