Robert Bathurst

In Toast of London (2013) Robert Bathurst spends most of his time in a dressing gown. His Ed Howzer-Black is an actor of Steven Toast's age who has made his peace with obscurity and passes the days offering advice nobody asked for, and Bathurst underplays him so thoroughly that Matt Berry sounds louder by contrast. That is the job, and he does it without ever winking at us. We laughed hardest not at anything Berry bellowed but at Ed listening to it, unbothered, waiting for it to stop so he could say something mild and wrong. A whole show that shouts needs one man who will not, and Bathurst is that man.

The career behind the dressing gown is longer and steadier than the part suggests. He read law at Cambridge and performed with the Footlights, then made his professional stage debut in 1983 in Noises Off at the Savoy Theatre, a farce that asks its actors to be precise about being incompetent. Early television in the 1980s included Red Dwarf. His first major role came as Mark Taylor in Joking Apart (1991–1995), written by Steven Moffat, and he has called it the most enjoyable job he will ever do. Then Cold Feet (1998–2003), as David Marsden, which brought him a wider audience and which he came back to when the series was revived from 2016 to 2020. Guest parts in Downton Abbey, as Sir Anthony Strallan, and Doctor Who have followed, alongside continued stage work.

What casting directors see in him is plain enough. He is the upper-middle-class man in a suit, the management consultant, the husband who does not say what he feels because it has not occurred to him that he could. The knock against him, such as it is, is that he is asked to do this rather a lot. The case for him is that within it he finds more than the script may have intended. The reputation of his Cold Feet years is that David Marsden began as one joke and became a person over the long run; we have not reviewed the series, so we will only note that the reputation is consistent, and that his own account of the show, "essentially about nothing apart from six people and how they got on", suggests he knew exactly what kind of acting it needed.

The farce training shows in the comedy. He is at his best when the material around him is broad and he is not, when he can stand still in a scene that is otherwise falling over. Berry has used that three times now, and it is not hard to see why. If you have only met Bathurst as a posh face in a period drama, start with Ed in his dressing gown, and notice how little he has to do to be the funniest man in the flat.