To mark his birthday this week, we celebrate his versatility from bumbling Mr Bean to his punctilious headteacher in The Secret Policeman’s Ball
Atkinson is the bumbling Father Gerald, who praises “the Holy Goat”, invites the happy couple to be “Johned in matrimony” and asks the groom to take his bride to be his “awful wedded wife”. Cutaways to the congregation’s reactions – Hugh Grant snickering, Simon Callow stifling a guffaw – do little to convince us that Richard Curtis’s script is top-tier stuff. At least Atkinson brings some typically subtle modulations, such as the vicar’s premature flickers of smugness when he wrongly believes his worst malapropisms to be behind him.
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