Who's Bond, James Bond?

The bets are off, Mr Bond. Casino Royale will be the next big-screen outing for 007. And thanks to a flurry of wagers on Dougray Scott - a fridge salesman's son who played the villain in Mission: Impossible 2 - bookmaker William Hill is now refusing further gambles on the identity of the man most likely to inherit Pierce Brosnan's neatly ironed dickie.

William Hill can't say whether the sudden splurge of bets were made by individuals with insider knowledge, or by certain parties - Dougray Scott's mum, for instance - who wanted to buy the actor some good publicity. But since the autumn, when Brosnan was ejected from the cast of the 21st Bond movie by its producer, Barbara Broccoli, the odds have been rising and falling on a number of candidates. Jude Law, Hugh Jackman, Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd, Ewan McGregor, Rupert Everett - everyone but Jim Broadbent seems to be in with a chance.

I'd like to add one of my own to the list: Adrian Lester. He's impeccably English, he knows how to wear a suit and tie, and he is capable of being as arch and twinkly as Roger Moore, and he can also act.

A power struggle between Broccoli and her partners, MGM, has allowed space for all this speculation. MGM bean-counters favour an established name. The Broccoli faction wants to employ a younger, less established actor. Both are arguing over a shortlist of 10 names, at the top of which, the latest rumours suggest, is a relative unknown named Dominic West.

It's amazing that there is anything to argue about. For more than four decades, the Bond franchise has been turning out high-gloss espionage to the same formula. The Berlin Wall, the Vietnam war, student riots and the Thatcher years have been and gone, and 007 is still here, gadding about in minicopters and delivering weak puns to women in bikinis.

Watching a Bond film in the new millennium requires a monstrous suspension of disbelief. They are rather like those old Basil Rathbone films in which Sherlock Holmes was able to battle the Nazis because - as the caption at the beginning explained - he was "ageless, invincible and unchanging".

If James Bond were any respecter of reality, the man who watched Honey Ryder rise from the waves in Dr No would now be in his midseventies, and keener for Q to design him a gadget to help him get out of the bath than a cigarette case with an inbuilt laser-beam. Instead of lolling on beaches with Halle Berry, he'd be lying drunk on the carpet, banging on about how much simpler the world was in the Cold War days when he was tussling with Smersh agents and three-nippled supercriminals.

In truth, though, Bond has always been a paid-up member of the Establishment. We associate the character with Sixties permissiveness - remember how odd Timothy Dalton's monogamous, Aids-aware incarnation of the character seemed? But 007 began with Forties morals and mores. In Goldfinger, he's a gruesome fuddy-duddy, who goes to the fridge to retrieve something chilled for the soon-to-be-electroplated Shirley Eaton, and declares: "My dear, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38OF. That's just as bad as listening to The Beatles without earmuffs!"

In most other British films of this period, lines like this are given to dull dads and humourless headmasters, not the hero of the piece. So, might any of the actors on whom the bookies have been taking bets be capable of reinvigorating this rather geriatric property? None of the better-know figures on the list seem to fit the bill. Clive Owen is too boring, Ioan Gruffudd too boyish, Rupert Everett too old and Ewan McGregor too bristly.

Jude Law is far too girly for Bond: by all means stick him in a swivel chair and give him a white cat to caress, but don't ask him to save the world. The only non-Brit, Hugh Jackman - best known as the hairiest of the X-Men - is too uncouth. And we all know what happened the last time they cast an Australian in the role. (Despite that whoop-de-do scene in which he drops his kilt for Diana Rigg, George Lazenby's sole outing as Bond, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, was a comparative failure.)