Ian Fletcher

Ian Fletcher is the BBC's Head of Values, a role that sounds important and means almost nothing, which suits him fine. He drifts through meetings with a permanent air of baffled goodwill, nodding along to jargon he doesn't understand, trying to keep the institution's various egos from colliding while never quite noticing he's the problem.

Bonneville plays him with a beautifully calibrated blankness — a man perpetually one beat behind his own sentences, trailing off mid-thought as if the meaning might catch up later. The comedy lives in that gap between his title and his competence, and Bonneville never overplays it; he just lets Fletcher nod, agree, and quietly sink.