I’ll have a Double O please Bob and a 7 (ask your parents) as today we’re marking 70 years of 007 and Bond at the beginning in Cascais.
As speculation reaches fever pitch over who will be the next James Bond, a pub question.
Who was the first actor to play the world’s most famous secret agent?
No, not Sean Connery nor Roger Bond, but Bob Holness, who would become a fixture on British TV screens as quizmasters.
Back in 1956 a young suave Bob channeled his inner Bond on radio in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker.
Of course, there has been many a blockbuster since of Fleming’s mos famous creation.
Spies are us
For Bob Holness, Connery, Moore, Daniel Craig et al, read Dusan Popov.
Who Fleming, himself a spy, created in 1941 shortly after his stay in Estoril in the Portuguese Riviera.
Where he met the double agent who he formed the character of Bond around his playing the enemy at cards at Europe’s biggest casinos.
The Palacio Estoril Hotel is the go-to billet for Bondophiles walking in the Great Spy‘s footsteps.
With it being famous in its own time as the ‘whispering hotel’, due to the espionage carried out here in the Second World War in the neutral Portugal.
And a bolthole as a second residence of the Spanish, Italian, French, Bulgarian and Romanian royal families.
As well as the millionaire Charles Guggenheim, the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Fleming.
The future Prime Minister of India Indira Nehru and the economist John Keynes, among many others.
At your service
But most importantly for us as the stage for the filming of 007: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Where there is still a living, working reminder of that film history in José Diogo, one of the Heads of the Concierge Desk.
Who in the film back in 1968 gives the keys to Bond’s Room 516 (today’s room 524) to the spy.
Now no stay in a Bond hotel, never mind the Bond hotel would be complete without the signature Bond drink, the Martini.
And the Palacio boasts its homage to Bond in their 007 Martini which contains vodka, gin and Lillet licquor.
Now if you think you can see Bond everywhere in Estoril, it’s probably because his footprint is ubiquitous here.
With keen observers of OHMSS recognising Guincho Beach.
While celebrity-watchers will hope to pick out the likes of the Michelin star Fortaleza do Guincho or the Porto de Santa Maria, a fave of Bill Clinton’s.
