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By Root 1521 0

Max Geldray described him, “as though his parents had invented hair.” Bentine’s past was suitably shady. He served in the RAF; that much is certain. His exceptional intelligence is also verifiable. But the tales he told of his own exploits, contacts, and secret lives tended to shift so effortlessly from eyewitnessed fact to plausible circumstance to grandiose impossibility and back again that none of his friends ever really knew what to make of him. The pub owner and writer Jimmy Grafton reports: “I have heard him give accounts of exciting incidents as a fighter pilot, bomber pilot, parachutist, commando, member of the Secret Service, even as an atomic scientist. His claims to be an expert swordsman, pistol shot, and archer are substantially true. He is also a qualified glider pilot.” Spike Milligan claimed that “he once told me, face to face, that his mother had levitated from the ground, across the dining table, and settled down on the other side.”

“Bentine was forever telling people they were geniuses,” said Peter Sellers. “I don’t know why he did this, but he’d say to anybody after a few minutes conversation, ‘You’re a genius!’ And they’d usually believe it, because Bentine is the only one who’s had any real education out of the three of us. He was the one who started nuclear physics, and all we could do was get through these three letter words like cat and dog.”

Whatever the actual facts of Michael Bentine’s biography may be, he was impulsively creative and recklessly funny. He enjoyed disrupting quiet cafés by suddenly bursting into fake-Russian babble so as to create the illusion that he was a spy (albeit one who couldn’t keep his mouth shut). Jimmy Grafton, the publican/writer, remembers being in Bentine’s dressing room once at the London Hippodrome when Bentine picked up a longbow and fired an arrow directly at the dressing room door. Because it had been shot from a mighty longbow, the arrow penetrated the wooden door with ease and ended up protruding several inches through to the other side. The reporter who was approaching the door at the time was surely surprised.

• • •

In the summer of 1948, BBC radio’s Third Programme was running a comedy series called Listen, My Children. (After World War II, the BBC divided itself into three sections: the Light Programme, the Home Service Programme, and the Third Programme, which appealed respectively to working-class, middle-class, and upper-middle and upper-class audiences.) Produced by Pat Dixon, Listen, My Children featured Benny Hill, Harry Secombe, and Carole Carr. Smart and funny, the show was popular enough that a follow-up series was quickly planned. It was originally to have been called Falling Leaves, but the title was changed to Third Division—Some Vulgar Fractions. Two new comics were added to the lineup—Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers.

Peter and his fellow radio comics recorded Third Division’s first program in early December 1948. Five more shows were recorded before the end of the year, and they began airing in late January 1949. In the second Third Division show, Sellers performed a hilarious sketch—so hilarious, in fact, that Sellers kept it alive for many years thereafter. Written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, it was a travelogue of a South London neighborhood. “Balham, Gateway to the South” was narrated by an overly enthusiastic, broadly Midwestern American (Sellers), who persistently renders the neighborhood’s name in two sharp, twangy stresses—Bal! Ham!

With snappy scripts by Muir and Norden, brought to antic life by Sellers, Secombe, Hill, and Carr, Third Division was a highly entertaining series of six programs. But it wasn’t history-making. That would require the participation of a gaunt lunatic who was living in an attic room over Jimmy Grafton’s pub, sharing space with a rhesus monkey.

• • •

Spike Milligan was born in Ahmednagar, India, in 1918, and first appeared onstage at the age of eight in the Christmas pageant of his convent school in Poona. He played a blue-faced clown, arguing shortly before curtain time (to no avail)