A Bean cartoon series has also been sold around the world. He made his debut in a half-hour ITV special on New Year’s Day 1990, since when more than 200 countries have bought the 14 original Mr Bean TV shows. Yet Mr Bean is one of the most successful pop-culture exports this country has ever produced. ‘If Rowan Atkinson hasn’t got the heart to kill off Mr Bean, I’ll gladly throttle him by his necktie myself,’ fumed one Fleet Street film critic forced to watch his last outing, Mr Bean Goes On Holiday. Other Britons are often infuriated by this grotesque caricature. Hopeless, sexless, awkward, badly dressed, acutely self-conscious and ill-at-ease, blitheringly useless at everything and completely oblivious to anyone and everything around him, Bean is a very clever man’s very stupid invention.Īnd he is unmistakably British, right down to the Mini (the old kind, naturally, not the slick new BMW version) in which he travels from one disaster to another. Above all, he’s the comic confirmation of every negative stereotype that foreigners have about the British. I contend that Mr Bean is an irritation and a menace, off the screen as well as on. This week, it appeared that this grotesque, rubber-lipped character could make a comeback after Mr Bean’s creator, Richard Curtis, said he was tempted to ‘return to Mr Bean’.Īlthough Rowan Atkinson swears he will never make another Bean film, can he really hold out if the pay cheque is large enough? When my nine-year-old son wanted to infuriate and torture me, he made me take him to the local multiplex, where I sat in the dark and watched Mr Bean Goes On Holiday. When Iranian interrogators wanted to humiliate and torture captured Royal Navy seaman Arthur Batchelor, they kept him in the dark and called him Mr Bean.
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