In 2001, over Kenya, a private plane's pilot fainted at the controls and the aircraft began losing altitude. The man who stepped up to the yoke wasn't a former military pilot, it was Rowan Atkinson, the bumbling Mr. Bean, armed with a master's in electrical engineering from Oxford.

This episode strips away the physical gags to examine a man of staggering contradictions: a master of razor-sharp verbal wit who conquered the world mute, a former stammerer who became one of Britain's most recognizable voices. We trace how an engineer's mind built Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and a fierce free-speech crusade.

• How his 1978 thesis on "self-tuning control" maps onto the feedback-loop mechanics of comedy
• Why stepping into character made his severe childhood stammer vanish
• The mid-series inversion of Blackadder from naive idiot to ...