Rowan Atkinson's McLaren F1 car after the crash on the A605 near Haddon in Cambridgeshire. Photograph: Gareth Purnell/Rex Features
Rowan Atkinson, the comedian and petrol-head, has been discharged from hospital on Friday after walking away from a crash in one of the world's fastest road cars – suffering no worse than an injured shoulder, some very expensive coach work and wounded pride.
He left Peterborough City hospital in a wheelchair by the back door, flanked by security guards who attempted to block waiting photographers, and was driven away in a private ambulance.
The accident happened when one of the stars of his large car collection the maroon
McLaren F1 – which he bought in 1997 for a reported £650,000, as a reward for the success of his Mr Bean film – apparently spun off the wet road on Thursday night and hit a tree and a lamppost. He had been travelling on the A605 near Haddon, Cambridgeshire, at around 7.30pm, at the time.
His agents, PBJ & JBJ, said the actor would leave hospital sore but without serious injury, that nobody else was involved in the accident, and that he had no comment to make.
And what's interesting about him as a comic character is that the custard pie hardly ever ends up on his face.
Rowan Atkinson
And, we put a lot more value, or at least I personally put a lot more value, on the creative values and creative challenges of something than the commercial necessities.
Rowan Atkinson
But generally speaking, I tend to be quiet and introspective.
Rowan Atkinson
Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that's important to me.
Rowan Atkinson
I don't much enjoy Back and Forth. I mean, I think it has its own particular qualities, but I think it's inferior to any of the half-hour ones we did.
Rowan Atkinson
I feel as though the camera is almost a kind of voyeur in Mr. Bean's life, and you just watch this bizarre man going about his life in the way that he wants to.
Rowan Atkinson
I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing.
Rowan Atkinson
I think the character does tend to suit an episodic thing, because what's fun about him is that he doesn't care about anyone else, and it's very difficult for a main character - a lead character - in a movie to not care about anybody else.
Rowan Atkinson
I want to express myself in a different way. I have a performing inclination.
Rowan Atkinson
I would return to the Blackadder character if the opportunity came up. I have no qualms about that at all.
Rowan Atkinson
In TV, and in particular in commercials, you don't really need to explain very much at all - you just say he's a spy and he's a little bit theatrical and overblown and smug and he's not very good at his job.
Rowan Atkinson
It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.
Rowan Atkinson
Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.
Rowan Atkinson
Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.
Rowan Atkinson
No, no, I was only funny on stage, really. I, I, think I was funny as a person toward my classmates when I was very young. You know, when I was a child, up to about the age of 12.
Rowan Atkinson
Not so much in Canada, but certainly in the US, as I'm sure you know, money is all, and if they can get another 26 programs of the same thing even though it advances the culture or those actor's careers not at all it doesn't matter.
Rowan Atkinson
Of course, some would say if you have a performing inclination, then you should become a lawyer. That's a platform we use, or a priest. You know, anywhere you lecture and pontificate to people.
Rowan Atkinson
We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.
Rowan Atkinson
When I was doing Bean more than I've done him in the last few years, I did strange things - like appearing on chat shows in character as Mr. Bean.
Rowan Atkinson
You're about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest.
Rowan Atkinson 
USA