- This series called "Iconic character."
- Oh, I see.
No, I don't do a dense or our introduction.
[upbeat music]
- [Narrator] "Man VS Bee"
Trevor Bingley, who's our hero
in "Man VS Bee" is just a very very nice man actually
kind of nicer than most of the characters that I play,
who tend to be very selfish or self-centered
or self obsessed in some way particularly Mr. Bean.
So actually we decided to create a character
who is in many ways, more real, more three dimensional.
He's a decent sort of family man
who's just gone through a divorce.
He's very short of money,
but he gets this job house sitting
for this very, very wealthy couple
who are going on holiday for a week.
And he has a lot of trouble with a bee.
- [Judge] On all 14 counts of dangerous driving,
the destruction of priceless artwork.
Arson [Rowan screaming]
- That's basically the story,
"Man VS Bee" was very difficult to shoot actually,
because we couldn't find a real house to shoot in
'cause it was during COVID
and no one who owned an extremely nice house
wanted a film crew in it.
So we had to create a house of our own in the studio,
which of course means you don't have a garden
and we need a garden
and so we had four different locations for the garden,
two or three different locations for the interior
and one big interior set
- Get out! Get out! [screaming]
- And to be honest,
I preferred the simplicity and the cheapness
if you like of some of the early Mr. Bean stuff,
which as you say,
we start wide, it was a lot of wide shooting
and I like wide shooting.
I'm a great believer
in what Charlie Chaplin said is that,
"A life is a tragedy in closeup and a comedy in long-shot."
If you sit back visually on a situation,
it would automatically becomes funnier.
I mentioned, which is a French comedian called Jacques Tati
who said that comedy begins in the legs.
And making a character more real and more sympathetic
and more identifiable doesn't necessarily make him funny
'cause in many ways,
what's funny about Mr. Bean, for example,
is his complete sort of selfishness
and he's a natural born anarchist
so he's a child trapped in a man's body.
Whereas, Trevor is an adult.
So it's not necessarily funny
to make him more three-dimensional
but he becomes very obsessed and very self-centered.
So in other words, he leaves his niceness behind
and that is when he becomes funny.
[suspenseful music]
- What? [screaming]
- In reality, we didn't have a bee.
You'll be unsurprised to hear.
We had a plastic bee on the end of a rod.
If we wanted a be to crawl across a worktop,
then we had some professional puppeteers
and quite a lot of it,
when I was just acting like that in a room,
we didn't have anything at all.
It was just down to me to imagine a bee
and to be able to mind the situation
if you like well enough to make it look convincing.
It was nice to look at a bee
because your eyes of course always look different.
If bee's close, you look like that
and the bee's further away, you look like that.
And I think the bee, I mean the CGI, the bee is amazing.
I think it's one of the finest CGI animals
ever to be seen on screen.
- [Narrator] "Mr. Bean"
I probably enjoyed playing Mr. Bean the most
because he's a character who's furthest away
from my own character.
As a person, I don't like him at all.
I think he's very odd and pretty weird and not very nice.
[people talking]
[audience laughing]
What's fun about it's an escape.
When you play the character, you don't care what you do.
It's a weird kind of release.
[audience laughing]
First time we did the character,
I'm fairly certain was 1979 on stage
and that was when we had developed, I think two sketches.
One was the beach sketch in which he's trying to change
into swimming trunks on the beach
and then there's the one in the church
in which he's sitting in the church
and he misbehaves while someone's spouting a sermon.
[audience laughing]
The character didn't have a name.
He didn't have to have a name
because there were no words spoken in the sketches
in which he featured they were silent sketches.
But then, when we thought actually these sketches
are quite funny, it's quite an interesting idea
to develop a a comedy character who doesn't use words.
Television comedy had developed from radio comedy
which was a very wordy tradition
and we had to give him a name
in order to give the television show a name.
So we came up with a name of Mr. Bean.
We were thinking Mr. White for a while,
that was an idea but that sounded a bit dull.
We thought of vegetables and Mr. Bean
seemed to be short sharpened to the point.
- Name? - Bean. [audience laughing]
The one I remember shattering me the most,
making me the most tired and exhausted I have ever been
was a movie we did called "Mr. Bean's Holiday"
in which he travels down through France to the south France
to the Cannes Film Festival
and we did a sequence in Provence
which was where he gets caught up
with a Peloton of cyclists
and he overtakes them with great ease.
[upbeat music]
I didn't overtake them with great ease.
I had to put in a tremendous amount of effort
and once we'd done a couple of takes of that
I was absolutely dead
'cause I'm not a cyclist.
I'm not fit. I'm not an athlete.
They cycle very slowly to make sure
that I overtook them, very very hard.
I remember thinking that I'd nearly killed myself
with the exhaustion.
In those days, we tended to do things for real
because it was cheaper and CGI didn't really exist
where the sophistication that it now has.
I mean, certainly the wider shots.
If you can see the wheels of the car on the road
then we were doing it for real.
If it's a tighter shot, then we may have been
on a trailer being pulled along.
Just to make it easy, I tended to just do it.
I remember we wanted the shot
of the car coming straight towards camera.
The cameraman was here and I just drove straight at him,
and you would never do that in this day and age.
I mean, I stopped before I hit him
but I might not have done or the brakes might have failed
because of that
you're not allowed to do that kind of thing anymore
but in those days we did.
[audience laughing]
- [Narrator] "The Blackadder"
"The Blackadder" is a recurring character in history.
We wrote a sitcom in which over four series you see him
in four different eras of British history
and the essence of "The Blackadder" it's about hierarchy.
There's either it's the Royal court or it's the army
which are very definable levels of status.
Effectively in every subsequent series,
I play the ancestor, the descendant of the person
in the previous series.
In the first series, he's a prince
Precisely!
In the second series, he's a Lord
- That Farrow bloke you executed today,
are you sure he's dead?
- Well I chopped his head off, that usually does the trick.
- Third series, he's a butler
- Lead on my God.
- I shall.
[audience laughing]
- And in the fourth series, he's a captain
in the British army in the first world war.
- You must be pretty impressed
having squadron commander The Lord Flashheart drop in
on your squalid bit of line!
- Actually no, I was more impressed
by the contents of my handkerchief,
the last time I blew my nose. [audience laughing]
- In the first series, he was a bit more of an idiot.
In the second, third and fourth series,
he's a cleverer man sort of stuck
in the middle of a hierarchy.
He'd love to move up,
but he finds it very, very difficult to do so
and he certainly doesn't wanna move down
towards his sidekick, Baldrick.
- Yes, and your definition of dog is?
- Not a cat. [audience laughing]
- Excellent!
- And he's always the middle guy.
He's the sort of middle management guy
who resents those above him and he resents those below it
but he had a wonderful sort of weary cynicism
about the world
and that I think is what made him surprisingly identifiable
and also made him funny.
The big changes in the first series and the second series
was we went from a very extravagant location
based semi film like texture to something,
well, we just had to make something much more effective
and much more funny and much more cheaply
so we ended up with a sort of three set sitcom.
So there were only three sets
and the action just moves between the three sets.
And then the third series,
we were in the Regency period
with George the Third on the throne
and the Prince Regent in charge, is that right?
Sorry. history was never my strong point.
Richard Curtis and Ben Elton
who really made "The Blackadder" of what it was.
It was just whatever they thought was going to work best.
Whenever I've been invited to do one of his films,
I think I've always said, yes.
So if I'm not in one of his films
then he hasn't invited me
which he's perfectly entitled not to do.
What like "Love Actually" is a case in point
which was when he asked me to do the small part
of the salesman in the shop.
- Could we be quite quick, please?
- Prontissimo!
- It was just a sweet, funny little part
who took one all night shoot in Selfridges on Oxford street
and was a very nice thing to have done.
- [Narrator] "Johnny English"
Johnny English is a British spy
who's not as good as he thinks he is.
He always overreaches himself.
His ambition is always greater than his skill.
The joke is in that discrepancy
between reality and ambition
- The master criminal sees not a room,
but a series of opportunities.
Should I go in through the window?
Possibly? Should I drop down from the ceiling?
Perhaps. - Actually sir--
- But there's one thing
I think we can be fairly confident about
that is that they didn't come up through the floor.
- I've got you, Sir.
- He's a curious thing, actually,
a relatively rare character
because he used to be called Richard Latham
and he was a character in some commercials that we made
for "Barclaycard" in the nineties,
- No ordinary bar, two clicks of a cap,
man, it'll render any assailant immobile,
very dangerous in the wrong hands.
Take over for a bath with you moment.
- We made the commercials to look like feature films.
- We'll never make that point Sir.
- Nonsense, our carriage awaits.
- It was a bit of a no brainer to say,
well actually, why don't we just make a feature film.
When we're trying to think of a name for the movies,
I like sort of the name of the character in there,
like Mr. Bean.
And so in trying to think of a name,
we thought Richard Latham was a bit dull
but Johnny English had a certain.
- Johnny English. I'm here to see Pegasus.
Still, no sense rushing things.
- I did most of the driving stuff I did.
I did what I was allowed to do.
They are very very reluctant
to allow the star actors to do them.
But I remember doing those things here
in the first Johnny English
when I fly down on the rope
and grab the crown from John Malkovich's head.
[heroic music]
I hated every single one of them.
I must have done it 25 times this swinging on a big roll.
So I did some and I didn't do others.