By: Sam Creighton
London - He may be loveable, but most would agree that TV twit Mr Bean shouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel of a car.
So when he drove around Buckingham Palace on Sunday he wasn’t – he was in an armchair on the roof.
Hordes of tourists hoping to see the Changing of the Guard stood open-mouthed as the hapless comic character, played by Rowan Atkinson, appeared to manouevre a 1976 Mini 1000 full of packages around central London using a mop handle and a series of ropes and pullies to operate the controls.
Mr Atkinson, 60, was recreating a scene from Do It Yourself Mr Bean, an episode from the Nineties TV show, to mark the series’ 25th anniversary.
Happily, the car was actually being controlled by a driver hidden behind the boxes, using a camera to wend his way through London’s traffic.
Although the yellow and black Mini is a classic, it’s a far cry from the famously car-crazy actor’s usual runabouts.
Mr Atkinson recently sold his McLaren F1 supercar for £8 million (R170m) in one of Britain’s biggest car deals – even though he paid only £640 000 for it in 1997, had put 64 000km on it and had crashed it twice.
The star, worth £85 million (1.8bn), still owns a classic Aston Martin, a 1939 BMW 328 and a Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupe.
Daily Mail