small>Daniel Craig says the film's title grows on you. Photograph: Rex Features/David Fisher
Just off Goldfinger Avenue at Pinewood Studios are offices so clean and uncluttered and clinically modern that they're a bit unpleasant. It's all highly polished grey tile floors, open plan workspaces, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, ground level water features surrounded by pebbles. It all screams order, professionalism, 2008.
This is the set for the MI6 offices in the next Bond movie, to be released in November and yesterday producers invited the world's press in to have a look round.
Reassuringly, there are staplers and hole punches on each desk but there's no personality, no piles of magazines, no half-filled cups of coffee and Twix wrappers. It made you yearn for past times when I suspect sick building syndrome did not exist because your office had wood panelling, library bookshelves and a cut glass decanter of whisky on the side table.
Filming has just started on Bond 22 - now revealed to be Quantum of Solace (the name grows on you according to Daniel Craig) - and it was great fun wandering the sets. Also at Pinewood are three sets from Siena: an art gallery, an underground MI6 safehouse (entered through a manhole) and the city's cisterns.
As you would expect everything is incredibly realistic and the mood was only really broken by the tea urns, scaffolding and huddles of men chatting about how slow the day was. The main actors, director and producers were also wheeled out to talk about the film and reveal not very much about the story.
So what did we learn?
The film will be a sequel to Casino Royale - taking off an hour after the last film finished with Bond coming to terms with his betrayal by Vesper Lynd. But it will be a stand-alone movie in its own right.
There'll be twice as much action (thank goodness - no endless poker sessions), but no Q or Moneypenny. Judi Dench's M will have more to do and we'll see more of her house (Dench initially said flat and then corrected herself, so perhaps M has beaten the economic downturn and upgraded since Casino Royale). We won't see her husband but we'll hear him. Bond meanwhile will fall for an English rose and a Bolivian seductress who begins the film as his enemy.
There will be plenty of humour and even some belly laugh moments, according to Craig. It will be fabulous. Of course it will. Unless you don't like Bond, of course. In which case, what's wrong with you?
