History Of Mr. Bean

He is gawky, befuddled, ingenious and selfish English gentleman, with the psyche of a child and for whom doing the most basic chores calls for bizarre schemes and ideas and evokes the most rip-roaring reactions. Love him or hate him, you just can’t ignore Mr. Bean, who with his hilarious hysterical theatrics has succeeded to rule our hearts for more than two decades now. Mr. Bean is the most popular pantomime characters to hit the small screens, since Charlie Chaplin days. This comic sitcom that took off almost two decade from now owes all of its fame and popularity to the 42 year old British actor Rowan Atkinson, who with his ingenious acting antics has embossed the character of Mr. Bean deep into our hearts. The child-like innocence of Mr. Bean, together with his ingenuity, has hardly missed to impress anyone. Since its launch, the show has been a huge hit and has claimed a host of prestigious awards. The popularity of this show escalated to such great heights that today we have an animated spin-off of the original show and even a film dedicated to the rib-tickling escapades of Mr. Bean and his forever friend ‘Teddy’. Read on to unearth a few such other interesting facts on Mr. Bean.

Mr. Bean, the renowned British comedy television series, starring the master of comic antics Rowan Atkinson in the lead, was first aired on television on January 1, 1990. This television series kicked off with 14 half-hour episodes, penned by Rowan Atkinson, Robin Driscoll, Richard Curtis and Ben Elton. Mr. Bean was conceived as an upshot of Rowan Atkinson's stage revues of the 1980s, which featured the silent odd-ball and since then, it has been one high ride for the comic sitcom that has added many prestigious awards and honors to its name, some of which are the International Emmy and the Golden Rose of Montreux.

 

Mr. Bean mainly featured the various exploits of the title character, his everyday problems and his hysterical quick-fix solutions to them. The character of Mr. Bean was conceived by Atkinson, during his tenure in the Oxford. In the early eighties, Atkinson took up a storm in the comedy world with his various revues and even acted in sitcoms, thereby paving way for the emergence of Mr. Bean. During one of his shows in a comedy festival in the year 1987, Atkinson insisted that he would rather perform on the French-speaking bill than the English-speaking program. This puzzled the co-coordinators who failed to understand the bizarre demand of Atkinson then. Later it was understood that Atkinson just wanted to use the festival, as a platform to see how the theatrics of the silent character went down with a non-English speaking audience.

 

You will be interested to know that a considerable amount of thought process went into deciding a name for the show. Initially, the show was supposed to be produced as ‘Mr. Cauliflower’, before the makers zeroed down on ‘Mr. Bean’, as the title of their ambitious enterprise. As per sources, Atkinson is said to owe much of Mr. Bean’s character to comic character Monsieur Hulot. ‘Mr. Bean’ is indeed one of its kinds of comic sitcom that purely relied on the silent hysterics of Atkinson, with little or no dialogues to the actor’s advantage. And this is what was believed to be the main USP of America’s much loved comic sitcom. This show which ruled the charts for five years, before going off-air on 1995, boasted of a whopping audience of 18.74 million all over USA.