| NEWS 4: Mr Bean's middle-fingers cut by ITV! If you've ever seen the 1997 film Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie starring Rowan Atkinson (it's great), you may recall a scene late on in the film when Mr Bean is being driven around Los Angeles taking touristy photos. But this is how the film appeared when ITV showed it in the evening, ending at 18.15, one Sunday evening in April 2003: ------------------ The car stops at some traffic lights and Bean takes a photo of the biker next to him, waving or doing a thumbs-up [I can't remember which]. The biker sticks his middle finger up at Bean and drives away. Thinking this must be a sign of affection, Bean looks at his own middle finger... and in the next shot is flipping the bird at everyone he drives past. ITV kept a few seconds of this in, when he was waving his hands about a bit so it might have been more blurry. (Then there were a few non-middle-finger-related sequences, so forget them.) When Bean is triumphantly leaving the family he stayed with in LA (who grew to like him once he saved their daughter's life), he gets into the car BEAN Farewell! He sticks his middle finger up at them, and they wave, looking a bit weirded-out. He continues to do this as the car goes out of sight. ------------------ Firstly, I would say it was a bit stupid to keep a gesture in once, then censor it many other times. Secondly, ITV saw fit to cut this out for the teatime audience (the film was rated PG), but keep in some excrutiating (but not gory) scenes before it, when 'Dr' Bean improvises to get a bullet out of a police officer who's in hospital after being shot. The worst thing about this was that they cut it so badly, and ruined the scenes. The Randy Newman song 'I Love LA' (although not being performed by Randy Newman here) plays in the background, throughout the scene. But no consideration was taken as to how it would sound if bits of it were cut out. It looks as if ITV took about 5 minutes to do this, and just threw it on the air and didn't care. As well as cutting The Naked Gun, ITV have cut some Bond films to smithereens in recent months, and take most of the final credits out of movies to make way for more adverts. Don't trust them with films! |
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