It’s most often all about the man in the tuxedo, but what about the times when even James Bond has been upstaged by those around him? Throughout the history of the 007 franchise, there’s been a whole array of awesome characters that command attention and capture the imagination. Going with the notion then that -  before she became box office poison - Halle Berry was set to star in her own spin-off as CIA agent Jinx from Die Another Day, there’s a litany of franchise figures that could carry their own series. Here are the top 10 James Bond characters that deserved the spin-off treatment...

Xenia Onatopp
Famke Janssen’s psychotic, sexually-charged villain from GoldenEye is a whole lot more fun and memorable than main Bond Girl, the cardigan-wearing computer programmer Natalya. A ferocious femme-fatale, she crushes her foes between her thighs. Where are the female action hero franchises? In a blockbuster scene that is much too macho, the resuscitation of the excitingly insane Xenia would be a fresh injection for feminist cinema, and it’d be excellent to see the super character despatch more victims with infectious relish.

Valentin Zukovsky
Robbie Coltrane’s ex-KGB agent Russian gangster-cum-caviar baron is a cracking character. Displaying great charisma in GoldenEye and The World is Not Enough, I see potential for a darkly comic crime drama in the vein of The Sopranos set in the shady business world of the former Soviet Union. Beluga, broad Russian accents, black market dealing and the big man himself in the middle reining over it all - perfect.

Baron Samedi
Brought to life by the giant Geoffrey Holder, the cackling voodoo cult villain is easily, in my very humble opinion, the coolest foe Bond has ever faced. Posing a paranormal threat, the Baron with his half-white face and natty top-hat is probably still alive at the end of Live and Let Die despite being dumped in a coffin full of snakes. An occult horror franchise fronted by the magical menace would be brilliant.

Nick Nack
You know that you’d love to track the adventures of the petit Cordon Bleu from The Man with the Golden Gun. He could’ve had his own cookery programme - The Midget Chef - though sadly the passing of Hervé Villechaize means we’ll never see that or a pulpy programme revolving around our pint-sized anti-hero’s globetrotting crime capers. A smaller-height version of Hustle anyone?

Aki
The Japanese Secret Service agent, played by Akiko Wakabayashi, rescues Bond twice in - appropriately enough - You Only Live Twice before perishing as an assassin slips her poison in her sleep. It’s a shame that Aki doesn’t last until the end - it would’ve been sweet to see her front her own 60s Japanese TV series defending the Land of the Rising Sun from such inconveniences as nuclear warhead-wielding megalomaniacs, ronin samurai and Godzilla.

Sheriff J.W. Pepper
Played by Clifton James, Pepper pops up to provide a touch of hokey comedy in Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun and is actually oddly entertaining alongside Roger Moore’s Bond. I can see the Southern hick Sheriff in his own series, chasing hoodlums and ne’er-do-wells through the Louisiana bayou in Dukes of Hazzard style. Cue much cursing and gurning as he ineffectually attempts to exert the law backed by a bunch of even more clueless backwater critters for support. Yeeeah boy! It’d be hilarious.

Dr. Kaufman
As an expert in chakra torture and tantric death methods, the appearance of Kaufman in Tomorrow Never Dies is way too short and he deserved to snuff it in a more stylish fashion than a mobile phone-administered electric shock. An über-tense TV series tracking the macabre murders of this Teutonic Hannibal Lector type would be terrifying and more satisfying for bloodlusting audiences than any CSI or Silent Witness episode. Alternatively, take the morbid academic - played by the scary Vincent Schiavelli - and give him his own ‘torture porn’ movie to offer a sophisticated cinematic sister to the likes of Saw.

Anya Amasova
It can get grating watching Bond films and seeing everything from the West’s perspective, so to plough an alternative course and follow a Soviet spy would be most interesting. Barbara Bach’s cool-natured Anya Amasova from The Spy Who Loved Me probably stands as the most impressive candidate in that she escapes Jaws and has the codename Triple X. With confused Vin Diesel fans and pervy old men flocking to the cinema to see “the new XXX movie”, it’d undoubtedly prove to be a box office hit.

Wai Lin
Another foreign female who kicks arse who could carry a series on her own. Michelle Yeoh has the martial arts mastery and, after hanging around as a scenery-chewer in recent Hollywood works, it’s about time she got back to action stations, slipped into that black leather catsuit and brought the Chinese undercover operative from Tomorrow Never Dies back onto the screen.

Miss Moneypenny
M’s long-suffering secretary exists as an enigmatic individual through most of the Bond series - with the exception of an imminent dinner date in GoldenEye and the ill-advised virtual reality canoodling with Bond’s avatar in Die Another Day. The MI6 mainstay is undeniably the bedrock of the franchise and, having gone missing in the Daniel Craig movies, I say it’s time Moneypenny made her solo break. Moneypenny’s franchise could be a woman-about-town sort of scenario like Sex and the City or Bridget Jones’s Diary, except it wouldn’t suck.

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