Timothy Dalton wears a TAG Heuer Night-Diver

The watch shows up for only a few seconds, in the dark, during the pre-title sequence of The Living Daylights. Timothy Dalton, in his first film as Bond, is fighting for control of a Land Rover as it careers down the Rock of Gibraltar, and as his hand grips the wheel a dive watch on his wrist throws off a patch of glowing dial. That glow is most of what the camera gives you. There is no close-up and no Q Branch gadget; the watch is just a watch.

Working from those few frames, the Bond-watch researcher Dell Deaton, along with Paul Gavin and the Heuer specialists at Calibre11, identified it as, most likely, a TAG Heuer 980.031 Night-Diver. It is a small watch by modern standards, a 36mm quartz diver in a black PVD case on a black jubilee bracelet, with a fully luminescent dial that reads white in daylight and glows in the dark once it has taken in enough sunlight. That last trait is the one the camera caught.

Even the experts cannot settle one detail: whether the dial read Heuer or TAG Heuer. TAG Group had bought a majority stake in the company in 1985, two years before the film, and the 980.031 was sold under both names as the logo changed over. No frame of The Living Daylights shows the dial cleanly enough to decide.