Harry Enfield

Harry Enfield built a career out of about a dozen people, none of whom are him. Loadsamoney, Kevin the Teenager, Smashie and Nicey, the Scousers, Tim Nice-But-Dim, Mr You Don't Want to Do It Like That: the characters arrived on Channel 4's Saturday Live in the mid-1980s, several of them devised with Paul Whitehouse, and then filled years of sketch television across Harry Enfield's Television Programme, Harry Enfield and Chums and Harry & Paul. He had studied politics at the University of York and done voice work on Spitting Image, which between them are a fair description of the act: satire delivered by someone with a very good ear for how English people actually sound.

The specific gift is compression. A Loadsamoney or a Tim Nice-But-Dim is an entire class position in one catchphrase and one posture, and the reason the characters outlived the sketches is that people recognised someone they knew. Kevin the Teenager got a film of his own in Kevin & Perry Go Large, which is roughly the point at which the material had gone as far as it could go.

The later career is the more surprising part. He has spent it as a straight-faced supporting actor in other people's shows: Jim Stonem, the excruciating father in Skins, Martin Wickers in Bad Education and its film spin-off, Mr Jackson in Swallows and Amazons, King George VI in a Churchill spoof. His Prince Charles in The Windsors is the best of them, a broad joke played with unexpected patience.