Now pay attention, 007

I see in the Independent that MI5 are looking for a new chief scientific adviser.

Once upon a time I had charge of a large and impressive industrial media facility that included a lot of basic equipment (mostly of the upper-bracket amateur kind) that could be hired out to other departments for them to Do their Own Thing.

When this happened I would take the relevant flightcase from the rack, place it upon a desk before the salivating suit who was, in his view, about to join the ranks of Kubrick and Tarkovski, snap open the locks and say:

“Now pay attention, 007.”

Unfortunately I probably blew my chance of getting the MI5 job by means of another technique.

It was the regrettable habit of one of my employers to commission the making of television programmes in which suits sat in their offices and told lies to BetaCams in the hope that someone at the other end of the arcane process would believe them. This process was euphemistically described as ‘Corporate Communications’.

On those occasions when I could not, by assigning it to apprentices or to moonlighting BBC staff, avoid doing such a job myself I would first enter the office of the victim and fill it with scarey-looking equipment. I would place the suit behind his desk, attach a tiny microphone to his tie, roast him under a couple of 800W redheads for a few minutes, then take up position behind the camera. As soon as he was completely intimidated and sweating copiously, trying to read his lies from the autocue (or idiot-board, if the fool had gone for cost-cutting), I would switch on the big red light on top of the camera, and in my best Ernst Stavro Blofeld voice say:

“Goodbye, Mr. Bond.”