For a character developed out of a popular series of Barclaycard ads, Johnny English quickly confirmed his appeal with a smash hit movie in 2003.

The bumbling hero of the British Secret Service prevailed despite his obvious lack of talent in the cloak and dagger world of espionage, yet conspicuous success at the box office did not hasten the eight years it took for a sequel to reach the screen.

Johnny English Reborn revisits the now disgraced hero in a Far Eastern spiritual retreat, before he is called back into service to undertake his most daring mission yet.

“I think we always wanted to return to the character,” explains star Rowan Atkinson.

“There was talk of a sequel immediately after the release of the first movie. We worked on it for a year or so and then we decided to abandon it and make the Mr Bean sequel instead.

“That came out in 2007 and then I did Fagin in the musical Oliver in the West End in 2008 and then eventually we got round to picking up the baton again with the intention of doing a sequel. It’s just distraction and laziness, basically, that has taken it so long to get here.”

Although his deadpan wit is in evidence as he speaks, Atkinson – beloved to Blackadder as much as Bean fans – takes his comedy very seriously. And so, as he keeps his head on set during moments of broad comic business, all about him are losing but trying not to ruin the take.

“There’s a scene where Johnny English is in a meeting going up and down on an office chair,” explains director Oliver Parker.

“Rowan’s focus is astonishing in that scene, because everybody else – he hadn’t realised – was having to hold back, and when I said ‘cut!’ there was an explosion of laughter.

“It was wonderful because the intensity of concentration was so extreme, that he wasn’t actually looking for a response on set. His relationship was with the audience.”

He’s not much of one for ‘corpsing’ into fits of uncontrollable giggles on set when someone fluffs a line or a prop breaks.

“I find it incredibly difficult to fall about laughing,” he shrugs.

“When things go wrong I tend to close up. We had exactly the same problem with Blackadder and all those tv shows that I did, they’re always looking for the moment where the glass breaks or the door knob came off in your hand and there was never any reaction from me whatsoever. My brain is always just focussed on other things.”

Atkinson admits that this concentrated analysis of just what is funny and why is another reason that his film roles have been fewer than they might have been.

“One of the problems I have is the need to be part of the process from the very beginning to the very end. I sometimes yearn for a world in which an actor just turns up for six weeks and does his bit and goes away and then makes another film.

“And because I tend to be part of the script-writing process and then there’s the shooting and then the post-production, which tends to dribble on for months and months and I tend to want to be part of that and contribute at all those sections of the production, it means that the project turns into years rather than months.”

Atkinson has become comedy Royalty, you might say, which puts a funny spin on the hapless Johnny English when he suspects an Eastern assassin might have infiltrated Buckingham Palace on the day he is to have his knighthood reinstated.

Suffice to say the indignities that Johnny inflicts on a VERY senior member of the Royal Family might scupper once and for all his own chances of becoming Sir Rowan.

The reason members of the Royal Family, have featured quite a lot in jokes I’ve been involved with for the past 30 years is because it’s a great and revered institution where certain codes of behaviour are expected.

“And if you can put a character who’s going to behave unconventionally in the middle of those conventions then you have the potential for comedy.”