In an interview with the Radio Times this week, actor, documentarian, campaigner and city planner Joanna Lumley opined that Idris Elba, long rumoured to be the next James Bond, should not play the role as he does not fit Ian Fleming’s original description of the character.

Joanna Lumley: Idris Elba should not play James Bond as he doesn't fit description Read more

In this Joanna Lumley is correct, although perhaps unintentionally so. What would Bond look like, if he had actually existed and been allowed to age? Bond scholars have it that the character would have been born in 1920 or 1921, educated at Eton and Fettes College, later doing a stint in the navy, famously racist, sexist and homophobic, and given to emitting embarrassing quips at the most inopportune moments. Which means that Bond, if he were alive today, would be 96 and look exactly like Prince Philip. The similarities between the two men are astonishing when you pause to look at them: same year of birth, public schooling and international education, military background, and a lifetime spent in unquestioning service to the queen. The two men’s best one-liners are routinely anthologised by tabloids and lads’ mags. The only significant difference between the two men is that Prince Philip has had the decency finally to retire.

As for a physical description of his hero, Fleming calls his protagonist handsome while noting, somewhat contradictorily, that he resembles the singer Hoagy Carmichael. There we have it: Bond, such as he was described in a series of books written by a white man in the 60s, does not resemble Elba, a black man born in the 70s. Lumley, who was born to another pre-war, patriotic, military James (Major James Rutherford Lumley), in India, in the last year of British colonial rule, called it right.

Lumley presumably holds this view because she cherishes the character, and the old-school British values of heroism and masculinity it connotes, and wants the actor playing him to be authentic. On the other hand, you could argue that if Elba cannot play a character, because he is too modern, too black, not upper-class enough, then the character should be shelved, much like his Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. We don’t need any more Bond films. We now know, in fact – not least because Bond is hero-worshipped by Piers Morgan – that the character is toxic.

Bond belongs to a grotesque tradition, born of British Empire, of separating boys from their parents at a very young age to send them to be bullied and sometimes raped in public schools, in order to toughen them up. This results in Bond’s terrifying, emotionless nihilism, or the give-a-shit rudeness of Prince Philip. Philip Larkin surely had this tradition in mind when he wrote that “man hands on misery to man”. Elba does not belong to this world and cannot convincingly portray it. The character has been modernised over the years, particularly since Jason Bourne came along to make Pierce Brosnan’s bouffant look (more) preposterous; but in essence, the character stands for an idea of empire, of British heroism, that is rooted in very specific socio-historical circumstances.

Can Elba play a handsome, exciting, sexy British spy? Damn right. But this would be to unclaw the character and sanitise his hideous, harmful trappings. Therefore, if Elba does not have the right profile to play a dinosaur, it seems obvious that we shouldn’t update the dinosaur, but consign it to history: let us shelve Bond as the museum artifact that he is, write Elba any number of other roles, and talk of 007 no more.