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"The Trouble with Mr. Bean" is the fifth episode of the British television series Mr. Bean, produced by Tiger Television for Thames Television. It was first broadcast on ITV on 1 January 1992 and watched by 18.7 million viewers on its original broadcast, making it the highest-rated episode in the series.

Plot

Part One

Mr. Bean sets several alarms for 8:00 am, but sleeps through all of them. He finally wakes up at 8:50 and spots a reminder about his dental appointment. Quickly, he gathers his clothes, shoes, toothbrush, and toothpaste before rushing out to his Mini. While driving to the appointment, Bean gets dressed and brushes his teeth, using the car's screenwash to rinse. He spits out the residue and it lands on the backside of a local builder, who assumes it is bird droppings.

Arriving at the dental clinic of Mr. A. M. Peggit, Bean forces the blue Reliant out of the only parking space, attracting the attention of a traffic warden. He then sits in the waiting room and tricks a boy into leaving by making it seem like he wet himself to get a Batman comic book. Once in the dentist's room, Bean creates chaos by adjusting the equipment and accidentally knocks out Mr. Peggit with a needle containing a dose of anaesthetic. Bean attempts to fill his own tooth but inadvertently drills all of them together. He gets startled when the dentist wakes up, freeing his jaws, and then leaves the clinic.

Part Two

Bean drives to the public park to have a picnic. The car park is full except for a gap between two cars only just wide enough for his Mini yet with no room to open the door, so he gets out and pushes his car into the gap, just as a car next to his car drives off. While passing by a boating lake, he spots a young boy having difficulty with his remote-controlled boat. Offering to help, he opens up the controller and tweaks the circuitry inside, fixing the problem. Unbeknown to both Bean and the boy, the controller also takes control of an elderly man's electric wheelchair just behind them, which goes wherever the remote-control boat goes. After hogging the controller for some time, Bean hands it back to the boy and leaves just as the now empty wheelchair approaches from behind him, pushing the boy into the lake (offscreen). Bean soon begins setting up his picnic, which consists of a large blanket, a portable transistor radio, a cake stand, a plate, a bottle of orange juice, a small chair, a book and an iced cupcake complete with a cherry on top. Unbeknownst to him, a car thief breaks into his Mini and hotwires it, only to find the steering wheel is missing; Bean had removed it and had it with him in his picnic basket.

As Bean prepares to read his book and eat his cake, a wasp suddenly buzzes around his spot and refuses to leave him alone, irritating him. He soon attempts to deal with it as it goes after his cake, swatting at it, jousting with it, chasing it around and even trying to drown it in his bottle of juice. Bean finally manages to kill it by tricking it into landing on the pages of his book and then quickly closing the book. Satisfied, he soon resumes what he was doing only to find an entire swarm of wasps coming for him, forcing him to abandon his picnic site as the end credits roll. Unable to lose them, Bean tosses his cake into a nearby car, unaware that the car thief is now in it, who soon finds himself being targeted by the wasps. The motorised wheelchair from earlier stops by the car as the episode ends.

Cast

• Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean
• Richard Wilson as Mr. A. M. Peggit, the dentist
• Caroline Quentin as the traffic warden
• Sam Mead as the schoolboy
• Christine Ellerbeck as the schoolboy's mother
• Hugo Mendez as the boy in the park
• Michael Godley as the man in a wheelchair
• Nathan Lewis as the car thief
• Bridget Brammall as the dental nurse

Production

Location scenes for this episode were shot on 35mm in Battersea Park, Kingston and Teddington, close to the Thames TV studios where studio sequences were recorded before a live audience.

An extended upbeat remix of the choral theme was used for the driving sequence in Act 1.

A number of inspired scenes and stories in Mr. Bean: The Animated Series:

• The scene at the dentist inspired the story for the episode called "Toothache"
• The scene between Mr. Bean and the wasp inspired a similar event for the episode "Artful Bean". The same scene inspired a 2022 Netflix series Man vs. Bee starring Atkinson as a house sitter.
• The scene in which Mr. Bean got his shaver stuck on his nasal hair was reused for the episode "Wanted".
• The scene in which Mr. Bean stopped his coffeemaker waking him by plugging up the hose attached to it that sprayed hot water onto his feet was adapted as part of a scene in clock "Birthday Bear"

A diagram of the clock and hose invention in this episode, also featured in the book Mr Bean's Diary, released in 1993.

The Batman Comic held by the boy in Act 1 is Batman Volume 1, Issue 463.

References

1. ^ "Mr Bean — Timeline". Tiger Aspect Productions Ltd. Archived from the original on 19 December 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
2. "Resources – 1992 – Top 10 Programmes". BARB. Retrieved 24 February 2013.
3. The DVD-laser Disc Newsletter. Vol. 173–183. DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter. 1999. pp. 42–. ... The Trouble with Mr. Bean, which includes his efforts to defeat an alarm clock, dress himself in his car and visit the dentist, and an interlude with a model boat in a park, and Mr. Bean Rides Again, a potpourri episode in which he tries to help a ...

External links

• "The Trouble with Mr. Bean" at IMDb

• Mr. Bean episodes
• 1992 British television episodes
• Television shows written by Rowan Atkinson
• Television shows written by Richard Curtis
• Television shows written by Robin Driscoll