What a palaver. In the press release for Bruce Dessau's biography of Rowan Atkinson - and written in attention-seeking big bold letters - is the sentence: "Rowan Atkinson has co-operated fully in the writing of this fascinating first biography, giving interviews and encouraging friends and colleagues to talk frankly to the author".
This is a tad curious, on two levels. First, Atkinson is notoriously private and has, in fact, only given about two or three interviews over his 20-odd year career - he just "doesn't do" press. Second, in the acknowledgments section of the biography, Dessau writes: "The greatest and strangest acknowledgment of all, however, has to go to Rowan Atkinson himself. He did not co-operate with the biography. Yet without him it could not have been written. If that is not the ultimate showbusiness paradox, I'm a Dutchman". Well, quite.
A few days later, the book's publisher circulated a fax which was headed "Urgent Correction". It said that their previous claim that the book was "authorised" was incorrect . The beautiful irony here is that this silly little incident perhaps reveals more about Rowan Atkinson than anything within the 265 pages of his biography. It would be unwise to speculate as to what role, if any, Rowan Atkinson had in "shaping" his unofficial biography, but certainly the flurry of faxes from the publishing company indicates that there's a story behind the story, so to speak.
Bruce Dessau is one of the very few full-time comedy journalists around and he writes with a certain authority. An ex-Perrier judge, he has previously written well-put-together books on Billy Connolly, Victoria Wood and Reeves and Mortimer. Oddly enough, he's covered Atkinson before in his 1997 book, Bean There, Done That (The Life And Times Of Rowan Atkinson), so why he's back so soon for another go at his subject merely adds to the intrigue around this latest publication. If this book is, as stated on the liner notes, "the first in-depth biography of Atkinson", where does that leave the same author's 1997 effort?
Dessau set himself up with the task of understanding "a showbusiness enigma - a man who comes into millions of homes on a regular basis and yet gives away little of himself. The key to the book was decoding the art to discover where the artist came in . . . it was like trying to carry an octopus in string bag". While certainly exhaustively researched, there is perhaps a bit too much information about Atkinson's family background - his grandfather was a farmer in Saskatchewan, we learn.
The youngest of three sons from a wealthy Northumbrian family, Atkinson went to the same school as Tony Blair. With his alienlike appearance - "his eyes bulged, his ears stuck out and his lips and nose went on for ever" - Atkinson was mercilessly teased and he earned nicknames like Dopie, Zoonie and Moonman. We find out that while at school, he studied the work of Jacques Tati - which goes some way to explaining the inspiration behind Mr Bean - but he didn't start performing until he went to Oxford and hooked up with Richard Curtis, the writer of Bean, Blackadder and the films Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. The two of them first made their mark at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where Atkinson's off-beat humour and physical movements led to him being dubbed "the new John Cleese."
AS GOOD as Dessau's analysis of Atkinson's humour is, it's very difficult to capture the appeal of some of his best moments, as in the famous sketch where he plays a schoolmaster reading the roll and his mere enunciation of some of the pupil's atypical names ("Babcock, Nibble, Orifice, Plectrum") provides the gag. Like the Pythons and Peter Cook before him, Atkinson has as much ability in delivery as he has in material.
He hit the mainstream courtesy of BBC's highly over-rated Not The Nine O'Clock News show - which was merely post-graduate, as opposed to undergraduate, humour. His role as Blackadder over three series was far more resonant and Dessau writes very well about the controversy surrounding the show (all about bad language and production costs) and how at one stage the station wanted to pull the programme.
It was with Mr Bean, though, that Atkinson broke through on an international level, and if you want to know the ups and downs and in and outs of the character, Dessau has assembled more information than you would have thought possible. When he's not trying too hard to trace the genesis of Mr Bean back to Atkinson's own childhood experiences, Dessau is very good on the (apparently) mutually exclusive audiences of Blackadder and Mr Bean with some fascinating demographic material throw in: "Blackadder had followed The Young Ones as the top student cult sitcom. It was hip and post-watershed but Mr Bean was as square as you would expect from a sitcom that went out on ITV at 8 p.m.", he writes. Atkinson himself is quoted as saying: "It's because Mr Bean has no intellectual conceit or irony or subtext whatsoever, and its sheer manifestness, which is sort of irritating to those who tend to look for more depth in comedy."
This is certainly a very accomplished and lucidly written biography, but whether Dessau ever comes close to unravelling his "enigmatic" subject is a moot point. It's a damn good try, though.
Brian Boyd is an Irish Times journalist
