Bores

I have just seen a film - well, actually only the first hour - called "He was a Quiet Man". It had a good cast, there was a good idea struggling its way through and there were indications that in charge of the whole production was someone of intelligence. But there was a big flaw in it that made it, to me, unwatchable. This had to do with the main character who was an absolute bore. After a while I gave up thinking "surely, something's going to happen that will change the character of this guy"; but it never did (well, it might have in the last half hour of the film but not in the first hour which is the part I saw).
I think this is a most difficult thing to do in story telling: how to manage to portray a bore without him being boring?
I thought of this when I was reading "Emma" by Jane Austen. She should have succeeded in presenting us with an entertaining bore by the quality of her writing - but even that, to me , was insufficient to allay that gut feeling of depression whenever the character appeared.
I have known a few bores in my time but the greatest (i.e. most boring) of these was a man I worked with. He could have bored for Britain. One day I made the mistake of asking him if he was recovering well from his operation. 15 minutes later his story had got as far as him leaving the house to get into the ambulence to go to the hospital.
But, unbelieveable as it seemed, he was a very good actor. We put on a panto every Christmas for the children of the staff. He, the bore, was always a main comic character. And he was brilliant.
I think he must have succeeded because being on stage he was not then himself but someone else, be it the villain in "Aladin" or the giant in "Jack" or Cinderella's step-mother; now he was a person who made people happy. He was not a bore any more.