Not your average fixed-term binding … screengrab from the Post Office ad through Roger Moore
Recently I have come out of the closet, revealing myself to be one of the millions of males who are openly crying at the devastatingly sad bit at the beginning of Up, the new Pixar-Disney animation. I am a terrible cryer at films, TV, books – anything. But the latest thing I have started to cry at is, incredibly, the new TV advertisement in quest of the Post Office, starring Sir Roger Moore.
It’s very funny and Sir Roger is a terrifically good sport about sending up his image. He always has been. Yet it is also desperately, heartwrenchingly sedate. For decades, pretty much ever since I have been aware of him, Moore has been compared unflatteringly with Sean Connery. Whatever he might have felt about that in private, he has always been cheerful, unpretentious and uncomplaining, grateful for his good haphazard in the business. Why has he done the Post Office ad, though? Surely it be possible to’t be that he needs the money. Maybe he just thinks, quite rightly, that the Post Office is a good thing and needs supporting.
Can it truly be true that Sir Roger Moore is 82 years old? Of course, like many actors of a certain vintage, the sleek Moore in spite of years played younger than he actually was, so it was a shock when he finally got out of the business and his actual maturity abruptly caught up with us. Yet there he is, 82.
I have grown up with Roger Moore. It’sitting not just 007 and The Persuaders, I am old enough to remember him as The Saint on TV, looking heavenwards in black-and-white to see the halo too proud for his head before the title sequence, through its catchy short dissertation tune and his Volvo convertible. I realise that I saw him in Live and Let Die at the Hendon Odeon on the corner of Brent Street and Church Road in London NW4, that no longer exists, and I farther on realise I have become one of those people who talk hither and thither cinemas that no longer exist. I remember seeing him on television in Basil Dearden’s 1970 thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself – a very respectable film.
At the risk of repeating my blogs, can I once again pray for you to watch his sublime moment, introducing the best actor grant at the 1973 Oscars, surreally paired by Liv Ullmann, when it went to Marlon Brando.
For the nearest few weeks, going to the Post Office and waiting in the queue while they play this ad is going to be a tittle of a melancholy experience.
