This is the final part of the intriguingly character-revealing interview with Michael Bentine’s son Richard from 2010 (part 1 here). Here he tells more stories from his father’s life, from both on and offstage.
Tina Hammond: What did your dad do before he went to Australia?
Richard Bentine: He made 12 episodes of The Bumblies; built, filmed everything at home in the garage. It was about as home-production as you could possibly get. Only ever broadcast once, yet everyone goes on about it as if it was a life-changing moment in children’s television. Dad went off to Australia because he was seriously considering emigrating there. He was offered a contract to work there, which he extended for another year, and then decided this wasn’t the place for him and came back. Obviously, he took the whole family out there. He worked in Variety out there and was quite a celebrity. I think that anyone who arrived in Australia was a celebrity! Then he came back because I think it lacked the diversity that he wanted, because Dad needed to have conversations with people all the time. In my earliest childhood I can remember this weird gang of people who’d come to stay, and they’d be anything from engineers, astrophysicists, comedians from America to circus performers. It was a normal childhood, as far as I was concerned.
TH: Do you share your Dad’s love of astrophysics?
RB: My son’s just started at Oxford and is reading physics for four years. My dad had the best train set in the world: the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, which we’d get to play with for a whole day every year. They used to give us a train.
John Repsch: It would be interesting to know how he got his ideas.
RB: Just walking round. We were driving back through London from somewhere in the early Sixties, and a sign said: ‘Isleworth Mountaineering Club’ on a sort of Nissan hut. He said, “What’s the highest place to climb in Isleworth?” And my mother said, “A municipal dump, dear.” So then there was an episode in Square World where the Isleworth Mountaineering Club get in touch with the Matterhorn Mountaineering Club. So the Isleworth Club goes and climbs the Matterhorn, and the Matterhorn Club goes and climbs the Isleworth municipal dump.
JR: So, he always carried a notebook and pencil?
RB: No. Living with Dad was like being in a notebook. He used to write on cards which he’d pin up on a board, and everything he wrote he’d check with children, which meant that you’d be 4, sitting on the floor playing with a teddy bear or whatever, and Dad would come running in saying, “Tell me if this is funny.” And he’d describe something to you and if you laughed it was funny, and if you didn’t he’d say, “No, that’s no good.”
JR: You could have demanded a credit.
RB: No, I’d be calling myself Spike if I did that!
JR: So, that was 1954?
RB: ’54 he was in Australia. ’57 he came back and worked in America.
JR: In 1957 he did Yes, It’s the Cathode Ray Tube Show.
RB: Yes, he wrote for Peter for that.
JR: And there are two films in ’55: Raising a Riot and John and Julie.
RB: Yes, my older sister, Marylla – Fusty Bentine – plays the little girl. It’s actually her and my elder brother because they looked like twins. She did most of the acting, but if she was tired he’d be put in for long shots. We all had daft names. I’m Peski because I was a nuisance; then my sister Serena is Suki because when she was born the record ‘Sucu Sucu’ came out; Gussy was Gorgeous Gus, the mouse from Cinderella; Fusty was Fastidio.
JR: 1958: the film I Only Arsked!; 1959: the radio show Round the Bend in 30 Minutes. If any of these ring a bell, sing out.
RB: I don’t think any examples of them are left.
JR: The Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit: 1961.
RB: Bob Godfrey, a famous animator, who did lots of animation for Square World, rang up Dad and said, “I’ve just done this fantasic little animation, but I’ve no idea what to do for the voice-over on it. Can you come and do it?” Dad said, “Sure.” They were great friends. They got very drunk and Dad made it up on the spot. It’s a really funny cartoon. Bob also made a film called Roobarb and Custard.
Dad and Peter were the funniest people to watch with any black & white movie on television – cowboys & Indians, spies, whatever – because they were both film buffs. As a sort of game, they would turn the volume off and do the voices of the characters, and make it up as they went along. They roughly knew what was going to happen in the scene: “What do you think she’s wearing?” – “She’s wearing ladies’ underwear” – “Is it exploding ladies’ underwear?”
JR: 1962: We Joined the Navy, another film. 1960-64: It’s a Square World, which won a BAFTA.
RB: And the Grand Prix de la Presse at Montreux. It was a fantastic series. It was the first one that I really remember because I was 4 or 5 years old. I used to go along with Dad, and they’d hoist me up with a packet of crisps and a bottle of pop. You’d never leave a small child twenty feet up in the air in a studio nowadays. Or I’d be left with the make-up department or costume department, who were all very lovely, sweet gentlemen. Friends of Dorothy, as Tony Hancock would say.
JR: Did he talk to you about Square World?
RB: It was always manically, ridiculously funny and, like The Goons, it was written on a contemporary basis. Half the show was pre-recorded a week to two weeks in advance – the series of sketches – and the other half was topical, written literally the day before and performed live. So it was a weird mix to do and, as a studio format, it had a whole host of performers who started with Dad, like Frank Thornton – Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served? He’s still working. I was speaking to him just before Christmas and he said, “What other industry in the world gives you a 3-year contract when you’re 86 years old?” Ronnie Barker, Clive Dunn, John le Mesurier, Derek Guyler, Dick Emery – an endless list of performers who were there every week. A lot of it was filmed outside which, for a small child, was terribly exciting because there was invariably an explosion and I was allowed to press the button.
JR: I’m interested in the creative process for all this. You say he was writing on bits of card. Did he stay up late? Was he very disciplined?
RB: He was quite disciplined when he wrote books. He would get up and work from 9 till 12, then have lunch, and then a nap, then a snack, then another nap, then he’d watch a film. Writing was an awful lot of thinking. He used to see it as a finished article. He’d think about it, the thought process would start, which invariably used to make him laugh. So you’d find Dad at different times of the day laughing, and eventually he’d see it as a finished sequence and then he’d write it down. So most of his script-writing was no more than two drafts. He’d write the whole thing out, read it through twice, amend it and that was it, whereas other writers go back and forth, back and forth changing things. Usually, even in the days of radio he would see it as a finished item as though it had been shot through a camera.
JR: Did he ever consider working with other people? Spike, for example, used to write a lot with Larry Stephens, Eric Sykes and John Antrobus.
RB: Galton & Simpson are two equal writers. They take it in turns to have the pencil, literally. And these are writing teams where one paces up and down firing off things, while the other one says, “Hold on, that’s not going to work.” So you have this balancing act. I think in Dad’s case he was really disciplined, in the sense that he could fire stuff off and then say to himself, “I need to hone that down.” He’d do that whole process, just sitting, thinking. And he’d laugh outrageously. He’d have laughing fits for two or three minutes. Then he’d go and sort it out.
JR: If you see anyone sitting on their own, laughing their head off, you think, “Obviously he’s mad.”
RB: Mad or depressed.
JR: Did he get depressed?
RB: No, not at all.
JR: Isn’t that unusual for comedians?
RB: Well, when people say your family went through dreadful tragedy – my two sisters died of cancer, my father died of cancer in ’96, my elder brother died in a plane crash when I was 11 – that’s an awful lot. But as a family we had to deal with it and we developed a black sense of humour. My mother’s still alive, and when I see her at various events or public places like Waitrose, I normally yell out, “Good heavens, the widow Bentine!” Everyone looks up and thinks that’s a weird word to shout out. And she’ll reply, “My God, one of the surviving children!”
TH: I think it was while your dad was doing Square World that he grazed a brick.
RB: Yes, he always used to blow up the BBC Television Centre at the end of the series. In the first series they used the interior forum as a gladiator ring, where the writers were thrown in and had to hack each other to death. In this case, Indians surrounded the building and they went riding round and round. A smoke-pot went off and burnt a brick at the front of the building. A week later, Dad went in – because he always used to take the technicians out for a big curry after the series had finished, to say thank you. And there were two funny things. First, there was a group of people standing outside with clipboards and they looked at Dad witheringly as he went in, and there was a memo in his cubbyhole from Bill Cotton: “Once again, Michael, I must remind you that under no circumstances will the Television Centre be used for the purposes of entertainment.” There was a bill for the replacement of one brick! Dad sent back a telegram saying: “Thank you for your memo. You are a cult, or my name’s not Beltine.”
JR: How did he get on generally with the BBC?
RB: He hated them.
JR: He had something in common with Spike, then.
RB: He loathed them and spent his life trying to get one over on them. That’s what the Goons were about: poking fun and getting something broadcast that no one else understood. Singhiz Thingz and “Bend over for the golden rivet” and that kind of thing.
The second funny thing was an armed robbery at the BBC, where a gang arrived in a Jag, with sawn-off shotguns, went into the cashier’s office – this was in the days when they gave you a little brown envelope with money shoved in it as your pay packet – and these robbers beat the cashier to the ground, grabbed the wage packets, which were probably £10,000, got into the car, screamed round to the entrance and, as they got to the front gates, the security guard came out and opened the gates, saluted and said, “When’s the programme, Michael?” assuming it was Dad. It’s probably the only thing that saved his life.
JR: So your dad got another bill, then! It would be interesting to know what his creative process was. There must have been an element of discipline.
RB: The creative process was haphazard. The only time Dad ever devoted any form of structure to his work was when he was writing a book. He knew it would take months, so he approached it in a very rigid format. He wrote it all in long-hand till eventually he got an Amstrad.
TH: He’d have loved computers, wouldn’t he?
RB: No. “Damn computers.” Dad was a theoretical physicist. Put anything in front of him and he’d dismantle it and put it together again and find vital parts left out.
JR: He designed those Potties and Bumblies, didn’t he?
RB: He designed every model, but there’s a difference between designing something and making it. Dad had this trick – I don’t know if it was a psychic gift – but he could visualize, to an extraordinary degree, static objects. He would design a set from the front and the side and the back for the puppeteers and the model-makers. For instance, Potty Time was 134 episodes. It was normally two storylines per episode. Each storyline probably had 4 characters, 4 character studies, 10 different associated studies and perhaps 10 different set designs and models. So in total for Potty Time he probably produced three and a half to four and a half thousand drawings, all A3 and colour, because that’s how he wrote it – as a storyboard. Once he saw it as a finished item, then he could write the scripts.
JR: He would comically re-enact historical scenes?
RB: Yes, what really happened! “History books will tell you, children…” He had a perverse sense of humour. Politically non-correct nowadays, because you would not have a children’s programme where all the baddies are German. Even if the baddie’s a mole – the farmers versus the moles – they were German moles with Panzer tanks. The Potties was a mismatch of reorganizing history, but through the eyes of Hollywood because it was always based on a film, and normally it had Ronald Colman in it, taking that pastiche approach. I remember one episode where it wasn’t the Khyber Pass they were defending; they were actually trying to stop the Khyber bypass being built because they had got the oil concession for all the sweetshops. And there’s no fighting. They shoot at each other, lots of explosions, and then they run out of ammunition and start saying, “Bang, bang”. Of course, after two days they could barely talk. Eventually they win because the Army flies over, and they drop from an ancient biplane vital munitions, which turn out to be cough-drops.
JR: Did he ever hear from the other Goons? For example, Sellers saying, “I loved this character – any chance of a voice-over here?” because it sounds like the kind of humour they’d have loved.
RB: I really don’t know.
JR: Your father was doing all the voices, was he?
RB: Yes, he used to pre-record them. My holiday job was to do all the songs, because Dad would turn ‘stupid’. That’s how he’d describe himself. He had the voice of Howard Keel and the ear of a brick. There was always a humorous song in it and I’d have to sing that, from the age of 13.
JR [reading]: In 1975: Tarzan and Bentine. I don’t know what that’s about – his life?
RB: Yes, in later years, from the mid-80s onwards, Dad stopped performing. He just wrote loads of books. He wrote loads of work for writers in America. Writing was something he always enjoyed. For him that was the funny bit. He could sit in his dressing room and write a sketch and laugh uproariously while doing it. In his mind’s eye he could see it being performed. And it didn’t have to be Peter Sellers performing it – it could be anybody in his imagination. It could be the Pope. But performing it, you’d have to have meetings with producers, and you’d be on film sets. I don’t know if anybody here has ever sat on a film set, but they’re the most boring place on earth. Most of your time is spent sitting around. Whenever there is activity, it has no relationship to reality. If you’re performing an action scene or a comedy scene, it doesn’t deliver full action. The satisfaction occurs when you see the finished article.
JR: We couldn’t finish this interview without discussing what really requires hours: para-psychology. Your father was very involved in it.
RB: From an early age. It stemmed from his father, who was the biggest sceptic you could possibly imagine. He had a fundamental thing that occurred to him between the wars: a psychic reading. It was so devastatingly, unbelievably accurate that he decided that, as a scientist, he would investigate what was then termed ‘spiritualism’. You have to remember that this was in a society – far more than the Second World War – where every family, every house, every street, every business had lost somebody who hadn’t come back. And the spiritualistic movement occurred. They were a whole bunch of mediums who always produced either Hiawatha or Isadora Duncan. My grandfather was so rattled by this thing which occurred to him that he decided he must either expose the untruth behind it or find out what was the greater truth that existed. He decided he would have a séance, but that it could only occur in an environment where all the lights were on and the windows and curtains were open, and his children were present. So Dad started sitting in on séances when he was 11. For every hundred weirdos that arrived – they were always called Madam something, wearing a turban and [talking with a shaky voice] “Oh, I can feel the presence of…” And, as a family, they used to take enormous fun out of pricking the bubble of whichever medium arrived.
JR: But your father believed in it.
RB: What my father encountered in the Second World War, which was equally devastating, was that with alarming accuracy he was able to predict who wasn’t coming back from a raid. As the Operations Officer, he would brief a raiding party, and he would know by looking around the room who was going to be injured and who wasn’t coming back. He went to see the chaplain about it, and the chaplain said, “I think you’re delusional,” and my father said, “No, it’s devastating. I don’t think I can do this any more.” So he started informing the chaplain of who he thought was not coming back, and at the point where it was becoming apparent that he was getting it right every single time, the chaplain decided that Dad must be blessed in some way, and Dad thought that takes it beyond the realms of possibility.
But what he did have was this gift of knowing that something was going to happen to somebody. And that pre-emptive form of mediumship was something Dad became more and more interested in. His interest in parapsychology was actually trying to compartmentalize and work out what were the elements of parapsychology that existed beyond usual physics. Was it subjective mediumship, was it psychometry, dowsing? As far as he was concerned, he recognized that something was there, but he had to apply some method of empirically trying to find out what it was. So, as far as he was concerned, parapsychology was a big bin in which you chucked lots of different phenomena, and you tried to work out what was real and what was not.
JR: He wrote a book about it, didn’t he?
RB: Seven! Plus three self-help books, four autobiographies, eight novels, four film scripts…
JR: He was also on The Sky at Night.
RB: He and Patrick Moore were lifelong friends. He gave Patrick his xylophone and he loves it. Dad would buy odd things. I came back one day from school when I was 15 to find my father sitting on an American saddle on a big metal stand in the middle of the room watching a John Wayne western. I didn’t say anything, and he turned to me and said it was most comfortable, and I said, “Oh really?” as though it was normal to find an American saddle on a metal frame, with your father on it, eating a sandwich and watching a John Wayne western. Later the inevitable happened. My mother came back from wherever she’d been, walked into the living room, and I heard: “Jesus Christ, what is that?” And I could hear Dad trying to defend his position saying, “Honestly, darling, it’s the most comfortable thing you can sit on.” And she said, “I don’t care. I’m not having that in the house – take it back.” So, dutifully, I helped him load it into his big Volvo Estate, in which he used to go touring with the flea circus and things like that. And off he went and I didn’t think any more about it. That was when we lived in Esher. In 1988 we moved to Tadworth, and that’s where they lived until Dad died. In ’97, the year after he died, I went up into the attic to bring stuff down, and what did I find? A big metal stand with an American saddle on it! How my father got that into the house, I’ve no idea. And not only had he hidden it somewhere in the house at Esher, but he’d also managed to hide it when we moved from Esher to Tadworth.
And it turned out that he had more secrets. When my son was born in 1990, Dad immediately did the grandfather thing and bought him a train-set. Most people spend that kind of money on a Mercedes, but my dad had a garden railway put in. Not a sit-on and ride. This was an LGB full-scale garden railway: 15 engines, 30 pieces of rolling stock, 480 feet of brass track, lights, tunnels, bridges, and Dad had his grandchildren running round the garden, changing points, blowing whistles and firing catapults with mud as trains went by. Around 1994 my mother declared that he should buy no more railway. And about two months later some sweaty men in a van arrived with a big pine chest. My mother asked, “What’s that for?” and he said, “I want that up in my playroom,” which was his room upstairs where he used to write, “because I’ve got nowhere to put my scripts.”
Well, on the day that I discovered the cowboy saddle, my mum said, “Could you move that chest?” but I couldn’t budge it. It felt like he’d had concrete in it, and she said, “It’s probably full of scripts.” I opened the lid and inside was a whole new train-set with 40 pieces of rolling stock with ten engines. He’d never opened the box.
The final thing: I mentioned earlier that Dad had a firearms certificate. He was appointed in 1963 as the Chief Combat Firearms Instructor for Special Branch. So we had a walk-in gun room and anywhere between 40 and 70 guns in the house. Anything from full automatic to semi-automatic, sub-machine gun, machine gun, various exotic hand guns from around the world. By the age of 5 or 6 we could all field-strip any gun, literally. By the age of 8 or 9 I started doing the first demonstration shoots with Dad and my sister down in Purbright. Dad would do the commentary, saying, “I’m a fat, old, wheezy asthmatic Peruvian; I’m really too old to do this, but if I can do it and 8 or 9-year-olds can do it, then surely you can learn to do it in a day.
So, I went out to the garage and, to my absolute amazement, there in the corner was one of the gun safes. This was early ’98 and the ownership of guns had been outlawed for about five years. I asked my mother, “Have you got a key for that?” She said, “Yes, there’s probably a load of old junk in it.” Seven and a half thousand rounds of ammunition! I had to call Scotland Yard who sent couriers down.
JR: He must have known that your mother would have found out eventually.
RB: Yes, but we all have our secrets.
JR: Let’s finish on a great quote of his: “One lifetime is nowhere near enough to do all that there is to do.”
RB: “It’s probably true.”
And on that point we say many thanks to Richard for airing his encyclopaedic knowledge of his father’s life.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 