Adam West

Watch him with the bomb. In Batman (1966) West jogs along a pier looking for a corner without nuns, a marching band, a mother with a pram or a family of ducks in it, and he keeps his back straight the whole way. He is not hurrying, exactly. He is a public official dealing with a nuisance. When he finally says 'some days you just can't get rid of a bomb', it comes out in the tone of a weather report. We laughed out loud, and it was the running that did it: a grown man in a grey leotard trotting politely away from ducks as though dignity were the whole point.

That straight face is the entire performance, and it is harder than it looks. West delivers the lines in a level baritone and never lets his eyes go to the camera. Children took Batman as a hero and adults took him as a joke, and West gave both of them what they wanted in the same take. He put it plainly himself: 'It was a constant effort to walk a tight wire, to be seemingly serious and very dynamic for the children, but to give the adults the laughs without winking at the camera.' Burt Ward's Robin bounced beside him through 120 episodes as the boy who took all of it at face value, and the pairing worked because only one of them was in on it. Some have called the earnestness naive, or merely camp. We think that gets it backwards: a man who did not know how absurd he looked could never have kept his face that still.

There was not much either side of it. Before the cowl he was a square-jawed authority figure in television westerns and a regular as Detective Sergeant Steve Nelson in The Detectives (1961-62), with a science-fiction lead in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). He was cast as Batman after a Nestlé Quik commercial, which tells you how the business saw him. When the series ended in 1968 the cowl would not come off. Serious parts did not come, and for a long time neither did much else.

What came instead, decades later, was the voice. From 1999 he was Mayor Adam West in Family Guy, a man with his name, his baritone and none of his sense, and he played the joke exactly as he had played Batman, without a wink. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length. We will only note that being typecast as yourself, for the rest of your working life, is a strange fate, and that he made it pay.

Start with the film. It runs out of ideas after an hour, but West does not; he is still playing it straight when the script has begun repeating itself, and that is the whole of his art.