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Michael Bentine (26 January, 1922 - 26 November, 1996) was a comedian, comic actor, and member of the Goons.
Life and work
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.
In World War II he served as an RAF Intelligence officer, and 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.
He had acted before the war, and afterwards 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.
He was also a television presenter and writer. He 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.
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 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 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.
He was married to Clementina, a Royal Ballet dancer, for over fifty years. Their two surviving children, Richard and Serena, both work in marketing.
He died from prostate cancer, at the age of 74, at his home in England.
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 Long Banana Skin - New English Library - 1976 - ISBN 0-450-02882-8
- The Condor and The Cross sub-title An Adventure Novel of the Conquistadors - Bantam Press - 1987 - ISBN 0-593-01265-8
- ''Madame's Girls"
- The Door Marked Summer
- Smith & Son Removers
- The Best of Bentine
- Doors of The Mind
- The Shy Person's Guide To Life
- The Potty Encyclopedia
- Lords of The Levels
External links
- http://www.rbadsign.demon.co.uk/michaelbentine.html (page not available 20060511)
- The Spike Milligan Appreciation Society
- Michael Bentine @ FashionState.com
1922 births | 1996 deaths | British radio actors | English television presenters | Cancer deaths | Deaths by prostate cancer | English comedians | English actors | Peruvian people | Entertainers who died in their 70s
"Michael Bentine"