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The actor had fond memories of chip butties in Sheffield when John Hind met him in 1988
John Hind
The Observer, Saturday 19 July 2014 16.00 BST
Bean was 29 when I interviewed him in late 1988 in the council house, on the brow of London's Muswell Hill, which he shared with his partner Melanie and their one-year-old daughter. Here was Bean the family man, on his knees, juggling toys, a "bloody lovely" child and an Embassy cigarette, gearing up to play a drunken, unemployed wife-beater in the TV film Small Zones. "Despite the fact that he pushes his wife's hand in a pan of bacon and egg," Bean mulled, "I have to see things I like in him and consider and understand when they really loved each other."
So far, as an actor, Bean said that his – and his mother's – favourite TV scene, as captured successfully on VHS machine, was him playing a violent bully forcing an early Channel 4 film's romantic lead to drink a bucket of bitter, phlegm and worse in a pre-Falklands RAF bar. Fresh from Rada in 1983 he'd first fronted an alcohol-free lager commercial. "I was the bloke who landed the stricken plane, then said 'Good job I was drinking Barbican.'"
Melanie arranged many teas and jam sandwiches, although Bean had suggested that one of us run up the hill for chips suitable for making chip butties. I thought he was joking. Then he recited a favourite song – not least for his child – which he'd often chanted at Sheffield United games, to the tune of John Denver's Annie's Song.
"You fill up my senses, like a gallon of Magnet [bitter], like a packet of Woodbines, like a good pinch of snuff [from Wilson's Snuff Mill of Sheffield]; Like a night out in Sheffield, like a greasy chip butty…".
Bean had recently served two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. |
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