THE BRYAN CLEMENS ARCHIVE PART TWO

IN THE SECOND OF A SERIES OF FEATURES, WE PRESENT SEVEN BOND MOVIE PITCHES BY THE LATE, GREAT BRIAN CLEMENS

- IAN BERRIMAN

AS YOU'LL KNOW IF YOU READ our feature lást issue, BrianClémens - script editor of The Avengers, and creator of The New Avengers and The Professionals - left behind a vast amount of paperwork when he passed away in 2015, which his sons George and Sam have been scanning and cataloguing.

It wasn't particularly well-organised during his lifetime. Sam describes his father's working environment: "I remember there were two piles of paper either side. One was, like, banks and legal, and the other was all scripts and things, and he was working in the middle of it - it was hilarious. You couldn't touch it. He'd get so annoyed if you got near it, because only he knew what was there, and if you started moving things he'd never know where anything was. That's why it's taken us literally 10 years to go through it."

One of their most exciting discoveries was a 10-page document containing seven James Bond concepts. They're dated April and May 1975 a year before The Spy Who Loved Me went into production. "We were amazed when we found it," says Sam, "Because he spoke about it for years, these Bond ideas, and we were like, 'It'd be great if we could see them.' And he didn't think he had them. So when we found them: 'Oh my god, this is incredible!' We thought this was a myth that he'd spoken about - 'Oh yeah, you wrote for Bond...""