In 1995 the TV Series “Mr Bean” went to air for the first time. It was a strange programme. Mr Bean was mostly silent – with only a handful of words being spoken by him throughout the whole three series. The audience reaction to him varies a lot. I think the cleverness of the wordless comic actions is brilliant and I love the show. My wife finds Mr Bean to be an incredibly nasty human being, which he is. She also can’t contain her discomfort at the situations that he gets himself into.

There’s a saying "Nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious". And that is what the Mr Bean series is all about.

But ANZAC Day’s approaching and this programme all about ANZAC Day. So why am I talking about Mr Bean, his silent comedy and foolishness? Well because it echoes my story about ANZAC Day, how the experience of the fighting at Gallipoli changed how Australians had seen themselves from Englishmen abroad to start with, to Australians completely at home with themselves as the War dragged on, and the remarkable qualities of those Australian soldiers compared to the English soldiers that they were fighting alongside with.

And no, I haven’t gone completely mad. There is a Mr Bean in my story. Mr Charles Bean. He was the first embedded war correspondent in modern terms. He was also the man who was destined to write the official history of Australia’s experience in World War I – and written by a man who had seen it up close and lethal.

So the whole silent movie thing of Mr Bean harkens back to the time of the Great War and just afterwards, with comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. And some of the things that happened – well they could have been funny if thousands of men didn’t pay with their lives, or in the case of those lucky enough, or maybe not, to have survived, who carried the scars of what they went through until the very day that they died. Mostly with their families, sometimes never leaving the hospitals that they were sent to after being gassed or losing their minds. Their families typically knowing nothing of what they had been through and perhaps grateful for it.

Tag words: Mr Bean; ANZAC Day; Gallipoli; Charles Bean; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton; British Empire; Peter Weir; Mel Gibson; Mark Lee; Frank Dunn; Archie Hamilton; 10th Light Horse; Edwin Bean; Lucy Bean; Oxford University; Hertford College; Justice William Owen; Sydney Morning Herald; journalist; Official History of World War I; HMS Powerful; First World War; Lieutenant-Colonel Ernst Swinton; Eye Witness; Admiral Horatio Nelson; Battle of Trafalgar; HMAT Orvieto; Australian Imperial Forces; HMAS Melbourne; Emden; HMAS Sydney; Royal Australian Navy; Kapitan Karl von Muller; Dardanelles; Turks;