Michael Bentine

Born in Watford, Hertfordshire, of Anglo-Peruvian parentage, he grew up in Folkestone at Kingsnorth Gardens, Elysee Mansions, now 24 Shorncliffe Road. He was educated at Eton College. In World War II he served as an RAF Intelligence officer, and took part in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He said about this experience: Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I’ve tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won’t come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy.

He had acted before the war, and afterwards he decided to become a comedian, specialising in off-the-wall humour, often involving cartoons and other types of animation. For example, a prominent feature of his series, It's a Square World, was the imaginary flea circus. He was also a television presenter and writer. He appeared in the Goon Show film Down Among the Z Men. During the 1960s he also took part in the first hovercraft expedition up the Amazon river.

In 1995, Michael Bentine received a CBE from Queen Elizabeth II "for services to entertainment". He was a holder of the Peruvian Order of Merit, as was his grandfather Don Antonio Bentin Palamero. 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 is a result of his and his family's extensive research into the paranormal which resulted in him writing The Door Marked Summer and The Doors of the Mind. He was married to Clementina, a Royal Ballet dancer, for over fifty years. Their two surviving children, Richard and Serena, both work in marketing. He died from prostate cancer, at the age of 74.