'A seventy something Bond? They know where to find me'

Thirty years ago, Pierce Brosnan announced himself as 007 with a dizzying jump from a vast, vertiginous concrete dam in one of the best openings to one of the best Bonds, GoldenEye. The 72-year-old makes a slightly more relaxed entrance today, but he’s every bit as unruffled as the suave super spy. A sharply cut navy blue suit. A lustrous, swooping grey mane. He strolls into the room with the stillness of someone who knows exactly how to occupy a space without crowding it.

- Patrick Smith, The Independent

Back in 1995, he was joining a franchise born of the international success of a famous series of novels. So too now, as he arrives on our screens in The Thursday Murder Club, adapted from the first of Richard Osman's bestselling blue-rinse detective stories. They're a crime-fiction phenomenon: four OAP sleuths, astronomical sales and, inevitably, grumblings about their cosy, middle-class view of Britain. Too sanitised by half, some have said. That, Brosnan responds, “is a lot of hogwash”. The first novel, published in 2020, is set in an upmarket retirement village in the fictional Kentish town of Fairhaven. Four of its residents have formed a “murder club” that meets once a week to delve into unsolved cases from the past. Then someone is killed on their doorstep, and they turn their attention to solving the clues right under their noses. Of course, it's the whiff of well-heeled privilege that gets some people's goat. “I think that’s a little ill directed,” Brosnan sighs, in his elegant Irish burr. “I mean, it's entertainment, and you want to be dazzled. You want to transport people, and you want them to come away with a wonderful sense of ‘I want to be there when I'm old. I want to grow old like this.”