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  • Is it... did you know... did you have a fear... I mean, feel that you would be like this cool to so many generations?

  • Like, you're huge!

  • Um, I'm huge.

  • No, not really, I suppose you don't, you know, you just, I mean, particularly when you're young and you're starting off and you're finding your comic feet that you just want to have fun, you know.

  • That I suppose is what drives you.

  • And you think, I suppose with Mr. Bean in particular because he's a largely silent character that there's no doubt that he was slightly contrived to have - there he is.

  • Um, he was slightly contrived to have international appeal, I suppose.

  • Right, because there's no language barrier.

  • Because it was based actually on a visit, on holiday, in Venice that I had in 1985.

  • Quite a long time ago.

  • And I just remember noticing all the musical artists who were popular at the time, you know, the Duran Duran and David Bowie, and classical musicians like Danny O'Bownbourn.

  • And I thought, how odd that musicians generally assume they have an international audience.

  • Whereas, if you do comedy, you assume you've just got your country.

  • And your kind of people who are going to enjoy what you do.

  • And I thought, well wouldn't it be fun, because I had already started exploring just doing purely visual comedy, whether I could, you know, do that.

  • I'd explored it on stage, and I was incidentally trying to put visual comedy through the character of Mr. Bean on TV.

  • And, so that's where it started.

  • The first ones we did were in 1988, 89.

  • And then it sort of grew from there, and now we've got this uh-

  • - Weird, it's like it's got its own life. - It has its own life.

Is it... did you know... did you have a fear... I mean, feel that you would be like this cool to so many generations?

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