Squidge Rugby has built a creative career out of taking rugby seriously and themselves not at all, but their latest essay tilts even by their own standards. The new long-form piece launches a series on "rugby's wider inflection upon the world" with a thesis the host delivers straight to camera: there would be no Mr Bean without Racing 92.
"That's not an exaggeration or some spin on the truth," the Squidge host insists. "The stripey club with a disco stadium that seemed responsible for a major dip in form for basically every third French international during some point in their career is directly, solely, squarely at the heart of how we got to this lad being daffed on ITV1."
The path from a Parisian first-division side to the most-translated comedy character in television history runs through Jacques Tati — yes, that Jacques Tati, the French filmmaker whose visual gags would later inspire generations of physical comedians.
"Jacques Tatischeff was born in the western suburbs of Paris in 1907," Squidge narrates. "Always a sporty child, he played tennis, boxed, rode horses. But it was after taking an apprenticeship in London to learn the language as a young man that he discovered rugby. Tati fell in love with the sport after just one game and continued to play once he returned to Paris."
What made the future filmmaker valuable to a rugby club was his physique. At 6'5", Tati was, by 1930s standards, a freak.
"At 6'5", Tatischeff was a natural second row, especially when you consider the average height in France was a good five inches shorter than today," the Squidge piece explains. "Les Bleus' two starting second rows at the time were 5'10" and 6 foot, marking Tati out as a giant — and especially in an era before lifting line-outs, a freak of nature when it came to winning the ball."
Within a handful of lower-league appearances, Tati had been scouted and signed by Racing Club de France — now Racing 92 in the Top 14 — which the Squidge essay describes as "one of France's oldest and proudest, but beyond that, perhaps the club with the broadest and richest cultural history."
The club's cultural confidence has continued into the modern era. "A few years ago, when contesting the final of the Champions Cup, the biggest prize in club rugby, Tati's old club, but in the future, turned up looking like this," the host says, cutting to footage. "The full squad emerged from the changing rooms wearing berets. The Frenchiest thing you've ever seen — yes, but beyond that, on what could have been the biggest day in the club's history if they were to become European champions for the first time in their 122-year history, a nod to those who had gone before."
Tati's own playing CV was unremarkable. Squidge's appraisal of his rugby — that he was "sort of 1931's answer to Adam Beard" — is not a setup. The footnotes confirm Tati played dozens of games over five seasons between 1930 and 1935, almost entirely on the back of his line-out reach.
"As a player, Tatischeff was pretty bog standard, a decent second row and a regular starter," the piece concedes. "Initially for the seconds, but then he worked his way up to the first. Despite one biography claiming he was a scrum half, which is still baffling, Tati's line-out prowess is literally the only aspect of his game that's ever mentioned in any record of his play."
Where Tati made his mark on Racing was in the change room and afterwards in the café. Squidge highlights one trick that the side ran in a competitive match.
"In one game, he told four of his teammates to hang behind the changing room and ran onto the pitch with a football under his arm, dressed as a goalkeeper. The referee and crowd both fell for the joke, worried the team had genuinely turned up to play the wrong sport."
Tati's playing days ended in 1935, but the physical comedy he had been honing in Racing's dressing room would form the basis of his later film career, and through it, his direct influence on Rowan Atkinson.
The Squidge essay traces the line forward. Mr Bean, the host reminds viewers, was test-driven in French-language stand-up rooms in Paris before the pilot was ever filmed. "Atkinson performed in Paris on French-language stand-up bills as Mr Bean to examine whether gags worked without a common language," the piece notes — a city that, for Atkinson as for Tati, became the international crucible for whether a character built purely on physicality could land regardless of language.
It is the sort of story rugby's mainstream press would never go near, which is the entire point Squidge Rugby is making about the code's cultural reach. The first instalment of the series argues — convincingly enough that few rugby essayists will follow it — that any honest line drawn through 20th-century comedy ends, at some point, in a stripey jersey in 1930s Paris.
Mr Bean's universal silent comedy now plays in 245 countries. Racing 92, the club, currently sits eighth in the Top 14, scrapping for a top-six playoff position. The cosmic joke, Squidge Rugby implies, has a much better hit rate than the rugby.
