…I have arranged for Eddie to come round on Friday afternoon so we can
go and see The Living Daylights together at the cinema.
I made Mum drive me past the cinema so I could be sure what times it was on…
We’d only got back from Devon the previous day, but evidently I wasn’t going to waste any time in organising what for me would be one of the real highlights of the summer.
I think the film must have been out for a good couple of weeks or so. I remember reading about it in the newspaper while we were away, and being hopelessly envious of what I presumed to be every other person in the entire country who’d already seen it.
Like around 97% of what I wrote in my diaries of 25 years ago, this all seems laughable now. But I was really quite anxious, insufferably so, that I would miss the chance to watch The Living Daylights in the cinema, and hence not get to see it for A FURTHER FIVE YEARS until it had its TV premiere.
I was also gripped with impatience, fuelled by a sense that I hadn’t paid enough attention to the Bond franchise two years earlier, when the previous film had been on general release.
Back then I’d only decided to go and see A View to a Kill on the recommendation, as I’ve mentioned here before, of Jimmy Greaves on TV-am.
Yes, had it not been for Greavsie, I might never have fallen in love with 007. Well, I probably would have done eventually, just not in time to see a gurning Grace Jones towering 30ft high on the big screen: a grisly experience at any age, but positively bonechilling to a naive nine-year-old.
A quarter of a century later, I can see The Living Daylights whenever I choose. I don’t want to, because unlike 25 years ago I don’t think it’s the best thing ever. It’s not even the best Bond film of The Greavsie TV-am Years. But I didn’t know any of this in 1987. All I knew is that I had to see the film before it, and the summer, left town.
