Smash hit

Anyway, back to basics. Here he is — a blue El Greco about to play Fagin, and a man who gets stopped in the street in every country in the world because of the global success of Mr Bean. In fact, he tried to prevent it from being shown in Italy, where he likes to take his holidays.

“We did manage to stop it in Italy for a while, but then satellite TV struck and we couldn’t do anything about the distribution of the film.”

He should have been an electrical engineer, but he made the mistake of doing his MSc at Oxford, where he met the writer Richard Curtis and fell into show business. This is a pity, as he was working in the important area of self-tuning control systems.

“It sounds both simple and slightly dull — but you don’t lose your instinct for it or, indeed, your interest in it. I don’t regret doing what I did.”

In spite of the encounter with Curtis, solid middle-class caution ensured that he finished his degree. “I was determined to get the degree. I was conditioned sufficiently well to believe you had to get all the qualifications you can. And I’m certainly not the sort of person who would have liked to have left university without achieving the badge of having been at university.”

“And anyway,” I suggest, “if all else fails . . .”

“Quite.”

Strictly speaking, the showbiz bit started at school in Durham. He hated games. “I think I made myself hopeless at all sports because there was something about sports and the competitive endeavour that I was so alienated by that I decided I was not going to be good at it. I was academically okay, but it’s always the extracurricular activities for which you get admired. So, when I was about 10 or 11, I remember standing in front of my classmates in the changing room and performing.”

He says, probably not entirely accurately, that it was the last time he performed unrehearsed and without masses of preparation. He’s a perfectionist, not an improviser.

Like many of the finest and funniest, comedy does not come naturally to him. He has to work at it. “I’m not a spontaneously funny person. I tend to need a script and I need rehearsals.”

He seems to have been good at meeting the right people. There was Curtis at Oxford; then a touring double act with Angus Deayton; then the television producer John Lloyd, who would cast him in Blackadder, though gave him his television breakthrough in Not the Nine O’Clock News with Pamela Stephenson, Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith. This series is now lodged in television history as the moment when a new comic generation was born. The title suggested it was a satirical show, but it wasn’t really. It was just what they happened to find funny at the time. From one angle, it was a traditional, mainstream sketch show, but with a few alternative touches. Perhaps the show it most resembled was America’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which was also a combination of sketch show and some of the weirder, wackier stuff they had imported from England.

Atkinson was primarily under the influence of Monty Python, the ne plus ultra of weird and wacky. His set-piece manner of gloriously withering disdain plainly owes something to John Cleese.

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