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Michael Bentine

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Michael Bentine
Born January 26, 1922
Image:Flag of England (bordered).svg Watford, Hertfordshire, England
Died November 26, 1996, age 74
Image:Flag of England (bordered).svg London, England
Image:Michael Bentine - The Long Banana Skin - 1976 paperback book cover.jpg

Michael Bentine CBE (26 January, 1922 - 26 November, 1996) was a comedian, comic actor, and member of the Goons.

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[edit] 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.

Having appeared in the Goon Show on radio 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 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 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 twice, remaining with his second wife Clementina, a Royal Ballet dancer, for over fifty years. Two of his five children have died from cancer, while a third, Gus, was killed in an aircrash. 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.

His two surviving children, Richard and Serena, both work in marketing.

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.

[edit] Programmes

Some of the programmes Bentine appeared in were:

[edit] Books

[edit] External links

v • d • e</div>

The Goon Show
The Goons
Michael Bentine • Spike Milligan • Harry Secombe • Peter Sellers
Other Contributors
Ray Ellington • Max Geldray • Wallace Greenslade • Larry Stephens • Wally Stott • Eric Sykes • Andrew Timothy
Radio & TV Series
The Goon Show • The Telegoons
Films
Let's Go Crazy • Penny Points to Paradise • Down Among the Z Men • The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn • The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
Characters
Cast members and their Characters • Major Bloodnok • Bluebottle • Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister • Eccles • Hercules Grytpype-Thynne • Count Jim Moriarty • Neddie Seagoon
General information
Episodes and archiving • Running Jokes
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