We’ve always known that in reality not one of Britain's secret agents has ever successfully fought a shark or garrotted Robert Shaw on a speeding train. In fact, we are told, over and over again, that most of what our secret agents do is boring; that instead of trying to stop Spectre stealing our nuclear bombers, they actually spend most of the day trying to stop their wives checking Max Mosley’s hair for nits. To hammer the point home, they even advertise for new agents these days in The Guardian.

And to reinforce the view that it’s all nasty coffee and budget meetings with flip charts, we should remember what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. Instead of dispatching their best man to blow up some submarines and sleep with as many Iraqi women as possible, the security services simply asked Alastair Campbell what he wanted. And then went on the internet until they found it. “Yes. Look. Saddam does have missiles with nerve gas tips. It says so here in this student’s essay.”

And yet, it became clear last week in the trial of some Muslims who wanted to blow up some airliners that the truth probably lies somewhere between the two points. Our agents are not shooting men with metal teeth in the face. But they are not getting all their intel from Wikipedia either.

If you actually read the court reports, there is no doubt that what they did to catch those stupid weird-beards would make a better, more real and more gripping spy thriller than anything from the likes of Forsyth, Fleming or Ludlum.

Admittedly, the locations don’t have the visual impact of Corfu or Bolivia. There are no deserts in Walthamstow and no glittering oceans in High Wycombe. And that’s part of what makes the story so fantastic. These are ordinary British towns full of IT consultants and greengrocers. You expect to find arms dealing and bomb-making factories in Algiers and Marseilles. Not on a housing estate in Buckinghamshire.

So it begins. Bond is brought into M’s office and told there is dirty work afoot. Pakistan’s interrogators have pulled out some fingernails and it’s emerged that some religious fanatics have hatched a plan to blow seven planes and thousands of people out of the sky, in a single day. The stakes are high and you’re gripped already.

Bond heads off to the airport, where he’s told there are no flights to Buckinghamshire. Instead he must catch the Heathrow Express back into London and then a commuter train from Marylebone to High Wycombe. For a bit of light relief, and in the name of reality, he might like to try using the lavatory on this service, to see if he can get the door to close.

On arrival, he has to wait until the fanatics are out before placing listening devices in their house. And presumably he must do this so that no one else in the close notices. Maybe he could sleep with Mrs Needham at No 43 to keep her quiet. That bit’s optional. I’m sure it didn’t happen in real life.

But, whatever, it transpires that there is a plot and several Muslims are in the process of building some advanced liquid bombs. And here’s the really good bit. Bond can’t simply take them to a field and leave them with nothing but a can of engine oil to drink. He must wait and collate evidence, because in the real world that’s what is needed to secure a prosecution in the courts.

Even when he knows, and M knows, and you and I know some of the men are guilty, he has to have enough hard facts to convince the looniest, stupidest jury. And juries can be very loony and very stupid indeed.

Then comes the twist. An idiotic American man called Dick Cheney decides he must make George Bush, another idiotic American man, look like he is winning the war on terror, so he ignores British pleas for patience and orders the arrest of a shadowy figure with links to Al-Qaeda and the bombers in Britain.

This is likely to derail the entire operation. With the shadow in jail in Pakistan, where people tend to talk eventually, some of the British bombers may feel their operation has been compromised and decide to go ahead sooner than anticipated. So what do the intelligence people do? Arrest them, even though they know they probably don’t have enough evidence for a conviction? Or continue to watch and wait with crossed fingers?

Imagine what it must have been like at that meeting. The sheer rage at the American stupidity. The tension. And the certain knowledge that if a wrong decision is made, either the bombers walk free or thousands of people die. This is cinema gold. And it actually happened.

Eventually, some bombers were arrested and you’d imagine the film would be over. But no. Thanks to Britain’s legal system, which allows tradition to trample all over common sense, the electronic intercept recordings of the men were inadmissible. And the jury could not agree on whether the plot to blow up aircraft actually existed.

So now you’re in the cinema, shaking with impotent fury. How can this have happened? All that watching and listening. All those late nights. Naturally, the film does have a happy ending because eventually they found a way around the rules on intercept evidence and at the retrial three men were found guilty of a plot.

Although I do like the idea of a final scene in which Bond is seen at a meeting with Colonel Gadaffi, arranging for BAE Systems to ship some missiles to Cuba in exchange for the release of the convicted men on compassionate grounds.

This, really, is what has emerged from the proceedings. That no matter how real and how gritty the Bond producers try to make their films, they will never be able to match the tension of what almost certainly is happening today, possibly just down your street, just outside the post office.

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