I love how, as human beings, we're allowed to be unashamedly fan-boy about a small, but important, list of universally loved items. British cars from 1950-1970. Crisp sandwiches. Alan Bennett. Gene Hunt. Mongrel puppies - particularly if they are called something like “Sid” or “Paul”. Pet Shop Boys. Wind-up radios. The dawn.

In a world where we largely define adulthood by how seen-it-all we are (“You have undying, unconditional love for me? Oh God, not another one. First it's my mother, and now, 20 years later, it's you. Can't a man get some peace?”), it's a relief to discover these few precious subjects on which we can let all our defences down. Bond, James Bond is, obviously, one of those. The quips, the fights, the white plastic “space furniture”. And, latterly, Daniel Craig's majestic, sea-damp crotch. Our surrender to Bond-love is so complete that this week the telly has made two programmes on him, to mark the imminent release of Quantum of Solace - which, like everyone, I am totally stoked about, have spent more than a year speculating about, and have already reserved my tickets for.

Ian Fleming - How Bond Began is a cheerfully comprehensive whiz around the life of Bond's creator, hosted by Joanna Lumley. Lumley seems back on top form again, after last month's bafflingly mawkish quest to see the Northern Lights (“It feels like it knew how much we wanted to see it! Thank you! Oh, thank you!” she cried; to a collision of charged particles, 30 miles up in the Earth's magnetosphere).

Trading on her past as a Bond Girl - she has two lines in On Her Majesty's Secret Service - Lumley winks, fruits and flirts all the way from Fleming's Jamaican home to an interview with Ben Macintyre of The Times, during which she is so juicily Lumleyesque, it's a wonder that Macintyre doesn't explode.

Fleming, we learn, was cold, posh and apt to be dismissive of anyone who didn't appreciate top-range tailoring. Although he deliberately set out to write “The spy book to end all spy books”, in the event he scarcely had to make anything up. Starting at Eton - where he nursed an enormous and eventually fruitful grudge against a boy called Scaramanga - in the Second World War Fleming landed a top job in Naval Intelligence after his mother pulled some strings. Fleming's plans - enrolling the occultist Aleister Crowley to capture Rudolf Hess; faking plane-crashes in order to steal codebooks - seem to be the actions of a screenwriter, using the war as a gigantic puppet theatre, rather than those of a master military tactician.

After the war, he moved to Jamaica, where he began every morning with a swim out on the reef. He then took to his writing room for three hours a day, smoking fags and working on his “books for male red-blooded heterosexuals who travel in boats and planes - not schoolboys”.

Falling in and out of love with Bond over the 14 novels, Fleming appears to have made an heroic effort to overcome the huge obstacles of wealth, privilege, success and prime beach-front real estate in Jamaica in order to remain miserable and unfulfilled - and succeeded entirely. He wasn't exactly Mr Cheery Chuckles.

It's left to The South Bank Show to remind us why we love James Bond. Indeed, the SBS is so excited about Bond that the makers have re-poked its theme tune to include a bit of the Bond theme tune.

The effect is rather like when you walk into your local bank on Christmas Eve and see that the manager is wearing a pair of antlers with an expression of “Look! I, too, am light-hearted about Christmas!” on his face.

It's the usual thorough SBS job, with Craig being self-deprecating and wry, Sean Connery suddenly looking very old, and John Barry, the superlative Bond soundtrack composer, being as frisky as usual. Really, every documentary ever made - even if it's about lesbians, or Chernobyl - should have interviews with John Barry; a languorous filth-bag genius who has anecdotes about everything - possibly even the formation of the Earth's crust. There are too many to list here, but the SBS's best one is on the ultimately nonsensical lyrics to Goldfinger.

“Shirley [Bassey] said ‘What's a Goldfinger?” he recalls. “I said, ‘Shirley, it doesn't matter - just go out there, and sing your m**** off.'”

Ultimately, it's pertinent advice for us all.

Ian Fleming - How Bond Began, Sun, BBC One, 6.10pm; The South Bank Show, Wed, ITV1, 10.40pm

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