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.'"
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