Sky to show only Bond (but not on channel 007)

James Bond will have his own channel on Sky

It's becoming something of a Sky speciality. Spend a bit of cash to hoick something from the terrestrial channels and then give it its own specialist channel so devotees can dedicate 24 hours a day, or thereabouts, to watching their favourite thing. It did it for sports, then it did it for Formula 1 and now it's doing it for the Bond films. It struck a deal in April with MGM, the film studio behind the spy franchise, to take the films away from ITV (who previously held the exclusive rights, which is why you were rarely more than a few hours away from Thunderball on ITV4). And from the autumn, Bond will be getting his martinis poured without ads on a temporary dedicated channel on Sky, launching on 5 October, which will also get the TV premiere of the forthcoming Skyfall.

Which is all well and good. But even if it's just for a year, are 23 films (some of which are utter chuff, it must be noted) enough to fill a whole channel? We got some of our top investigative hacks at Trending HQ to work out the running time of all the Bond films: it's 2,871 minutes or just under 48 hours. Expect a few repeats...