The first James Bond film exploded onto our cinema screens way back in 1962,
but a closer look at this classic can help explain the enduring appeal of one of
the world’s most famous fictional characters.

On the 5th of October 1962, the James Bond film Dr No went on general release across Britain and a glamourised world of jet-setting, suave, secret agents was revealed to the public for the first time. Having only just emerged from black and white, post-war 1950s gloom, the people who went to see Dr No that year were taken to places most of them knew little about, let alone had any personal experience of, and it was all presented to them in luscious, opulent colour. The members only clubs, posh hotels and white sand beaches of the West Indies, the London casinos where independent women casually ask for another £1,000 credit with which to gamble (in 1962, the average annual salary in the UK was around £800), then decide to make a strange man theirs for the night, the hidden offices of MI6 furnished with red leather armchairs, mahogany desks and oil paintings – all were glimpses into the lives of a moneyed elite and the shadowy Secret Service who guarded the British state. Dr No was a very good thriller, yes – a pacy spy yarn full of self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek humour, but it was also an education, a travelogue and an adventure for the audience. In 1962, no one had seen anything like it before.