It’s Rowan Atkinson’s 13th straight month of celebrating Christmas and he’s getting a bit jaded. The comedian’s new Netflix comedy Man Vs Baby is set in and around a plush Piccadilly penthouse at the height of the festive season. In this follow-up to the 2022 series Man Vs Bee, his genial alter ego Trevor Bingley is again the disaster-prone house-sitter of a swanky location. This time he is lumbered with a baby to care for too.
Man Vs Baby started location work on December 22 last year, to catch some of the Christmas crowds. Baby clocked off early this year, but Man has been involved in every single aspect of the production, from first ideas to final sound mix. “It’s been five days a week for a year and a quarter,” he says, slightly wearily. And he’s still at it. Now he is here in his agent’s West End offices talking up the four-part series. Can he be trusted not to bring hilarious mishaps to this also rather swish place? Watch out, Rowan, don’t get your trousers caught in the lift doors/lock yourself out/set the place on fire!
No chance. This 70-year-old perfectionist only plies haplessness for professional purposes. He has always been drawn, he admits, to playing the “bungling, bumbling” type — a sitcom, two films and more than a hundred animated adventures as Mr Bean; a series of adverts, then three films as his spoof spy Johnny English. Even the first version of Edmund Blackadder in 1983 was a bit of a berk, before he was reinvented to be “relentlessly negative and cynical” (as Atkinson puts it) from the second series onwards.
In person Atkinson is urbane, articulate, self-contained but quietly affable. Wearing a dark blue suit, V-neck jumper, shirt and tie, his silver hair neatly cropped, he could be a reassuringly expensive private doctor. He could even be the electrical engineer he was studying to be before comedy yanked him from his doctorate at Oxford University to near-instant stardom in the late 1970s.
And when I say he is “talking up” the new series … “You will be unsurprised to hear I could write a list as long as your arm of all the things I don’t like about it,” he says, after I tell him I enjoyed and was even touched by a series that is more easygoing and sweeter than its frenzied predecessor. “‘Oh that seems too long … Why is that line still there?’ Things like that.”
Such doubts, he admits, should fade a bit as time goes by. It took him decades to watch an episode of Blackadder for fun, which he did on impulse on a flight ten years ago, and enjoyed. And maybe his glut of yuletide spirit is weighing him down. Is he a Christmas man by habit? He stiffens slightly: I was warned he doesn’t like personal questions. I thought that meant talking about his second family with the actress Louise Ford (Kate Middleton in The Windsors), whom he met in a West End revival of Simon Gray’s tragicomedy Quartermaine’s Terms in 2013. They have a daughter, Isla, aged eight. Atkinson also has two adult children, Ben and Lila, from his marriage to Sunetra Sastry.
Atkinson in 2013 with his wife Louise Ford in Quartermaine’s Terms, the play on which they met
DONALD COOPER/SHUTTERSTOCK
But, no, it turns out Christmas is personal too. “You’ll be unsurprised to hear that I would never talk about my own Christmas or Christmasses … but I do like Christmas. I just think that I’ve lived this Christmas for too long.”
A different setting next time: Man Vs Barbados, maybe? Atkinson is not sure he wants to revisit Trevor. “I’ve found the process of doing it quite a strain. So by this point I start to feel I don’t want more projects of this sort of commitment.”
• Read more comedy reviews, guides and interviews
Well, Atkinson doesn’t do his comedy casually. Ben Elton, in his recent memoir, What Have I Done?, describes how the “tortured micro-tinkering” of the Blackadder cast stopped him attending rehearsals for the sitcom he co-wrote. He also describes how he and Richard Curtis went to Atkinson’s home to deliver their sketches for his 1986 West End show, then had to wait while Atkinson — “the sweetest of men, and kind, but God he can be stern” — spent an hour reading the lot in total silence before finally saying, “Some good ideas, I think, but it all needs work.”
Atkinson has read and enjoyed Elton’s book. “I come out of it OK,” he says with a smile. “It could have been a lot worse.” He shies away from the idea that “tortured micro-tinkering” is how he operates, though. For a start, he’s not at all tortured about seeing himself on screen. “I’m able to detach myself from square one. I don’t see myself there at all. But I tend to be a bit difficult to please, which sounds not very pleasant, but I think I always try to be polite. I’m just perennially dissatisfied.” With himself, too? “Yes, absolutely.”
In 1999 with the Blackadder team of Ben Elton, Tony Robinson, Paul Weiland, Richard Curtis and Sophie Clarke-Jervoise
JILLIAN EDELSTEIN/CAMERA PRESS
It is a paradox, he knows: his engineer’s brain is drawn to plausibility, logic, sound structure. Yet he then plays outsized characters who forever bring everything round them crashing down. “I hope generally it’s believable. Obviously you are pushing the envelope. But even then I look back at some Johnny English movies and I think, ‘That is ridiculous. That bears no relation to reality whatsoever.’”
And Man Vs Baby is what Atkinson, his director David Kerr and co-writer Will Davies are doing instead of the fourth Johnny English film. The film was announced last year after they had gone “quite a long way down developing the idea”. Then Atkinson “lost faith a little bit”. He is not ruling out reviving it, any more than he is ruling out going back to Mr Bean. Don’t get your hopes up, though. “I’m not saying never, but it’s certainly not in the realms of my thinking at the moment.”
Still, he knows that plying Trevor’s mix of innocence and chaos will spark memories of Bean. When he appeared at the London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012, playing keyboards on the Chariots of Fire theme with an orchestra, everyone assumed he was playing Bean, even though that hadn’t been the idea at all. But it was visual comedy, it was Rowan Atkinson, and Bean is more famous than his creator. “Yes, 95 per cent of people who say hello to me on the street refer to me as Mr Bean, and that’s fine.”
As Captain Edmund Blackadder with Tony Robinson as Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth (1989)
ALAMY
Atkinson always pursues ideas that amuse him, but the audience’s response is paramount. “I measure success in strict, objective terms. It’s viewing figures and box office numbers. I wish no disrespect to critics, pundits, commentators, influencers. But they are not who I am interested in.”
After all, to an engineer’s mind, the data of popularity is pure in a way that the data of opinion is not. “I remember reading an interview with a well-known director who was asked how he derives satisfaction from his work. He said, ‘In the end it’s the opinions of friends, family and professional peers that I respect the most.’ And I couldn’t agree less. I have no interest in those people. If friends and family like it, that’s of passing interest but not lasting interest. I’m interested in the guys out there I genuinely don’t meet.”
• Rowan Atkinson: ‘Perfectionism is a kind of disease’
This is not because of a crazed lust for dosh? “No, it’s not ‘oh goody, I’ll make more money now’, or I hope it isn’t. It’s just that’s where the satisfaction is, from entertaining a wide audience. The bigger it is the better.” So don’t expect him to detour into an obscure passion project. “I’m not someone who says, ‘Oh I’ve always wanted to do some Kafka.’ I find it quite hard to get excited about uncommercial stuff.”
Still, he notes that his next planned project may not be his most populist: he is returning to the stage for a one-man show. Atkinson used to ply sketch shows in his early days, flanked by Curtis and their Oxford contemporary the composer Howard Goodall. He and Curtis are meeting up in the new year to discuss a “heritage show” that will mix old sketches and new.
He doubts Curtis would want to play his stooge again. “But Richard would be writing and supervising rehearsals. So, yeah, we are thinking of taking a trip down memory lane.
“It would be a limited run, I’ve no desire to do a nine-month tour. There is no theatre booked yet. I’d like to do it because not many people have seen me do comedy sketches live: it’s been almost 40 years. And I suppose it appeals to the control freak in me. The autonomy you have as a theatre performer, it’s just you and the audience and you’re in charge.”
He knows there is a dated element to some of his old material, which included him playing an Indian waiter in one sketch — you can find that one on YouTube — but also a raft of stuffy authority figures. “We mocked the people that Richard and I found funny at the time, which tended to be establishment figures like vicars.
“They were figures of a certain type who spoke in a certain way. And some of those sketches wouldn’t land now. People would go, ‘Who is that guy? What world does he represent?’ And you have to acknowledge that.”
• Rowan Atkinson: I feel duped by my electric car
He says he doesn’t worry about his comedy having longevity. “It’s just about trying to entertain people in the here and now.” Bean, Bingley and English have little or no political content to date them or to stop them from being hugely successful all over the world. He notes that the more astringent Blackadder has aged well too, but suggests that the historical settings help. “So there’s no sitting on the sofa and the doorbell ringing in a 1980s kind of way. Most middle-class sitcoms from then look very dated.”
Curtis recently repeated the idea that Blackadder was “definitely and definitively” finished. Atkinson is slightly less definitive, but thinks it would be “tricky” to bring it back. “And what’s the point? You’d just be desperately trying to reproduce the success of what you’d done decades ago. You’re on a hiding to nothing. The only motivation would be money. But I don’t think that would bring me into the fold.”
Atkinson grew up in County Durham, the youngest of four boys. He did his first degree in electrical and electronic engineering at Newcastle, then went to Oxford. Within a year or so of leaving Oxford in 1978 he was a TV star in Not the Nine O’Clock News on BBC2 alongside Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson. He was 24. “Monty Python had created this idea of comedy as rock’n’roll and we were following in their footsteps, really. It was fun.”
With his co-stars Mel Smith, Pamela Stephenson and Griff Rhys Jones from Not the Nine O’Clock News in 1979
ALAMY
And if his approach ever since has been of ruthless professionalism rather than rock’n’roll looseness, well, this is a man who did his Oxford thesis in self-tuning control systems. A self-tuning control system, the internet tells me, “automatically adjusts its own parameters to maintain optimal performance even when the system’s characteristics change”. Atkinson gives a thermostat as an example, but a comic actor responding to his crowd, his viewing figures, his box office receipts might surely be another?
He acknowledges the analogy while insisting that the electrical engineer part of his brain only gets used in pursuing the logic of his creations. Does he compare himself to newer comics? No, but then he doesn’t tend to watch any of them; he would rather read a car magazine. (Cars, he will admit, are his hobby: over the years he has collected highly valuable models including the McLaren F1, several Rolls-Royces and a 1939 BMW 328.) “Very often in script meetings someone says something like ‘It’s sort of Pulp Fiction meets Barbie’, and I say, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t seen either.’”
• Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews
He isn’t entirely aloof from the modern day. In 2018 he wrote a controversial letter to The Times in which he defended the right to mock religion. “I do think that Boris Johnson’s joke about wearers of the burka resembling letterboxes is a pretty good one,” he wrote. Seven years later he thinks the culture of oversensitivity is relaxing a bit. “I do sense that the pendulum is swinging back more into a position of realism and moderation.
“The word ‘should’ has been used an awful lot, which I don’t think is a useful word in the arts. ‘You shouldn’t make jokes about this, you shouldn’t make jokes about that, that part should be played by this kind of person, that part shouldn’t be played by that kind of person.’ I think it’s the job of art, really, to challenge the status quo, to challenge what people think you shouldn’t do. There seems to be less prescription now than there was even three years ago.”
Not that it affects him directly. “No, the good thing about my work is that in terms of political or social activity it’s so anodyne, really, it’s just silliness.”
And though he needs time off right now, Atkinson insists he still loves being able to think up funny ideas. Even if having to perform them can be a chore. “I just wish I could delegate them to someone else to actually act them out.” Still, he knows that his own ever-expressive chops are his greatest selling point. “Unfortunately, yes, people tend to want your visage on the screen.” No doubt this great comedian will feel more positive after a good Christmas. Whatever a good Christmas may mean for Rowan Atkinson.
Man Vs Baby is on Netflix from Dec 11
Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows, the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer, the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don’t forget to check our critics’ choices to what to watch this week, and browse our comprehensive TV guide
