Daniel Stroud

Daniel Stroud works within the Olympic Deliverance Commission, one of the earnest junior figures trying to keep London's 2012 preparations from falling apart. He is diligent, a little anxious to please, and forever caught between competing departments and half-formed decisions, doing his best to look competent while everything around him wobbles.

Samuel Barnett plays him with a nervy, put-upon politeness that captures the show's real subject: the exhausting effort of appearing organised when nothing is. He's funniest not through big jokes but through small flickers of dread, the face of someone quietly absorbing every meeting's incompetence.