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Michael Bentine | |
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| Born | Michael James Bentin (1922-01-26)26 January 1922 Watford,Hertfordshire, England |
| Died | 26 November 1996(1996-11-26) (aged 74) London, England |
| Resting place | Randall's Park Crematorium,Leatherhead,Surrey, England |
| Education | Eton College |
| Occupation(s) | Comedian, actor |
| Years active | 1940, 1946–1996 |
| Spouses | |
Michael Bentine (bornMichael James Bentin; 26 January 1922[1] – 26 November 1996)[2] was a British comedian,comic actor and founding member ofthe Goons. His father was aPeruvian Briton.[3]
Bentine was born inWatford, Hertfordshire, to a Peruvian father, Adam Bentin, and a British mother, Florence Dawkins,[3] and grew up inFolkestone, Kent. He was educated atEton College. With the help of speech trainer, Harry Burgess, he learned to manage a stammer and subsequently developed an interest in amateur theatricals, along with the Tomlinson family, including the youngDavid Tomlinson. He spoke fluent Spanish and French.
His father was an earlyaeronautical engineer for theSopwith Aviation Company during and afterWorld War I and invented atension meter for setting the tension on aircraftrigging wires.
InWorld War II, Bentine volunteered for all services when the war broke out (theRAF was his first choice owing to the influence of his father's experience), but was initially rejected because of his father's nationality.[3]
He started his acting career in 1940, in a touring company inCardiff playing a juvenile lead inSweet Lavender. He went on to joinRobert Atkins'Shakespearean company inRegent's Park, London, until he was called up for service in the RAF. He was appearing in a Shakespearean play in doublet and hose in the open-air theatre in London'sHyde Park when twoRAF Police NCOs marched on stage and arrested him for desertion. Unknown to him, an RAF conscription notice had been following him for a month as his company toured.[3]
Once in the RAF he went through flying training. He was the penultimate man going through a medical line receiving inoculations fortyphoid with the other flight candidates in his class (they were going to Canada to receive new aircraft) when thevaccine ran out. They refilled the bottle to inoculate him and the other man as well. By mistake they loaded a pure culture of typhoid. The other man died immediately, and Bentine was in a coma for six weeks. When he regained consciousness his eyesight was ruined, leaving himmyopic for the rest of his life. Since he was no longer physically qualified for flying, he was transferred toRAF Intelligence and seconded toMI9, a unit that was dedicated to supporting resistance movements and helping prisoners escape. His immediate superior was theColditz escapeeAirey Neave.
At the end of the war, he took part in the liberation ofBergen-Belsen concentration camp. He said about this experience:
Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I've tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won't come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy. (The Reluctant Jester, Chapter 17.)
After the war Bentine decided to become a comedian and worked in theWindmill Theatre where he metHarry Secombe. He specialised in off-the-wall humour, often involving cartoons and other types of animation. His acts included giving lectures in an invented language called Slobodian, "Imaginative Young Man with a Walking Stick" and "The Chairback", with a broken chairback having a number of uses from comb to machine gun and taking on a demoniacal life of its own.Peter Sellers told him this was the inspiration for the prosthetic arm routine inDr Strangelove. This act led to his engagement byVal Parnell to appear in the Starlight Roof revues starringVic Oliver, where he met and married his second wife Clementina, with whom he had four children. Also on the bill wereFred Emney and a youngJulie Andrews.
Bentine co-createdThe Goon Show radio show withSpike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, but appeared in only the first 38 shows on theBBC Home Service from 1951 to 1952. The first of these shows were actually calledThose Crazy People and subtitled "The Junior Crazy Gang"; the term "Goon" was used as the headline of a review of Bentine's act byPicture Post dated 5 November 1948. Only one of this first series (and very few of the following three in which he did not appear) has survived, the rest of the original disc recordings having apparently been destroyed or discarded as no longer usable, so there is almost no record of his work as a radio "Goon". He also appeared in the 1952Goon Show filmDown Among the Z Men.
In 1951 Bentine was invited to the United States to appear onThe Ed Sullivan Show. On his return he parted amicably from his partners and continued touring in variety, remaining close to Secombe and Sellers for the rest of his life. In 1972, Secombe and Sellers toldMichael Parkinson that Bentine was "always calling everyone a genius" and, since he was the only one of the four with a "proper education", they always believed him.
His first appearances on television were as presenter on a 13-part children's series featuring remote controlled puppets,The Bumblies, which he also devised, designed and wrote. These were three small creatures from outer space who slept on "Professor Bentine's" ceiling and who had come to Earth to learn the ways of Earthling children. Angelo de Calferta modelled the puppets from Bentine's designs and Richard Dendy moulded them in latex rubber. He sold the series to the BBC for less than they had cost to make. He then spent two years touring in Australia (1954–55).
On his return to Britain in 1954, he worked as a scriptwriter for Peter Sellers and then on 39 episodes of his own radio showRound the Bend in 30 Minutes, which has also been wiped from the BBC archive. He then teamed up withDick Lester to devise a series of six TV programmesBefore Midnight forABC Weekend TV in Birmingham in 1958. This led to a 13-programme series calledAfter Hours in which he appeared alongsideDick Emery,Clive Dunn,David Lodge, Joe Gibbons andBenny Lee.[4] The show featured the "olde English sport of drats, later known as nurdling". Some of the sketches were adapted into a stage revue at theCambridge Theatre,Don't Shoot, We're English. He also appeared in the film comedyRaising a Riot, starringKenneth More, which featured his five-year-old daughter "Fusty". He joked that she got better billing.
From 1960 to 1964, he had a television series,It's a Square World, which won aBAFTA award in 1962 and Grand Prix de la Presse atMontreux in 1963.[5] A prominent feature of the series was the imaginaryflea circus where plays were enacted on tiny sets using nothing but special effects to show the movement of things too small to see and sounds with Bentine's commentary. One, titledThe Beast of the Black Bog Tarn, was set in a (miniature) haunted house.
He was the subject ofThis Is Your Life in April 1963 when he was surprised byEamonn Andrews at theBBC Television Theatre.
In 1969–70 he was presenter ofThe Golden Silents on BBC TV, which attempted authentic showings ofsilent films, without the commentaries with which they were usually shown on television before then.
From 1974 to 1980 he wrote, designed, narrated and presented the children's television programmeMichael Bentine's Potty Time and made one-off comedy specials.
From January to May 1984 Bentine put out 11 half-hour episodes, in two series, ofThe Michael Bentine Show[6][7][8] on Radio 4. These have subsequently been repeated, several times, on the BBC's archive radio station BBC7 (nowBBC Radio 4 Extra).
He was the writer of 16 best-selling novels, comedies and non-fiction books. Four of his books,The Long Banana Skin (1975),The Door Marked Summer (1981),Doors of the Mind andThe Reluctant Jester (1992) are autobiographical.
In 1968, travelling on theBritish Hovercraft Corporation (BHC)SR.N6,GH–2012, Bentine took part in the firsthovercraft expedition up theRiver Amazon.[9][10]
In the1995 New Year Honours, Bentine received aCBE fromQueen Elizabeth II "for services to entertainment". In 1971, Bentine received the Order of Merit ofPeru following his fund-raising work for the 1970Great Peruvian earthquake.[dubious –discuss]
Bentine was a crack pistol shot and helped to start the idea of acounter-terrorist wing within 22SAS Regiment.[11] In doing so, he became the first non-SAS person ever to fire a gun inside theclose-quarters battle training house atHereford.[citation needed]
His interests includedparapsychology. This was as a result of his and his family's extensive research into the paranormal, which resulted in his writingThe Door Marked Summer andDoors of the Mind. He was, for the final years of his life, president of theAssociation for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena.
On 14 December 1977, he appeared withArthur C. Clarke onPatrick Moore's BBCThe Sky at Night programme. The broadcast was entitled "Suns, Spaceships and Bug-Eyed Monsters" – a light-hearted look at how science fiction had become science fact, as well as how ideas of space travel had become reality through the 20th century. In the opening of the programme, Moore introduces Bentine with Bentine confirming that he was the possessor of a "Reader's Digest Degree". This remark was typical of Bentine's comic approach to most things in life that concealed his knowledge of science. Bentine appeared in a subsequent broadcast on a similar theme with Moore in 1980. Following the death of Arthur C. Clarke,BBC Sky at Night magazine released a copy of the 1977 archive programme on the cover of their May 2008 edition.
Bentine was married twice. With his first wife Marie Barradell, married 1941–1947, he had a daughter:
In 1949, he married his second wife, Clementina Stuart, aRoyal Ballet dancer. They had four children:
Of his five children, the two eldest daughters, Elaine and Marylla, died from cancer (breast cancer andlymphoma) in the 1980s. His elder son, Stuart, was killed with a pilot friend when aPiper PA-18 Super Cub crashed into a hillside atDitcham Park Woods nearPetersfield, Hampshire, on 28 August 1971. Their bodies and the aircraft were not found until October 1971. TheAAIB after an 11-month investigation found that the aircraft went into clouds when taking action to avoid power cables while flying low in poor visibility, and subsequently, went out of control.[12][13] Bentine's subsequent investigation into regulations governing private airfields resulted in his writing a report forSpecial Branch into the use of personal aircraft in smuggling operations. He fictionalised much of the material in his novelLords of the Levels.
From 1975 until his death in 1996, he and his wife spent their winters at a second home inPalm Springs, California, US.
Shortly before his death fromprostate cancer at the age of 74, he was visited in hospital byPrince Charles.[14]
Some of the programmes Bentine appeared in were:
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