I can't quite remember how we left Hannibal Lecter in the last 'Silence of the Sheep' film. As I recall, he'd sawn the top off Ray Liotta's head, lost his hand and was on a plane, offering brain pate and crackers to all and sundry.

Or was he being eaten by a pig? Or was he setting fire to a man in a wheelchair?

The fact is that Lecter creator Thomas Harris only ever gave Hannibal a very small role in his first book on the subject of mass murder, but since the movie boys moved in, he's been turned into one of the biggest baddies in cinema history. Which is another way of saying 'milked to death'.

But even so, I understand there's to be a new Lecter film next year in which we see the cannibal as a young man, growing up in Eastern Europe. I daresay he will eat his mother and feed his father to the dog. And then he'll splash on a bit of exotic aftershave, and generally make a nuisance of himself in various set-pieces designed to get the audience vomiting.

We see this with James Bond too. I'm the hugest fan of 007 and know most of the films off by heart. But even I will admit that while Moonraker produced the best Bond villain of them all - Michael Lonsdale - it was such a stupid story that the only way to go afterwards was backwards.

Today's Bond films, as a result, aren't really Bond films at all. In the early days, we had long scene-setting sequences - the carnival in Rio and the funeral in New Orleans, for instance. They were impossibly glamorous and set the films apart from other home-grown movies which mostly featured Robin Askwith peering through windows in places no more exotic than Wakefield and Plaistow.

Now we can go to Hong Kong for three hundred quid. We can see the carnival in Rio on a web cam. We can ski and scuba dive and do all that Bondy stuff whenever the mood takes us. Bond, thanks to Ryanair and the internet, lost his glamour.