Майкл Бентин: Жизнь и творчество британского комика

British comedian

Michael Bentine, (born Michael James Bentin; 26 January 1922 – 26 November 1996) was a British comedian, comic actor and founding member of the Goons. His father was a Peruvian Briton.

Bentine was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, to a Peruvian father, Adam Bentin, and a British mother, Florence Dawkins, The show featured the "olde English sport of drats, later known as nurdling". Some of the sketches were adapted into a stage revue at the Cambridge Theatre, Don't Shoot, We're English. 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. One, titled The Beast of the Black Bog Tarn, was set in a (miniature) haunted house. He was the subject of This Is Your Life in April 1963 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre. 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. From January to May 1984 Bentine put out 11 half hour episodes, in two series, of The Michael Bentine Show on Radio 4. These have subsequently been repeated, several times, on the BBC's archive radio station BBC7 (now BBC 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 and The Reluctant Jester (1992) are autobiographical.

In 1968, travelling on the British Hovercraft Corporation (BHC) SR. N6, GH–2012, Bentine took part in the first hovercraft expedition up the River Amazon. In the 1995 New Year Honours, Bentine received a CBE from Queen Elizabeth II "for services to entertainment". In 1971, Bentine received the Order of Merit of Peru following his fund raising work for the 1970 Great Peruvian earthquake. 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 was as a result of his and his family's extensive research into the paranormal, which resulted in his writing The Door Marked Summer and Doors of the Mind. He was, for the final years of his life, president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena. On 14 December 1977, he appeared with Arthur C. Clarke on Patrick Moore's BBC The 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.