The name is Powers, Austin Powers. He may at first glance look like a nerdy 1960s throwback with a frightening hairstyle, bad teeth, geeky National Health glasses and a dysfunctional dress sense, but once mediated through celluloid onto a giant screen, the man Powers transmogrifies into the cool hipster who goes under the job description of "the grooviest secret agent on the planet".
When he's not busy saving the world, he's chatting up the chicks with subtle and sophisticated lines like "fancy a shag, baby?", because Austin Powers is actually two parts Benny Hill to one part James Bond, and what he lacks in the chiselled superhero department, he makes up for with saucy, seaside postcard innuendo.
In his new shagtastic cinema outing, poetically titled Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, our heroic anti-hero is currently wiping the floor with Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson. Spy has knocked the unfeasibly hyped new Star Wars film off its Number One box-office perch in the US and earned $57 million in its opening week alone - making it the second fastest-grossing film of all time. The moral of the story is simple: no amount of million pound special effects or star names can hope to compete with single entendre jokes about tits and willies.
Rude and crude, but all done in the best possible taste, the film introduces such timeless characters as Felicity Shagwell ("Shagwell by name, shag very well by reputation"), Ivana Humpalot ("Humpalot by name . . .") and Robin Swallows ("Swallows by name etc"). Film noir it's not.
Very much rooted in 1970s British sitcom territory - think George and Mildred going On the Buses with a Man about the House - if nothing else, the success of the film in the US provides some vital sociological clues as to why Benny Hill always went down better (the puns are infectious) in Los Angeles than he did in Blackpool. This is Route One, pre-PC, simple and uncomplicated comedy. And the jokes don't get any deeper than a buxom blonde in a sports car pulling up beside a man on the street and saying "Can I give you a ride?"
Powers first thrust his way onto the big screen in 1996's Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery when he played a geeky superspy from the 1960s who had been cryogenically frozen for 30 years, re-emerging into a world where his cute anachronisms and innocent ways were tragically out of place. A low-budget affair that was marketed mainly on the star's success in the Wayne's World films, International Man of Mystery was only moderately successfully at the boxoffice but somewhere between ending its cinema run and being released on video, films such as The Wedding Singer and particularly There's Something About Mary had made a virtue out of dumbed-down, one-dimensional humour. The video sold by the truck load - thanks to the timely injection of a $40 million marketing budget - and the massive Time-Warner media organisation soon scheduled the sequel.
Bringing the term "synergy" to a new level of meaning, two of Time-Warner's cable channels ran saturation promotions for the sequel before its release in the US two months ago and Madonna (who is signed to a Warner music label) had Austin Powers appearing in the video for her Beautiful Stranger single. The Warner Brothers retail stores, for their part, featured a select range of Austin Powers Swedish penis-enlargers for the discerning customer. Knowing that its release date would coincide with the new Star Wars film, the producers met the challenge head-on in their promotional blurb for The Spy Who Shagged Me: "If you only go to see one film this year," ran the blurb, "go and see the new Stars Wars film. But if you go to see two, go and see The Spy Who Shagged Me" - a line that may have to be revised since the film's unexpected success.
Meanwhile, the US has gone "shag" crazy: Austin Powers theme nights are the parties du jour in fashionable Manhattan lofts - revellers dressed in Carnaby Street chic inquire, in tortured English accents, if anybody would "fancy a shag"; hotpants and flares are running out of the shops; the Internet service provider America On-Line now comes complete with an Austin Powers window and the London to New York Virgin Airlines flight has now been officially renamed the "Shagtastic Express".
Why a considerable part of the cinema-going population is getting off on a film that makes your average Carry On caper look deep is perhaps one of the biggest cinematic mysteries of the last decade. Superficially at least, it would appear that people are revelling in the anti-PC escapades of Austin Powers and if the plot isn't up to much, what matter? The film can still be viewed through irony-tinted glasses.
Talking of irony, although Austin Powers looks and talks like he lives in a 1960s Carnaby Street bachelor pad, he's actually a Canadian comic called Mike Myers. Brought up in Toronto by his Liverpudlian parents, the young Myers was force-fed a diet of Monthy Python, Benny Hill, The Avengers and The Saint and he doesn't try to hide his almost exclusively Anglo influences. "I'm a police composite of every comedian I've ever liked," he says. "Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness and shows like The Goodies, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and On the Buses." He first trod the boards as a comic at Toronto's famed Second City Improv Theatre before working on the popular US show, Saturday Night Live.
While he may be a connoisseur of sorts, Myers's base-line in comedy is simply "whatever makes people laugh". "It doesn't matter to me whether it's Monthy Python doing something clever like the `All-England Proust-Summarising Competition' or something basic like `The Fish-Slapping Contest'," he says, "and it's the same in the Meaning of Life - you had all that philosophical stuff followed by a man vomiting all over a restaurant. It's just different kinds of jokes. So for me it's all the same. There were always jokes in the Carry On films that had that kind of cheekiness, that seaside postcard stuff - and they always made me laugh. So, if it's a guilty pleasure, then so be it, but it's a pleasure nonetheless."
The pleasure this time out for Austin Powers is that the self-appointed "International Man of Mystery" finds that the secret behind his libido (his "mojo") has been stolen by his nemesis, the complicated-sounding Dr Evil. Not being able to "shag", Austin must travel back in time (in a psychedelic Volkswagen Beetle) to the Swingin' Sixties to track down his "mojo" and thwart Dr Evil's plans to destroy the world. Enter all-round fab chick and hot spy, Felicity Shagwell and let the fun begin . . .
"It's great for Austin to get back to the 1960s in this film," says Myers. "Having spent so much time in the 1990s, it turns out he may have lost a bit of his confidence with the ladies. And that's dangerously close to being square. I loved that era when everything was either sexy or made sexy. You couldn't have a kettle, you had to have a sexy kettle. You couldn't just be a flight attendant, you had to be a sexy stew. Then one day, I think it was 1978, it all just stopped. But not for Austin Powers." Or cinema audiences worldwide.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me opens in Ireland on July 30th
