The Simpsons: 10 Best Nameless Characters

“Mountain of Madness” sees Mr Burns organise a work team-building trip to the avalanche-prone Mount Useful.

Whilst Homer and Burns go crazy in the cabin, the rest of the family share most of their screen time with the unnamed mountain ranger.

From his opening explanation to Marge that budget cuts have led to the park having had to “eliminate anything the least bit entertaining”, to telling the search party to put on their “corpse handling gloves” mere seconds after reassuring Bart and Lisa that their dad will be okay, the ranger gets all the episode’s funniest lines.

The sequence on the mountain's chair lift (which offers an "eagle-eye view of the area directly beneath the chair lift") sees the ranger at his best. He gives Marge a "slim to nil" chance of finding the children, which immediately cuts to Bart and Lisa smiling and waving the their mother. When Marge asks to stop the chair lift, the ranger replies that, "There's no way off till we get to the top, and even then it's sort of tricky."

An affable authority figure who turns out to be as useless as he is grimly pessimistic, he is exactly the sort of character The Simpsons does best.