JAMES Bond Will Return.

JAMES Bond Will Return.

That's the caption that has ended all 23 of the 007 movies from Dr No to Skyfall, promising the cinema goers that the fix of the greatest movie spy of all time won't have been their last.

And this week, we're back.

In a glitzy promo, director Same Mendes unveiled Bond 24 as having the title Spectre.

As a lawyer I am interested that this shadow organisation seen in some of the earliest films disappeared because of a rights dispute that ended up in court, as the producer of Thunderball was not prepared to allow the crime syndicate name to feature in further films without his say-so (and no doubt pay-off).

Now that legal teams have negotiated settlement, the litigation stops and the international criminal mayhem can recommence.

But you don't read this column to wallow in contracts and intellectual property law. Bond is also relevant to health and fitness.

One obvious point is that he no longer smokes.

During Die Another Day, Jinx Johnson (Halle Berry) tells 007 that smoking (a cigar) is not good for him, and that's the last we see of a puffing secret agent.

Daniel Craig was hired to ooze athleticism and toughness rather than the handsome smoothness of Pierce Brosnan, and central to this is physical fitness.

Ironically in real life Craig has struggles to avoid cigarettes, but well done to the producers for this development.

Of course in the Fleming novels Bond smokes incessantly.

He still takes a bevvy - and when in London recently I was served the cocktail he calls a Vesper. Strong? Let's just say I only managed one of them.

But the bigger picture is physical fitness.

All the Bonds have had to stage-fight, usually with skiing, swimming - on and/or under water - climbing and running.

Who can forget the scene in Skyfall when Bond has to sprint down Whitehall to get to Parliament before M is attacked by Raoul Silva and his goons?

Every movie has its share of hard exercise, though the ability of the actors has been a mixed bag.

The greatest living Scotsman Sean Connery was a genuine athlete - a competitive body-builder in his Edinburgh milkman days, and his physique was effortlessly chiselled.

Roger Moore was the opposite - something of a camp playboy, his attempts at martial arts were perfunctory at best, laughably weak at worst.

He was still worth watching as 007, being a consummate film actor whose personality was central to a more comedy-drama approach in his outings as 007.

Actually, one small coincidence I came across on the internet recently was that Roger Moore actually has a connection with my style of martial arts.

In an episode of The Saint, which older readers will remember brought Moore to a wide TV audience, the action featured a training course led by a karate expert played by Hirokazu Kanazawa, who was the greatest fighter and Sensei in Shotokan karate and is very much the gold standard of karate to this day.

Of all the Bonds, Daniel Craig is the real deal when it comes to physical acting.

Hired to match the intensity of the action scenes in the highly lucrative and successful Bourne trilogy, he needed to look like a rugby full-back and punch like a prize-fighter.

Less classy than Brosnan, not of the upper-class smoothness of Moore, and more or less bereft of a sense of humour, he is a Bond for our age.

Craig has been properly trained for fighting, and gets a sweat up when contesting with villains and henchmen.

As you know, I am not a violent person, I regard aggression and physical force as vile.

I do karate not for any aggressive purpose but to exercise mind body and spirit in a convivial class with friends.

Stage or film violence has its place as entertainment, perfectly healthy as long as an integral part of an exciting story but not to be emulated or glorified for its own sake. Yes, the skill of film-makers is to glamourize fighting - most real-life fights last a few seconds and look like the proverbial handbags at ten paces - but that is no bad thing.

If 007 solved international terrorism by sitting at a desk tapping on a computer keyboard and knocking on doors we would all lose interest.

The secret agent and superhero genres are fiction and fantasy.

No-one in their right mind dress up in a cape and mask or drive a sport car with machine guns behind the headlights.

But humans have always liked exciting stories from way back on the ancient Athens stage through to the latest disaster movie.

Such stories depend on characters, and those characters can have qualities we aspire to - fairness, glamour, determination. And physical excellence.

So when I go to see Spectre on its release, I will sit with fellow fans in the darkness of the cinema. But please join me in not chomping on hot dogs and nachos or slooshing at a huge vat of sugary soft drink.

Take in a bottle of still water and some fruit. Watch our hero kicking and wrestling his way to victory. And come out inspired to get in that kind of shape.

The name's Lafferty. Austin Lafferty.