In a way, it’s brilliant that actor Riz Ahmed delves into one of Hollywood’s (and Britain’s) most pressing cultural voids – Who will be the next James Bond? – and inserts himself into it. In Bait, a six-episode miniseries, Ahmed plays an emerging Pakistani-British actor having an existential moment when he’s announced as a contender to be the next 007. In a series that is part wish-fulfilment, part introspection, part satire and part surreal coming-of-age tale, Ahmed meditates on his place in Hollywood, in modern British society and if his immigrant trauma will even lends itself to playing the poised, suave, and, till now, white, neo-colonial MI6 agent. 

Shahjahan Latif (Ahmed) is an actor on the brink, when he enters an audition of a lifetime. The director favours him, and it’s all going well, until one line of dialogue from a co-star throws the entire audition into disarray. “Do you even know who you are?” It’s a loaded question for a guy almost knifed by skinheads as an adolescent, mocked for his eating habits, trying to fit in using polished language and quiet compliance with the very structures that marginalise him, while reckoning with his South Asian family’s ghosts of having had to migrate to a foreign land for a better quality of life. 

Shah, as he likes to be called to be accessible to........

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