Bean was 29 when I interviewed him in late 1988 in the council house, on the brow of London's Muswell Hill, which he shared with his partner Melanie and their one-year-old daughter. Here was Bean the family man, on his knees, juggling toys, a "bloody lovely" child and an Embassy cigarette, gearing up to play a drunken, unemployed wife-beater in the TV film Small Zones. "Despite the fact that he pushes his wife's hand in a pan of bacon and egg," Bean mulled, "I have to see things I like in him and consider and understand when they really loved each other."

So far, as an actor, Bean said that his – and his mother's – favourite TV scene, as captured successfully on VHS machine, was him playing a violent bully forcing an early Channel 4 film's romantic lead to drink a bucket of bitter, phlegm and worse in a pre-Falklands RAF bar. Fresh from Rada in 1983 he'd first fronted an alcohol-free lager commercial. "I was the bloke who landed the stricken plane, then said 'Good job I was drinking Barbican.'"

Melanie arranged many teas and jam sandwiches, although Bean had suggested that one of us run up the hill for chips suitable for making chip butties. I thought he was joking. Then he recited a favourite song – not least for his child – which he'd often chanted at Sheffield United games, to the tune of John Denver's Annie's Song.

"You fill up my senses, like a gallon of Magnet [bitter], like a packet of Woodbines, like a good pinch of snuff [from Wilson's Snuff Mill of Sheffield]; Like a night out in Sheffield, like a greasy chip butty…".

Bean had recently served two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company.