Why James Bond remains Britain's most enduring cultural icon as search for the next 007 is on

Amazon MGM Studios, the company that now owns the James Bond franchise, has confirmed that auditions for the next 007 are underway. This has triggered the usual speculation: will the new Bond be Jacob Elordi or Tom Francis? Harris Dickinson or Aaron Taylor-Johnson? Or someone else entirely?

Meanwhile, on Amazon’s streaming platform Prime Video, you can watch Bait, a new series written by and starring Riz Ahmed, in which a British-Pakistani actor auditions for the role of James Bond and watches his public and private life implode from the fallout. It’s an audacious premise that goes on to investigate questions of identity and belonging.

Ahmed has described Bond as “a symbol of aspiration, this unattainable kind of self”. What explains the hold that the spy has on the popular imagination, not just in Britain but all over the world?

The character was created by former British Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming in 1952 at his Jamaican estate, called Goldeneye. He began writing the first book, Casino Royale, with the ambition of creating “the spy story to end all spy stories”. What he came up with was a character who could absorb the anxieties and yearnings of generations.

More from Lifestyle

At the time, post-war Britain was depleted and conscious of its reduced standing in the world. Meanwhile, Bond went to the right places, ate and drank the right things, wore the right clothes and operated at the centre of global affairs in a way that actual British foreign policy did not.

The vicarious appeal was important. Novelist Anthony Burgess once said that what he remembered most about the novels were “the fast car, the correct recipe for a vodka martini, a dinner and a bridge game at Blade's, the brand names of superior toilet articles, the seductively ill-parted hair of a pretty girl”.

Historian Jeremy Black also emphasises the Cold War context. “The novels and early films charted a period when Britain was making adjustments to her world status in uneasy alliance with the United States against Communism,” he writes. In this era, the British spy offered skill, brains and professionalism instead of mere might.

When John F. Kennedy named From Russia with Love among his ten favourite novels in 1961, Bond started to attract audiences in America and the rest of the world. Then came the films, which didn’t necessarily stay close to the source material, being more upbeat and possessing a lightness of tone. They created a recognisable brand almost from the start.

Producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman established the formula with Dr. No (1962): the gun barrel, the theme music, the gadgets, the villain’s lair and the glamorous women. This was rigid enough to be reassuring and flexible enough to be reinvented over the decades.

Cultural theorist Christoph Lindner points out the underlying blueprint: one of excess that combines consumerism, tourism and elitism with chauvinism and voyeurism. This was cheekily acknowledged in GoldenEye (1995) when Judi Dench’s M describes Bond as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War”.

One can track the aspirations of the age by analysing the personas of the actors who played Bond. If Sean Connery’s 007 was compelling and unapologetically dominant, Roger Moore’s was suave and self-mocking. Pierce Brosnan dialled up the charisma, while Daniel Craig’s was magnetic but more vulnerable, helping to offset some of the franchise’s earlier sexism.

It’s instructive to contrast, as some have done, Fleming’s spy with John le Carré’s Smiley, the secret agent who is the opposite of Bond in many ways. Where Bond is smart, deadly and desirable, Smiley is overweight, unglamorous and cuckolded. In le Carré’s work, the world of British intelligence is morally murky, riven with class loyalties and self-deception.

The TV and film adaptations of le Carré’s novels captured much of this texture. They were riveting, yet suffused with paranoia and bleakness. As with Bond, a new screen version is on the cards, with Matthew Macfadyen set to take on the role in the upcoming TV series Legacy of Spies.

The casting of the new Bond could reveal something about the future direction of the franchise. Will it stick to convention or strike out in a manner that reflects a refreshed aspect of national mythology? Chances are that the producers will stay true to Bond’s conservative heritage, but they will find it hard to ignore the more complicated world we inhabit.

To remain relevant, the next Bond film might have to look less like Fleming’s fantasy and, tonally, more like George Smiley’s reality. One way or another, the spy with the licence to kill will be back. As the villain in the film version of Octopussy snarls: “You have a nasty habit of surviving, Mr Bond.”