Mr Bean is at large again, travelling to foreign lands, getting into scrapes, performing pratfalls, saying little, and generally making a spectacle of himself . . . No, wait! That’s Steve McClaren’s England’s football team we were thinking of.

And, once again, it seems that Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean will pull off that curious trick of being sneered at in his own country, while the rest of the world weeps with mirth.

His latest cinematic adventure, Mr Bean’s Holiday, looks as if it, too, may leave Britain’s film critics unmoved (our own woman in the stalls refers to him in times2 today as an “accident-prone irritant. . . a low-water mark in the tide of British cinema”), while abroad Atkinson’s alter ego will again win audiences, much as the largely soundless routines of Benny Hill continue to make foreign TV-watchers clutch their sides in laughter.

Are we in Britain just not very good at appreciating talent under our own noses? Does Mr Bean not slip into a long and noble tradition of celluloid slapstick humour and visual buffoonery that stretches back, through Jacques Tati, all the way to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (another successful British export)? Is Mr Bean, like Norman Wisdom, a man destined always to be more fêted in Albania than in Albion? Perhaps, with his childlike innocence, his clumsy antics and his improbably elastic face, Mr Bean is so underrated at home simply because he is misunderstood.

But then, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wondered, “Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton . . . To be great is to be misunderstood.” So play on, old bean. Whoops! Er, let us help you up.