Michael Bentine

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Michael Bentine, (born Michael James Bentin; 26 January 1922 – 26 November 1996) was a British comedian, comic actor and founding member of the Goons.

His father was a Peruvian Briton.

In 1971, Bentine received the Order of Merit of Peru following his fund-raising work for the 1970 Great Peruvian earthquake.

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Comedy career

Bentine decided to become a comedian and spent time in the Windmill Theatre, where he first encountered Harry Secombe. He specialized in off-the-wall humour, often involving cartoons and other forms of animation. His performances included lectures in Slobodian, "Imaginative Young Man with a Walking Stick," and "The Chairback," with a broken chairback having a variety of uses from comb to machine gun, and taking on a demoniacal life of its own. This was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove's prosthetic arm workout, according to Peter Sellers. Val Parnell's participation in the Starlight Roof revues, where he met and married Clementina, with whom he had four children, resulted in his appearance. Fred Emney and a young Julie Andrews were both on the bill, as well as a young Julie Andrews.

Bentine co-created The Goon Show radio show with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe, but he appeared in just the first 38 shows on the BBC Light Programme from 1951 to 1953. The first of these shows was actually called Crazy People and tagged "The Junior Crazy Gang," and the word "goon" was used in the headline of a review of Bentine's behavior by the Picture Post, which was published on November 5, 1948. Only one of this first series (and only a few of the subsequent three in which he did not appear) has survived, but the majority of the original disc recordings have apparently been lost or destroyed as no longer usable, so there is almost no evidence of him as a radio "Goon." He appeared in Down Among the Z Men, a Goon Show film.

In 1951, Bentine was invited to the United States to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. On his return from work, he parted amicably from his colleagues and began touring in variety, remaining close to Secombe and Sellers for the remainder of his life. Bentine was "always calling everyone a genius," according to Michael Parkinson, and since he was the only one of the four with a "proper education," they never trusted him.

His first appearances on television were as host on a 13-part children's series starring remote controlled puppets that he also invented, fabricated, and wrote. These were three tiny creatures from outer space who slept on "Professor Bentine's" ceiling and who had to visit Earth to learn the ways of Earthling children. Angelo de Calferta modeled the puppets from Bentine's sketches and Richard Dendy cast them in latex rubber. He sold the series to the BBC for less money than they had to produce. He then spent two years in Australia (1954-55).

On his return to Britain in 1954, he served as a scriptwriter for Peter Sellers and later in 39 episodes of his own radio show Round the Bend in 30 Minutes, which have also been taken down from the BBC archive. In 1958, he and Dick Lester joined up with Dick Lester to create a series of six television shows before Midnight for ABC Weekend TV in Birmingham. After Hours, Dick Emery, Clive Dunn, David Lodge, Joe Gibbons, and Benny Lee appeared in a 13-hour series named After Hours. The show featured "olde English sport of drats, later known as soledling." Don't Shoot, We're British, Some of the sketches were turned into a stage revue. He also appeared in the film "Reaching a Riot," starring Kenneth More, which starred his five-year-old daughter "Fusty." She got a better bill, according to him.

He had a television series from 1960 to 1964, It's a Square World, which received a BAFTA award in 1962 and Grand Prix de la Presse at Montreux in 1963. A key feature of the series was the imaginary flea circus, in which plays were performed on tiny sets with nothing but special effects to show the movement of things that were too small to see and sounds with Bentine's commentary. In a (miniature) haunted house, one named The Beast of the Black Bog Tarn was set.

At the BBC Television Theatre in April 1963, he was interviewed by Eamonn Andrews on This Is Your Life.

He appeared on BBC television in 1969–70, which advocated for true showings of silent films without the commentaries, which were not often seen on television until then.

He wrote, produced, narrated, and presented the children's television show Potty Time from 1974 to 1980, as well as one-off comedy specials from Michael Bentine's Potty Time.

In two series of The Michael Bentine Show on Radio 4, Bentine produced 11 half-hour episodes from January to May 1984. These have since been repeated several times on BBC Radio 7 (now BBC Radio 4 Extra).

He was the author of 16 best-selling books, comedies, and non-fiction books. Four of his books, The Long Banana Skin (1975), The Door Marked Summer (1981), The Mind of the Mind (1992), and The Reluctant Jester (1992), are autobiographical.

Bentine, a 1968 explorer on the British Hovercraft Corporation (BHC) SR.N6, GH–2012, was the first hovercraft expedition up the River Amazon.

Bentine was awarded a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II "for services to entertainment" in the 1995 New Year Honours. Following his fund-raising efforts for the 1970 Great Peruvian earthquake, Bentine was awarded the Order of Merit of Peru.

Bentine was a crack gun shooter who sparked the idea of a counter-terrorism unit within the 22 SAS Regiment. He became the first non-SAS person to fire a gun inside the battle training house in Hereford's close quarters.

Theorists were interested in psychoanalysis. This was as a result of his and his family's extensive study into the paranormal, which culminated in his writing The Doors of the Mind and The Door Marked Summer. He was president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena for the final years of his life.

On December 14, 1977, he appeared on Patrick Moore's BBC The Sky at Night program with Arthur C. Clarke. "Suns, Spaceships, and Bug-Eyed Monsters" was a light-hearted glimpse at how science fiction has progressed into science fiction, as well as how space travel has evolved through the twentieth century. Moore introduces Bentine with Bentine announcing that he is the possessor of a "Readers Digest Degree" in the program's beginnings. This remark was typical of Bentine's comedic approach to most things in life that obscured his interest in science. In 1980, Bentine appeared in a subsequent broadcast on a similar theme as Moore. Following Arthur C. Clarke's death, BBC Sky at Night magazine published a copy of the 1977 archive series on the front of their May 2008 issue.

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