The writer behind HM’s encounter with the bear explains the sketch’s tender power
In 1972, Rick Sylvester skied off the edge of Mount Asgard in Canada in one of cinema’s most electrifying stunts. It’s the bit in The Spy Who Loved Me where Bond is chased over the edge of a cliff to his certain death. Except it turns out that Bond takes a parachute with him when he goes skiing just in case –a union jack parachute. In his brilliant book about Bond and the Beatles, Love and Let Die, John Higgs quotes the film’s writer Christopher Wood: “All over the world, instead of howling and throwing stones at the union jack, they were bursting into spontaneous applause.”
When we were working on the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, the designer Mark Tildesley came up with the notion of having Bond help the Queen use another union jack parachute to sky dive into the Olympic stadium.
