To bee or not to bee

• Published date: 28 June 2022
• Publication title: Signal

ROWAN Atkinson’s latest comedy bristles with life lessons. You cannot hope to trap a bee in a grand piano. Bees, as we know, are already endangered, so don’t microwave them

Should you find yourself in a mercy dash to the vet with a comatose dog, don’t get distracted and remove your shoe to swat a bee inside the car. If you have managed to destroy a Mondrian while trying to hammer a bee, repainting the red patch with tomato sauce won’t fool anyone; same goes for using old CDs and triangles you’ve cut from roller blinds to restore a Kandinsky mobile you hit with a tennis racket.

Man vs Bee replaces Nicolas Cage’s The Wicker Man retool as my favourite bee comedy. You remember what happened at the end of that movie? Nic, allergic to bees, has his head shoved into a portable beehive. ‘‘No, not the bees!’’ he screams. ‘‘Not the bees! Aaaaghhh!’’ I was still laughing about that days later. Atkinson, by contrast, is intentionally funny in all nine episodes of this sitcom.

Atkinson, with his writer Will Davies and director David Kerr, realise that comedy is not tragedy plus time, but stuff plus idiot. Man vs Bee could just as readily have been called Man vs Himself or Man vs House. Atkinson plays Trevor, a man fired from Asda after an altercation with a trolley and from an office after winding up on the losing side of a battle with a shredder. His wife has divorced him and his daughter yearns, perhaps futilely, for daddy-daughter bonding on a camping trip to the Isle of Wight (proving that strangeness runs in the family).

Trevor is not the go-to guy to look after a house with voice-activated security systems and a manual so thick that, rather than a tennis racket, it should have been the weapon chosen for a protracted bee smackdown.

Julian Rhind-Tutt and Jing Lusi literally phone in their heroically grotesque performances as appalling holidaying homeowners who chillax poolside in monogrammed espadrilles, calling the man they’ve stupidly entrusted their pad to in order to find out if their assets — an E-type Jag, priceless artworks, Cupcake the dog — are still intact. Meanwhile, their pristine house ends up destroyed in a rage spree with flamethrowers. Bee, naturally, isn’t so much as singed.

I’ve always...