The humour seems to have gone the same way. In no future is Bond likely to make a wry joke as a laser threatens to bisect his scrotum, thus deploying the Englishman’s ultimate weapon against the presumed Germanic humourlessness of Auric Goldfinger. Irony used to be in Bond’s DNA. Watching a crepe-necked Roger Moore tumbling into the cot with those nymphets was creepy, but his raised eyebrow told you he was the first to see its funny side.

The curious thing about No Time to Die is that despite the much-touted (and tutted, by the feminist-fearing conservative press) addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the writing team, it isn’t funny. Not just during the action sequences, which are obliged to be realistically serious since Bond took on the franchise challenge of Bourne, but at all.

So what is the modern Bond supposed to be like? Bond is definitely English, despite having been played by a Scot, an Irishman and most recently by a northerner (who is definitely English, but not of Bond’s old Etonian cut) but what signifies Englishness now? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of not being foreign, which – in another demonstration of Bond’s adaptability – is arguably right up to speed with the Brexiteer sensibility.

Exotic locations have always been a central plank of the franchise. As a representative of Empire, Bond would arrive as a restorer of the civilised order, confronting criminal petty dictators, busting drug rings in fictitious banana republics and dealing with megalomaniacs seeing world domination and were usually, by implication, Russian.

Once the villains were dispatched, he enjoyed the tropical imaginary of Fleming’s Caribbean (or India or the Ivory Coast, wherever): “an empty stage of colonial space”, as cultural critic Graham Huggins put it, “prefigured as an arena for adventure, excitement and leisure, to be enjoyed only by the ‘best’ people.” However strange the land, there was always a bar that felt reassuringly familiar.

Recent editions deploy these landscapes more spectacularly than ever, but the aesthetic is that of the postcard. In No Time to Die, the first chapter of the story takes place in an unnamed place in Italy, full of stone houses ranged down cliffs and a colourful custom of writing memories down on slips of paper and burning them to start the year afresh, an idea Bond pursues himself, with – ahem – explosive results. Where this is and whether this custom exists anywhere doesn’t matter. It’s the exoticism of a culture, not its specificity, that makes it work as a backdrop, throwing Bond’s English exceptionalism into sharp and consistent relief.

In fact, according to one of the essays in a fascinating book called The Cultural Life of James Bond (Jaap Verheul), the locations in the Bond films have often been dictated by factors such as tax breaks, co-production deals, availability of local labour or even a single geographical feature (the Varda viaduct, apparently, swung the Skyfall shoot for Turkey) that is useful to the story. They could have been pretty much anywhere, as long as they were somewhere else.

As for the local colour, the Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City that swirls around the action in the opening sequence of Spectre was entirely invented. There were no parades; people would traditionally perform private rituals in cemeteries. These were truly folkloric; the urban parade actually had a modernist flavour, thanks to the contributions of many local artists to the event. Since the film came out, however, tourists have come to Mexico expecting it, so the city obliges: it’s a licence to mill.

Stories like this don’t do anything for Bond’s cosmopolitan image, which anyway only cuts as deep as a finger of vodka. Again, according to the above authors, Bond hasn’t really given up on his imperial project, either. It is just that his focus, despite his acquisition of a French wife, has swung on to Britain.

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The modern Bond is always rushing back to base, whether it is to deal with his deep-seated childhood traumas in Skyfall or simply – as in No Time to Die - to snap at M, both less at ease with themselves or each other than ever. There is at least one bejewelled elephant squatting in that room; they really need to discuss it. The next James Bond will certainly be English, whatever else he is. Perhaps he – or she – will also be able at last to decide what that represents.

No Time To Die opens on November 11.

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