1. Michael Bentine's father was an early aeronautical engineer for the Sopwith Aviation Company during and after World War I and invented a tension meter for setting the tension on aircraft rigging wires.
22 Facts About Michael Bentine
1. 2.
In World War II, Michael Bentine volunteered for all services when the war broke out, but was initially rejected because of his father's nationality.
3.
Michael Bentine started his acting career in 1940, in a touring company in Cardiff playing a juvenile lead in Sweet Lavender.
4.
Michael Bentine went on to join Robert Atkins' Shakespearean company in Regent's Park, London, until he was called up for service in the RAF.
5.
Michael Bentine was the penultimate man going through a medical line receiving inoculations for typhoid with the other flight candidates in his class when the vaccine ran out.
6.
The other man died immediately, and Michael Bentine was in a coma for six weeks.
7.
Michael Bentine specialised in off-the-wall humour, often involving cartoons and other types of animation.
8.
Michael Bentine's 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 demoniacal life of its own.
9.
Michael Bentine co-created The Goon Show radio show with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, but appeared in only the first 38 shows on the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1952.
10.
The first of these shows were actually called Those Crazy People and subtitled "The Junior Crazy Gang"; the term "Goon" was used as the headline of a review of Michael Bentine's act by Picture Post dated 5 November 1948.
11.
Michael Bentine appeared in the 1952 Goon Show film Down Among the Z Men.
12.
In 1951 Michael Bentine was invited to the United States to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show.
13.
Michael Bentine sold the series to the BBC for less than they had cost to make.
14.
Michael Bentine then spent two years touring in Australia.
15.
Michael Bentine appeared in the film comedy Raising a Riot, starring Kenneth More, which featured his five-year-old daughter "Fusty".
16.
Michael Bentine was the subject of This Is Your Life in April 1963 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the BBC Television Theatre.
17.
From January to May 1984 Bentine put out 11 half-hour episodes, in two series, of The Michael Bentine Show on Radio 4.
18.
Michael Bentine was the writer of 16 best-selling novels, comedies and non-fiction books.
19.
In 1971, Michael Bentine received the Order of Merit of Peru following his fund-raising work for the 1970 Great Peruvian earthquake.
20.
Michael Bentine was a crack pistol shot and helped to start the idea of a counter-terrorist wing within 22 SAS Regiment.
21.
Michael Bentine was, for the final years of his life, president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena.
22.
Michael Bentine appeared in a subsequent broadcast on a similar theme with Moore in 1980.