The Wizard of Oz

    Also honouring the occasion with their obnoxious presence were Jaws, Hugo Drax, Mayday and Mr Kil. There were thousands of them; every villain that Bond had ever had to face in his years with the Secret Service was in attendance. But not just one of each of them, they were there in multiples, twin upon twin, doppelganger upon doppelganger. There must have been a hundred Dr No’s and a hundred Jaws, more, and the same number of all the other villains, and every last one of them screaming for his blood. Twelve ball boys, each of them Nick Nack from the Man With The Golden Gun, surrounded the court; eight Rosa Klebbs were acting as line judges, each of them no doubt with a poisoned stiletto in her shoe. The prospect was truly horrendous.
     When he had first heard that the majority of people dream in black and white Bond had been more than a little surprised. He himself not only dreamt in colour but also in wide screen and stereophonic sound. His dreams would have been a credit to Cecil B de Mille at his most extravagant. And the colour was not the more or less realistic colour of today’s films but the garish early Technicolor of films like Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz. In fact Bond had once dreamt that he was the Tin Man in the famous Judy Garland film, which he didn’t mind at all, far rather a Tin Man than a Cowardly Lion, until he realised that the version of the Wizard Of Oz in which he found himself cast was set not in Oz but in Manchester, and by the start of reel two he had rusted to death. But that was just one dream. Most of Bond’s dreams were pleasant, the ones about Bond Girls being especially pleasant, and often wet, the colour in the dreams serving only to enhance his enjoyment of them. But in dreams as much as in life there is always a price to pay, and the price to pay in this instance was that colour also enhanced the horror of his nightmares by the same degree. And the current one was the mother of all nightmares.
     Now Goldfinger, always a grotesque, but now even more grotesque with his bloated Technicolor red face and hair the colour of a carrot, tapped the microphone from high in his umpire chair. “The Game of Life,” he announced to the crowd. “For their life!” The crowd roared, savouring the prospect. Goldfinger let the noise of the crowd subside before firing a sneer in Bond’s direction, then continuing. "Roger Federer….” The crowd cheered anew as they applauded their favourite. They could not have exhibited more bloodlust had they been a crowd applauding the entrance of the gladiators at the Coliseum in ancient Rome. “…Versus…,” Goldfinger continued, before turning in Bond’s direction to address him directly as he spat out the words … “Tim Henman!”