Do-It-Yourself Mr. Bean

Summarize Fact Check

Mr. Bean hosts a New Year's Eve celebration for his friends, Rupert and Hubert. When preparing refreshments, Bean improvises Twiglets from a tree branch dipped in Marmite and substitutes champagne with sweetened vinegar. Unhappy with the festivities, Rupert and Hubert trick Bean by moving the clock forward to midnight, allowing them to leave. They discover a lively party happening next door and decide to join. While Bean is in bed, the actual midnight strikes, causing his blood to boil with anger as he realises that he was tricked.

On New Year's Day, Bean drives to Arding & Hobbs to take advantage of the January sales, and reveals he had planted a dummy made up of balloons and a cauliflower outside the store the night before in order to be first in the queue. He buys numerous items, including an armchair in the window.

Unable to fit all of his purchases and himself into his Mini, Bean decides to drive it from the armchair atop the roof, using ropes to control the steering wheel and gear stick, and a broom to manage the pedals. Everything goes smoothly until Bean is diverted down a steep hill. He loses the broom's head trying to apply the brakes, and continues down the hill before eventually crashing into the rear of a lorry delivering mattresses and pillows.^[2]

Back at his flat, Bean begins to redecorate. He cuts out a chunk of wall with a reciprocating saw and uses it to fill the kitchen window, unknowingly cutting through a telephone cable and several pictures in the process. He then begins to paint the living room, using Teddy as a makeshift paintbrush. Eventually, Bean decides to cover every object in the flat with newspaper, and then blow up the tin of paint with a firework. However, unbeknownst to him while he runs out to cover his hears, Hubert returns to the flat to get his hat, which is inside when the firework goes off. Bean returns to find the flat completely painted except for a patch of wall in the shape of Hubert reaching for his hat.

An extended scene, which is not seen in the original broadcast of the episode, was included in the American broadcasts on HBO as well as some home media versions.

Bean is shopping in the department store, when he sees a chair that he wishes to purchase. Upon approaching the reclining chair, he discovers that a sales assistant is already demonstrating its features to an elderly couple. When Bean realises that the couple wants to take the chair, he find ways of fooling them into thinking it is broken: he unplugs it, which is almost immediately noticed by the assistant. While the elderly woman is enjoyably sitting on the chair, Bean then sneaks up to a control panel on the chair's arm and tampers with the wires inside, unknown to the woman. As the woman tries out the reclining feature this time, it folds over, sandwiching her in the middle; she yells to her hearing-impaired husband for help but is unheard, despite being only a couple of metres away. In addition, Bean turns up the music playing on the store's intercom to make it harder for her to be heard. Ultimately, she falls backwards.

• Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean
• Robert Austin as Hubert
• Simon Godley as Rupert
• Helen Burns as the woman on the narrow sofa
• David Stoll (uncredited)
• Rupert Vansittart as Police Officer
• Andy Greenhalgh (uncredited)

Location scenes were recorded on ENG videotape at Arding & Hobbs (run at the time as an Allders department store) in Battersea. Studio sequences were recorded at Teddington Studios, although for safety reasons, part of Act 3 was filmed without a live audience. It was also the first episode produced by Tiger Aspect founder Peter Bennett-Jones.

During its second transmission, the episode was watched by 12.96 million viewers, outrating the final two episodes of the series.

The scene of Bean cutting through a picture of Princess Diana was removed from reruns following her death in a car crash in Paris in 1997. However, some international airings left the scene intact.