Michael Bentine - Comedy Career

Comedy Career

After the war he decided to become a comedian and worked in the Windmill Theatre where he met Harry 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 demonical life of its own. Peter Sellers told him this was the inspiration for the prosthetic arm routine in Dr Strangelove. This act led to his engagement by Val Parnell to appear in the Starlight Roof revues starring Vic Oliver, where he met and married his second wife Clementina, with whom he had four children. Also on the bill were Fred Emney and a young Julie Andrews.

He co-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 to 1953. The first of these shows were actually called Crazy People and subtitled "The Junior Crazy Gang"; the term "Goon" was used as the headline of a review of Bentine's act by Picture 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 Goon Show film Down Among the Z Men.

In 1951 Bentine was invited to the United States to appear on The 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 told Michael 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 amd 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 found he faced hostility for having left the Goons to the extent that his picture had been excised from early pictures and wasn't replaced until Bentine complained to DG Michael Checkland in the 1990s. He worked as a scriptwriter for Peter Sellers and then on 39 episodes of his own radio show Round the Bend in 30 Minutes, which has also been wiped from the BBC archive. He then teamed up with Dick Lester to devise a series of six TV programmes Before Midnight for ABC in Birmingham in 1958. This led to a 13-programme series called After Hours in which he appeared alongside Dick Emery, Clive Dunn, David Lodge, Joe Gibbons and Benny Lee. The show featured the "olde English sport of drats, later known as nurdling". Some of the sketches were adapted into a stage revue, Don't Shoot, We're British. He also appeared in the film comedy Raising a Riot, starring Kenneth 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 a BAFTA award in 1962 and Grand Prix de la Presse at Montreux in 1963. A prominent feature of the series 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 not serious. One, titled The Beast of the Black Bog Tarn, was set in a (miniature) haunted house.

In 1969-70 he was presenter of The Golden Silents on BBC TV, which attempted authentic showings of silent 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 programme Michael Bentine's Potty Time and made one-off comedy specials.

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