Tee Off, Mr. Bean

Tee Off, Mr. Bean
Season	1
Episode	12
Air date	September 20, 1995
Written by	Robin Driscoll, Rowan Atkinson
Directed by	John Birkin
Previous	Back to School, Mr. Bean
Next	Goodnight, Mr. Bean

Tee Off, Mr. Bean is the twelfth episode of the live-action TV series. It originally aired over ITV on September 20, 1995.

Synopsis

Mr. Bean goes to a launderette where he washes his clothes and other various items and ends up causing trouble with the other people and their laundry. Afterwards, he heads off to a mini golf course where he plays but ends up following the ball everywhere it goes and continues to play even when it is off the course.

Plot

Act One: The Launderette

Mr. Bean heads off to the launderette to wash all his items. He struggles to get through the door with his bin bag full of his washing. He finds a washing machine and prepares £2, but he is shocked to see on a sign that the price has been raised to £3. So he searches for his loose change around his clothes (a 20p coin from his jacket pocket is not enough). He pulls a small paper envelope from his trousers zippers to obtain a pound coin. 

A built, tough man enters and rudely pushes Mr. Bean off to the next washing machine. He places his nun chucks, pushes Mr Bean's coins to the other machine, and takes his karate uniform with a black belt (signifying he is a highly-skilled martial artist). He pulls the black belt, making Mr. Bean think he's gonna strangle him. He pours in the detergent powder, and Bean does so with a bathing soap and a grater on the other machine. The man drags his nun chucks with him, and Mr Bean does so with a grater.

He opens his laundry bag and takes in his bed sheets, an inflated seahorse floatie (deflates it by stepping on it), two fuzzy dice from his car, a welcome floor mat, lampshade, and Teddy. He controls Teddy as he puts it in, it crawls away scared. So he takes an L-bent drinking straw, suggesting that Teddy can breathe from it underwater, letting it agree.

He gets his weekly underpants except for Wednesday and Sunday. Due to the timed dressing, he has to remove his underwear. He walks off to the closet to undress his trousers, but he is noticed by a lady and turns her back shocked. He sets his trousers aside on the woman's pile of clothes to remove his Wednesday underwear, and he unknowingly takes the woman's skirt from the pile and wears it. After zips it, he returns to the washing machine to place his Wednesday underpants. After he paid £3 for a wash, he sits down and realizes he is wearing the lady's skirt. While the tough man orders a fabric conditioner, he returns to the lady's washing machine and tries to open it.

Mr. Bean tucks in the skirt to reveal skinny pants, and sits down again. The man watches Bean wearing obviously a skirt. He yanks it out, and teasingly utters an wonderment. He winks at him, making him nervous. He grabs his laundry bag, and finds his Sunday underpants left behind. He is unable to reopen the washing machine while in operation, so he hides to wear it through her skirt. The man steps on his underwear, and Mr. Bean attempts to escape from bullying. The man releases it, causing him to be thrown to the bins. He thumbs up with a nasty smile at him.

Mr. Bean plans to seek his revenge by buying a cup of black coffee from the vending machine. He sneaks to the tough man's washing machine, replacing the softener with a coffee in an identical cup. He sits down scratching his knee. As the washing machine bell rings, the man stands and peeks down to the skirt, but it makes him pouring the black coffee into the inlet unnoticed. Mr. Bean smirks and watches the man's washing process go wrong. The man sees his karate uniform soaked brown. He sniffs the empty cup, finds it was coffee, and eyes at Mr. Bean. To cover up his actions, he blows on the softener and drinks it like a coffee. The man walks away angrily, and Mr. Bean gets sick.

Later, the man accuses the manager and quarrels with him off-screen. Mr. Bean, still avoiding trouble, takes his laundry items to the drying machine. He finds the lampshade whose fabric is trimmed out, floor mat whose welcome text is removed and has white spots transferred from the fuzzy dice, and his Teddy which has been shrunk. He hides away with his finished laundry as the lady returns to dry her clothes, while he is still wearing her skirt. She looks at her watch just before she takes her dried mattresses from her dryer, and goes to the washing machine belled. Mr. Bean tries to search for his trousers on her basket and then inside her dryer. While he crawls inside the machine, the lady finds one of her clothes which is not hers: Mr. Bean's trousers, so she puts it away. She takes all of her washed clothes and puts them to her dryer, where Mr. Bean already occupied, and shuts it. Mr. Bean knocks on the glass door, asking to stop the drying process. However, because the lady is wearing headphones to listen to music, she ignores him and turns on the machine causing Mr. Bean to start spinning around.

Act Two: Mini Golf

A kid walks off and goes to play, while Mr Bean shows up at the booth and watches him fail so he starts giggling at him. Then he grabs his stick, ball and score card, says "thank you" and walks off, with the booth man peering out at him. He then goes to play where the boy already is, and throws his ball away, who chases after it. He gets a hole in one on the first hole and writes that down and scoffs walking off. On Hole Two, he polishes the ball by rubbing it against his trousers, scoffs at how easy it is, hits the ball way too hard and it ends up by the fence, much to the contentment of the booth man. He goes to pick it up, but the booth man shouts "Oy!" and tells him that he cannot, so Mr. Bean tries to get it back to the course, accidentally hitting it on the other side of the fence. On the other side of the fence, he hits it much too hard then hits it again. This time, he hits it way too hard, and the ball goes bouncing off across the course, flying out of the park, and onto a bus. Mr. Bean then flags down a ride in someone's car, grabbing the bus stop sign on his way. As the bus goes round the corner, Mr. Bean plants the bus stop sign on the ground and the bus stops, and he gets onboard. He repeatedly tries to hit the ball on the bus, hitting people's feet on the way, then the ball hits the stop button, and the bus stops to let Mr. Bean get off. He continues to try hitting the ball back to the golf course out from a lady's shopping bag (she is later seen describing what happened to a police officer), off a little boy's double cone, splattering him with vanilla ice cream, who then gets told off by his mum who pulls off the remainder saying "No more!", whacking off both ice cream balls. The ball bounces by a bench, where the ice cream lands. Mr. Bean then finds his ball lodged in a Proton Saga car's exhaust pipe. He then tries to keep hitting the ball out from a car's exhaust pipe (causing the engine to explode), but is sent falling down a drain, He tries swatting it out in the sewers, until the golf ball shoots upwards and drops into a rubbish bin, which is then collected by the refuse lorry, eventually getting it out after he hitches a ride on a tandem bike. He then hitches another ride but the Reliant shows up, and Mr. Bean ignores it, even though the person opens the door and honks at him, so it takes off. A lady playing choir music then shows up, and Mr Bean cuts out the square of grass by the car that the golf ball sits on, to the lady's confusion, and gets in the car. He arrives back at the mini golf course as the sunset turns to night, and the mini golf game is about to close. Mr. Bean shows him, then rolls the ball in the hole and is all happy about it. He then writes on his score card 3,427 for hole 2 and heads home.

Trivia

• Climbing inside a working clothes dryer is a common cartoon joke, but in real life, Mr. Bean inside the running dryer would probably have been killed, and if he survived, he would have suffered from dehydration and third-degree burns by the intense heat in the machine.
  • It is also unlikely he would fit in the dryer.
• The scene where Mr. Bean is locked inside the dryer and spinning around is copied in the animated series episode, "Goldfish" where he, who becomes smelly by a pile of fish, washes himself in the washing machine.
• The editing of the shot clearly shows that Rowan Atkinson inside some other kind of cylinder is being overlaid over the top of the image of the dryer.
• Mr. Bean paid for the drying even though he had used £3 for washing and 20p for coffee.
• Mr. Bean drinks the fabric softener and is not shown to spit it out. In reality, drinking it would be poisonous, although he drank only a very small amount.
• Mr. Bean's tiny Teddy is dropped from his trousers while searching in the lady's laundry basket, considered a slight goof.
• The welcome floor mat has the white dots on it transferred from the fuzzy dice. An adhesive would be needed to stick on it.
• There are only 22 dots on the mat, but originally there were 42 on both cubes. This means that the remaining 20 may be discarded from washer and/or dryer.
• The "welcome" text is not only removed but also blurred and faded away. The text is possibly printed on instead of dyed or embroidered.
• Teddy would never shrink that small because of cotton contents and stitches. It could be another but smaller Teddy which was used.
• Golf ball goofs:
  • The ice cream splattered on the bench is white (or vanilla), but not the pink one (or strawberry) although the vanilla is already replaced by a golf ball.
  • The ball is ejected from the car exhaust and is traversed to the left side of the road, but the ball goes to the drain cover in the front of the kerb.
  • Shooting toward the center of the drain cover could have possibly not happened in reality, even teeing off toward the same centre perfectly in a single stroke.
    • It does not bounce that low from the metal surface (due to the collision and kinetic energy from a very strong surface). Since the video clip is not cut and is real-time, the ball is possibly a small CGI animation or an on-screen animation.
• About 60 strokes (far beyond triple bogey) are used in hole 2, but he writes 3427 on his score card.
• The pineapple display at a fruit market has the Del Monte logo, one of the well-known fruit sellers.
• This marks the last appearance of the Reliant Regal in the live-action series, which the song by Sid & The Comets from the pilot episode was used.
• This is the only episode to feature the ending credits on the right side rather than the center position.
• This episode and "Back to School, Mr. Bean" are the only episodes where the "Qui Est Faba" (sung twice) during the end credits are missing.
  • In this episode, the choir sings "Finis partis" instead of the usual "Finis partis primae".
• The car where the golf ball went into its exhaust pipe was an old Proton Saga.
• Act Two was reference from an Animated Episode called A Round of Golf.