In April of 1971, a man in need of a haircut and sporting a scraggly beard sat down on a British talk show, where he proceeded to rail off a list of US senators he believed were intimately involved in the assassination of JFK. The man was allegedly inebriated, the talk show host embarrassed and shortly fired soon after, and watching at home were an array of Hollywood producers, who could only hide their shame that, just several years prior, they had cast the rambling, seemingly paranoid gentleman as James Bond.

The man was George Lazenby, forever recognised as the awkward misfiring pistol of the 007 franchise, who swiftly quit the iconic role after just one installment: 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In Ian Fleming terms, if Lazenby were a Bond Girl, he’d be the doomed one-night-stand killed off around act two, the Jill Masterson to Sean Connery’s Pussy Galore, whose presence in...