By the mid-1990s, Rowan Atkinson had achieved a certain ubiquity in British popular culture, with comedy series (and their reruns) on television, character roles in leading films, and even life-size cutouts placed in branches of a major bank (a consequence of his advertisements for that bank). Yet despite Atkinson’s high profile, his career has been one of cautious progressions, refining and modestly extending his repertoire of comic personae. As one of his regular writers, Ben Elton, has commented, Atkinson is content to await the roles and vehicles that will suit him rather than constantly seek the limelight.

After revue work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and London’s Hampstead Theatre in the 1970s, Atkinson first achieved prominence as one-quarter of the team in the BBC’s satirical review Not the Nine O’Clock News (broadcast on BBC 2 while the Nine O’Clock News occupied BBC 1). After a decade in which British satire had diminished, in the wake of the expiration of the Monty Python series, a “second wave” was thereby ushered in as a new conservative government took power in 1979. The four performers (also including Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, who later formed a successful production company together, and talented comedian Pamela Stephenson) had similar university backgrounds to those of the earlier generations of British television satire since Beyond the Fringe. But the show’s rapid-sketch format, often accompanied by a driving soundtrack, was less concerned with elaborate deflations of British political and social institutions or Pythonesque surreal narratives; instead, it was a combination of guerilla sniping and playful parody, loosely held together by fake news announcements (the most political and topical segments of the program). Though the quality of the writing varied hugely, Atkinson succeeded most clearly in developing an individual presence through what were to become his comic trademarks—gawky physicality, an abundance of comic facial expressions from sneering distaste to sublime idiocy, shifting mood changes and vocal registers from nerdish obsequiousness to bombast, and his ability to create bizarre characterizations, such as his ranting audience member (planted among the show’s actual studio audience) or his nonsensespeaker of biblical passages.

From being the “first among equals” in Not the Nine O’Clock News, Atkinson moved to center stage to play Edmund Blackadder in the highly innovative Blackadder (also for the BBC), co-written by Elton and Richard Curtis, the latter a writer of Atkinson’s stage shows. The first series was set in a medieval English court, with Edmund Blackadder as a hapless prince in waiting; subsequent series traveled forward in time to portray successive generations of Blackadders, in which Edmund became courtier in Elizabethan England, then courtier during the Regency period, and finally Captain Blackadder in the trenches of World War I. With a regular core cast, who constantly refined their performances as the writers honed their scripts, the series combined, with increasing success, a sharpening satirical thrust with an escapist sense of the absurd. The format served Atkinson extremely well in allowing him to play out variations on a character theme, balancing consistency with change. While all the incarnations of Edmund Blackadder pitted the rational, frustrated, and much put-upon—though intellectually superior—individual against environments in which the insane, tyrannical, and psychopathic vied for dominance, the youthful, gawky prince of the first series evolved through the wishful, self-aggrandizing courtier of the 1800s, to the older, world-weary soldier attempting merely to stay alive amid the mayhem of war. While the Blackadder series undoubtedly took time to find its feet, the attention to detail in all matters, from script to opening credits and period pastiche music, produced in the World War I series a highly successful blend of brilliantly conceived and executed characterizations, a situation combining historical absurdity and tragedy, and a poignant narrative trajectory toward final disaster: in the last episode, Blackadder and his entourage finally did go “over the top” into no man’s land and to their deaths, as in one last trick of time the trenches dissolved into the eerily silent fields that they are today.

If Blackadder exploited Atkinson’s skills at very English forms of witty verbal comedy and one-upmanship, his persona in the Mr. Bean series linked him with another tradition—that of silent film comics, notably Buster Keaton. Though silent-comedy “specials” have made occasional appearances on British television, this was an innovative attempt to pursue the mode throughout a string of episodes. Inevitably, Atkinson also became, to a much greater extent than previously, conceiver and creator of a character, though Curtis again had writing credits. In Mr. Bean Atkinson portrays a kind of small-minded, nerdish bachelor, simultaneously appallingly innocent of the ways of the world, yet, in his solipsistic lifestyle, deeply selfish and mean spirited: the pathetic and the contemptible are here closely allied. It is a comedy of ineptitude, as Bean’s attempts to meet women, decorate his flat, host a New Year’s Eve party, and so on all become calamitous, his incapabilities compounded by a seemingly malevolent fate. With its sources in some of his earlier characterizations, Atkinson has been able to exploit his physical gawkiness and plunder his repertoire of expressions in the role. While Blackadder’s wit achieved popularity with mainly younger audiences, the Mr. Bean format of eccentric protagonist in perpetual conflict with his intractable world took Atkinson fully into the mainstream, with its appeal to all ages. A feature film version, released in 1997, was hugely successful, though it garnered mixed reviews.

Atkinson’s most recent television role–Inspector Fowler in The Thin Blue Line–has been a kind of merging of the otherworldliness of Mr. Bean with the witty barbs of Blackadder. He plays a middle-ranking, idealistic, uniformed policeman with an absolute respect for the values of the law and the job, often ridiculed by his more cynical colleagues. This new series, widely seen as writer Ben Elton’s attempt to create a character-based comedy in a similar vein to the classic Dad’s Army, received mixed reviews. This bold attempt to reinvigorate an older format has remained a minority taste, regularly revived in the later-evening schedules of BBC 2 but never emerging into the limelight. Its mixed-genre approach, combining character-comedy gentility with an often baroque verbal structure (such as elaborate unintentional double entendres) has tended to mystify viewers. For Atkinson, though, it is something of a logical progression—a variation as opposed to a revolution, and a further integration into the comic mainstream.

So far Atkinson has given no sign of any desire to break out of the character portrayals for which he is renowned. Though his film work has included some strongly defined subsidiary roles (such as his bumbling vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral), he has not attempted to make the move into serious drama and has never had call to portray genuine and serious emotions. Indeed, almost all of his comic characters exude a separateness from other human beings; Blackadder is generally uninterested in women, Bean cannot make contact with prospective partners or friends, and Fowler prefers a hot mug of cocoa to sexual relations with his permanently frustrated female partner. This apparent avoidance of roles demanding emotional display may indicate limitations in his acting range. But Atkinson himself may well regard it more as a choice to concentrate on a steady perfection and crafting of the kind of comic characterization now so closely identified with him.

It seems that the films of Mr. Bean and lately Atkinson’s Bond-spoof Johnny English (from the character created for his Barclaycard advertisements) signal a move away from television. There are still occasional cameo appearances and contributions to charity specials, but it remains to be seen whether Atkinson will return to the medium that established his career.