I was watching Mr Bean again the other day, because they were showing all the reruns on some old Facebook channel. It came out when we were teenagers, and we were leaving another bubble, getting ready for our “A” levels, which of course we aced.
Back in the day, Mr Bean was hilarious as fuck. I think this was the 90s, and Britain was a wonderful factory for great ideas back then. British music in the 90s was superb, and they had all those movies that Richard Curtis had a hand in, and also the Kenneth Branagh productions. Not to mention the Rowan Atkinson comedies.
At that time Rowan Atkinson was acknowledged as one of the greatest comic actors of his time. His work has slowed down, and I think that maybe he feels that he’d be repeating himself, or that he can no longer hit the heights that he was used to.
Somebody once said to me that he thought that Mr Bean was an extremely annoying person. I suppose it’s just as well that Mr Bean only had less than 20 episodes in all, and the original TV series emphasised quality over quantity. There’s no exaggerating what a difficult person he would be if you were in his company. I think most of us liked him from a distance. There were a few things about him that we nonetheless recognised in some of our friends: they were the weird fetishes that he had – once he set his mind on doing something, by god he had to do it, and he would be completely oblivious to the havoc that he would cause. There was something extremely childish about him, and in a way that was his saving grace that he never took anything too seriously for long anyway. But he also had a mean and selfish streak.
But what made Mr Bean so special was the ingenuity of the gags. Mr Bean may have been an extremely annoying person, but some of his gags were so clever that you had to sit back and marvel. And one of the best things about comedy, and one reason why great comedy TV series don’t always translate well to the big screen (ie also for the Simpsons) is that comedy is in some ways more suited for the small screen. The cheapness of the production is sometimes part of the gag. TV is in some ways a smaller medium, as in the production values are rougher, and yet it is in other ways a larger medium, as in you get 10 hours worth of narrative to play with, and that is why there is no time limit on how far you can stretch out a gag. You could make one whole episode revolve around just one small set of scenarios. One entirely about Christmas. 10 minutes on taking an exam. You could have him dig himself deeper and deeper into an absurd scenario, but movies are different, they demand that the plot moves itself along.
And the thing about Mr Bean is somehow he manages to live in this world, even as a child who does not grow up. There’s this sense that everything’s going to be alright, no matter what. It’s an almost American kind of optimism. Mr Bean is alternately idiotic and ingenious: being able to get away with, for example, changing clothes while driving his mini Austin.
And in a way, many of us, during our childhood years, were all living like Mr Bean. We were impervious to reality, our stupidity didn’t have any real consequences. We could simply live in the moment and fixate on whatever just happened to make us happy. And very interestingly, Mr Bean was one of the last cultural phenomenon to take place in a pre-internet environment. I’m wondering if a nostalgia for those days is somewhat conflated by a pre-internet world being the last part of my grade school days.
And even national service was … we used to talk about Mr Bean because a lot of the regulars who ended up there were Mr Beans. The SAF, for some of them, was some kind of la la land, where you had an iron rice bowl and you didn’t have to worry about screwing up, and of course, you always did.
Music Composition 