0:02 is called iconic characters oh i see no
0:05 i don't do idents or introductions [Music]
0:10 [Music]
0:12 man vs b
0:15 trevor bingley who's our hero in man vs
0:17 b is just a very very nice man actually
0:19 kind of nicer
0:21 than most of the characters that i play
0:23 who tend to be very selfish or
0:24 self-centered or
0:26 self-obsessed in some way you know
0:28 particularly mr bean so actually we
0:29 decided to create a character who was in
0:31 many ways more real more
0:33 three-dimensional he's a decent sort of
0:35 family man who's just gone through a
0:37 divorce he's very short of money but he
0:39 gets this job house-sitting for this
0:40 very very wealthy couple who are going
0:42 on holiday for a week and he has a lot
0:45 of trouble with a b on all 14 counts of
0:47 dangerous driving
0:50 the destruction of priceless artwork oh arson
0:52 arson
0:54 that's basically the story man vs b was
0:57 very difficult to shoot actually because
0:59 we couldn't find
1:01 a real house to shoot in because it was
1:03 during covid and no one who owned
1:06 an extremely nice house wanted
1:08 a film crew in it so we had to create a
1:10 house of our own in the studio which of
1:11 course means you don't have a garden and
1:14 we need a garden and so we had four
1:16 different locations for the garden two
1:17 or three different locations for the
1:26 and to be honest i preferred
1:28 the simplicity and the cheapness if you
1:30 like of some of the early mr bean stuff
1:33 which as you say we start wide you know
1:34 there's a lot of wide shooting and i
1:37 like wide shooting i'm a great believer
1:39 in what charlie chaplin said is that a life
1:40 life
1:44 is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in
1:46 long shot if you sit back visually on a
1:48 situation it automatically becomes
1:50 funnier i mentioned which is a french
1:52 comedian called jack tatty who said that
1:54 comedy begins in the legs making a
1:57 character more real and more sympathetic
2:00 uh and more identifiable doesn't
2:02 necessarily make him funny because in
2:04 many ways what's funny about mr bean for
2:06 example is his complete sort of
2:08 selfishness and he's a natural born
2:10 anarchist so he's a child trapped in a
2:13 man's body whereas trevor is an adult so
2:16 it's not necessarily funny to make him
2:18 more three-dimensional but he becomes
2:21 very obsessed and very self-centered so
2:23 in other words he leaves his niceness behind
2:25 behind
2:35 in reality we didn't have a bee you'll
2:38 be unsurprised to hear we had a we had a
2:40 plastic b on the end of a rod if we
2:42 wanted to be to crawl across the worktop
2:44 then we had some professional puppeteers
2:46 and quite a lot of it you know when i
2:48 was just you know acting like that in a
2:49 room we didn't have anything at all it
2:51 was just down to me to imagine the bee and
2:52 and
2:55 to be able to mime the situation if you
2:56 like well enough to make it look
2:58 convincing it was nice to look at a bee
3:00 because your eyes of course always look
3:02 different you know that if
3:04 if he's close you look like that and the
3:05 beats further away you look like that
3:08 and i think the b i mean the cgi the b
3:10 is amazing i think it's one of the
3:13 finest cgi animals
3:15 ever to be seen on screen
3:18 mr bean
3:20 i probably enjoyed playing mr bean the
3:22 most because he's a character who's
3:24 furthest away from
3:27 my own character as a person
3:29 i don't like him at all i think he's
3:31 very odd and pretty weird and not very nice
3:42 what's fun about it is it it's it's an
3:44 escape you know when you play the
3:46 character you don't care what you do
3:57 first time we did the character i'm
4:00 fairly certain was 1979
4:02 on stage and that was when we had
4:05 developed i think two sketches one was
4:07 the beach sketch in which he's trying to
4:08 change into his swimming trunks on the
4:10 beach and then there's the one in the
4:11 church in which he's sitting in the
4:13 church and he misbehaves while someone's
4:23 the character didn't have a name he
4:24 didn't have to have a name because there
4:27 were no words spoken in the sketches in
4:29 which he featured they were silent
4:30 sketches but then when we thought
4:32 actually these sketches are quite funny
4:33 it's quite an interesting idea to
4:36 develop a comedy character who doesn't
4:38 use words television comedy had
4:40 developed from radio comedy which was a
4:43 very wordy you know tradition and we had
4:45 to give him a name in order to give the
4:48 television show a name so we came up
4:50 with the name of mr bean we were
4:53 thinking mr white for a while
4:54 that was an idea but that sounded a bit
4:57 dull we thought of you know vegetables
5:00 and mr bean seemed to be short sharp and
5:08 the one i remember shattering me the
5:10 most making me the most tired and
5:13 exhausted i have ever been was a
5:15 movie we did called mr bean's holiday in
5:17 which she travels down through france to
5:18 the south france to the cannes film
5:20 festival and we did a sequence in
5:23 provence which was where he gets caught
5:26 up with a peloton of cyclists and he
5:33 [Music]
5:35 i didn't overtake them with great ease i
5:36 had to put in a tremendous amount of
5:38 effort and once we've done a couple of
5:40 takes of that i was absolutely dead
5:42 because i'm not a cyclist i'm not fit
5:44 i'm not an athlete they cycled very
5:46 slowly to make sure that i overtook them
5:48 very very hard i remember i remember
5:50 thinking that i nearly killed killed
5:51 myself with the exhaustion in those days
5:53 we tended to do things for real because
5:54 it was
5:57 cheaper and cgi didn't really exist with
5:59 the sophistication that it now has i
6:00 mean certainly the wider shots if you
6:02 can see the wheels of the car on the
6:04 road then we were doing it for real if
6:06 it's a tighter shot then we may have
6:08 been on a trailer being pulled along
6:10 just to make it easy we tended i tended
6:11 to just
6:13 you know do it i remember you know we
6:14 went to the shot of the of the car
6:16 coming straight towards camera you know
6:17 the cameraman was here and i just drove
6:19 straight at him you know and you would
6:21 never do to do that in this day and age
6:22 i mean i stopped you know before i hit
6:24 him but i might not have done all the
6:25 brakes might have failed because of that
6:26 you're not allowed to do that kind of
6:30 thing anymore but in those days we did [Applause]
6:44 [Music]
6:48 the black adder is a recurring character
6:51 in history we wrote a sitcom in which
6:53 over four series you see him in four
6:55 different eras of british history the
6:57 essence of the blackout it's about
6:58 hierarchy there's a you know either it's
7:01 the royal court or it's the uh or it's
7:03 the army which has a very you know
7:05 definable you know levels of
7:08 status effectively in every
7:11 subsequent series i play
7:13 you know the ancestor the descendant of
7:15 the person in the previous series in the
7:18 first series he's a prince precisely in
7:20 the second series he's a lord
7:22 bloke you executed today sure he's dead
7:24 what chopped his head off that usually
7:26 does the trick third series he's a butler
7:28 butler
7:36 and in the fourth series he's a captain
7:39 in the british army in the first world
7:41 war yeah must be pretty impressed having
7:43 squadron commander the lord flash heart
7:45 drop in on your squally bit of line
7:47 actually no i was more impressed by the
7:48 contents of my handkerchief the last
7:50 time i blew my nose in the first series
7:52 he was a bit more of an idiot in the
7:54 second third and fourth series he's a
7:55 cleverer man
7:57 sort of stuck in the middle of a
7:59 hierarchy he'd love to move up
8:02 but he finds it very very difficult to
8:03 do so and he certainly doesn't want to
8:06 move down towards his sidekick baldrick
8:09 yes and your definition of dog is
8:17 excellent and he's always the middle guy
8:19 he's the sort of middle management guy
8:20 who resents those above him and he
8:22 resents those below it but he had a
8:24 wonderful sort of
8:27 weary cynicism
8:30 about the world and that i think is what
8:33 made him surprisingly identifiable
8:36 and also made him funny the big changes
8:37 in the first series in the second series
8:39 was we went from a very extravagant
8:43 location-based semi-film-like texture to
8:44 something well we just had to make
8:46 something much more effective and much
8:49 more funny and much more cheaply so we
8:51 ended up with with a sort of three-set
8:53 sitcom so there are only three sets and
8:54 the action just moves between the three
8:57 sets and then the third series yeah we
9:00 were in in the region c period with
9:02 george iii on the throne and the prince
9:04 regent in charge is that right sorry
9:06 history was never my strong point you
9:08 know richard and ben elton richie curtis
9:10 and ben elton who really made the
9:11 blackout of
9:12 what it was
9:14 it was just whatever they thought was
9:16 going to work best whenever i've been
9:18 invited to do one of his films i think
9:19 i've always said yes so if i'm not in
9:21 one of his films then he hasn't invited
9:23 me which which
9:25 which he's perfectly entitled
9:27 not to do well like love actually you
9:29 know is a case in point which was when
9:31 he asked me to do the small part of the
9:33 salesman in the in the shop
9:36 could we be quite quick [Music]
9:44 [Music]
9:46 it was just a sweet funny little part it
9:48 took one
9:50 all-night shoot in selfridges on oxford
9:52 street and uh and it was a very nice
9:54 thing to have done
10:00 johnny english is a british spy
10:02 who's not as good as he thinks he is he
10:04 always overreaches himself his ambition
10:06 is always greater than his skill the
10:08 joke is in that
10:11 discrepancy between you know reality and
10:13 ambition the master criminal sees not a
10:17 room but a series of opportunities
10:20 should i come in through the window possibly
10:21 possibly
10:24 should i drop down from the ceiling
10:27 perhaps actually because one thing i
10:30 think we can be fairly confident about
10:31 that is that they didn't come up through
10:36 he's a curious thing actually a
10:38 relatively rare
10:40 character because he used to be called richard
10:42 richard
10:44 latham and he was a character in some
10:46 commercials that we made for barclaycard
10:50 in the 90s no ordinary buyer
10:51 two clicks of a cap and it will render
10:54 any assailant immobile
11:00 take over for a buff would you moment
11:03 we made the commercials to look like
11:05 feature films
11:08 we'll never make that plane sir nonsense
11:10 our carriage awaits
11:11 it was a bit of a no-brainer to say well
11:12 actually why don't we just make a feature
11:13 feature
11:15 when we're trying to think of a name for
11:17 for the movies i like sort of you know
11:18 the name of the character in there like
11:20 mr bean and so in trying to think of a
11:21 name we thought richard latham was a bit
11:24 dull but johnny english had a certain
11:28 johnny english i'm here to see pegasus still
11:29 still
11:37 i did some most of the driving stuff i
11:39 did i did what i was allowed to do they
11:42 are very very reluctant to allow the
11:44 star actors to do them but i remember
11:46 doing those things here in the first
11:48 johnny english when i fly down on the
11:49 rope and grab the crown from john
11:59 i hated every single one of them i must
12:02 have done it 25 times this swinging on a
12:05 big rope so i did some and i didn't do others
12:07 others [Music]
