MICHAEL BENTINE

'Michael Bentine' CBE (26 January 1922 - 26 November 1996) was a comedian, comic actor, and member of the Goons.
Bentine was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, of Anglo-Peruvian parentage and grew up in Folkestone, Kent, one of his friends being the young David Tomlinson. He was educated at Eton College. He spoke fluent Spanish and French. His father was an early aeronautical engineer for Sopwith aircraft during and after World War I.

Contents

The War years

Comedy career

Family and health

Programmes

Books

External links

The War years

In World War II he volunteered for all services when the war broke out (the RAF was his first choice due to the influence of his father's experience), but was rejected because he was a Peruvian citizen and regarded as an enemy alien. He then found work in a touring company and was appearing in a Shakespearean play in doublet and hose in the open-air theatre in Hyde Park when two RAF MPs marched onstage and arrested him for desertion. Unbeknownst to him, an RAF conscription notice had been following him for a month as his company toured.
Once in the RAF he went through flight training. He was the penultimate man going through a medical line receiving inoculations for typhoid with the other flight candidates in his class (they were going to Canada to receive new aircraft) when the vaccine ran out. They refilled the bottle to inoculate him and the other. By mistake they loaded a pure culture of typhoid. The last man died immediately, and he was in a coma for six weeks. When he regained consciousness his eyesight was ruined, leaving him myopic for the rest of his life. Since he was no longer physically qualified for flight, he was transferred to RAF Intelligence and seconded to MI9 a unit that was dedicated to supporting resistance movements and help prisoners escape. His immediate superior was the Colditz escaper Airey Neave.
At the end of the war, he took part in the liberation of Bergen-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.''

Comedy career

He started his career in 1940, in Cardiff playing a juvenile lead in Sweet Lavender. He went onto to join Robert Atkin's Shakespearian company in Regent's Park, London until he was called up for service in the RAF. After the war he worked in the Windmill Theatre and the Starlight Roof revues. Bentine spent two years in Australia (1954-55). He decided to become a comedian, specialising in off-the-wall humour, often involving cartoons and other types of animation. For example, a prominent feature of his series, ''It's a Square World'', was the imaginary flea 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. The plays were anything but serious with one titled "The Beast of the Black Bog Tarn" which was set in a (miniature) haunted house.
Having already worked on the radio series Round the Bend, he founded the ''Goon Show'' radio show with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe, but appeared in only the first 38 shows on the BBC Light Programme from 1951-3. He also appeared in the ''Goon Show'' film ''Down Among the Z Men'', and at the time seemed perhaps the most comfortable of the cast in working in a visual medium. He parted amicably with his partners and remained very close to Secombe and Milligan for the rest of their lives.
He left the Goons to work on his own radio series.
In 1972, Secombe and Sellers told Michael Parkinson that he was "...always calling everyone a genius..." and since he was the only one of the four with a "proper education," they always believed him.
He was also a television presenter and writer.
During the 1960s he also took part in the first hovercraft expedition up the Amazon river.
In 1995, Michael Bentine received a CBE from Queen Elizabeth II "for services to entertainment". He was also a holder of the Peruvian Order of Merit, as was his grandfather Don Antonio Bentin Palamero.
Bentine was a crack pistol shot, and helped to start the idea of a counter-terrorist wing within 22 SAS[1] Regiment. In doing so, he became the first non-SAS person ever to fire a gun inside the close-quarters battle training house at Hereford.
His interests included parapsychology. This is a result of his and his family's extensive research into the paranormal which resulted in him writing ''The Door Marked Summer'' and ''The Doors of the Mind''. He was, for the final years of his life, president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena.

Family and health

He was married twice, remaining with his second wife Clementina Stuart, a Royal Ballet dancer, for over fifty years. He had a child from his first marriage, Elaine. His children from his second marriage were better known by their family nicknames than their birth names - Gus (real name Stuart), Fusty (real name Marylla), Suki (real name Serena) and Peski (real name Richard). Two of his five children, his eldest daughters, have died from cancer (breast cancer and lymphoma), while his eldest son, Gus, was killed when his light aircraft crashed in August 1971. His body and aircraft were missing for ten weeks. Bentine's subsequent investigation into regulations governing private airfields resulted in him writing a report for the Special Branch of the British police into the use of personal aircraft in smuggling operations. He fictionalised much of the material in his novel ''Lords of the Levels''.
When his son Richard's first boy was born, he tried to give him a Maxim Spandau machine gun, which his daughter-in-law refused. When Richard's second son was born, Michael bought him a train set.
From 1975 until his death, he and his wife spent their winters at a second home in Palm Springs, CA.
Shortly before his death from prostate cancer at the age of 74, he was visited at his home in England by the heir to the British throne Charles, Prince of Wales, who was a close personal friend.
His two surviving children, Richard (aka Peski) and Serena (aka Suki), both work in marketing. Today, their mother Clementina, greets them with, "Good heavens! The surviving children!"
They both reply, "Ah, the widow Bentine."

Programmes

Some of the programmes Bentine appeared in were:

★ ''The Goon Show'' (1950-52)

★ ''Round the Bend in Thirty Minutes'' (1959)

★ ''It's a Square World'' (1960-64)

★ ''The Golden Silents'' (1965)

★ ''Michael Bentine's Potty Time'' (1973-80)

Books

★ ''The Reluctant Jester'' sub-title ''My Head-on Collision with the 20th Century'' - Bantam Press - 1992 - ISBN 0-593-02042-1

★ ''Open Your Mind'' sub-title ''The quest for creative thinking'' - Bantam Press - 1990 - ISBN 0-593-01538-X

★ ''Templar'' - Bantam Press - 1988 - ISBN 0-593-01339-5

★ ''The Condor and The Cross'' sub-title ''An Adventure Novel of the Conquistadors'' - Bantam Press - 1987 - ISBN 0-593-01265-8

★ ''Lords of The Levels'' - Grafton - 1986 - ISBN 0-586-06643-8

★ ''The Shy Person's Guide To Life'' - Grafton - 1984 - ISBN 0-586-06167-3

★ ''Doors of The Mind'' - Granada - 1984 - ISBN 0-246-11845-8

★ ''The Door Marked Summer'' - Granada - 1981 - ISBN 0-246-11405-3

★ ''Smith & Son Removers'' - Corgi - 1981 - ISBN 0-552-12074-X

★ ''The Long Banana Skin'' - New English Library - 1976 - ISBN 0-450-02882-8

★ ''Madame's Girls

★ ''The Best of Bentine''

★ ''The Potty Encyclopedia''

★ ''The Potty Khyber Pass''

External links

★ Michael Bentine biography and credits at BFI Screenonline

★ The Spike Milligan Appreciation Society

★ Michael Bentine @ FashionState.com