Charles Walter " Dick" Bentley (14 May 1907 – 27 August 1995) was an -born comedian and actor of radio, stage and screen. He starred with Jimmy Edwards in Take It From Here for BBC Radio. He was a staple of and pioneer of radio, having started his career in the medium in the early 1930s. He appeared on screen from the late 1940s until retiring in 1978.
Biography
Early life and radio
Bentley was born in
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. As a child, Bentley learned several musical instruments, and while still in his teens was a staple on the Melbourne cabaret circuit as a comedian and singer, his act consisting of playing a few bars of music deliberately badly, interspersed with jokes and legitimate musical numbers. He made his first appearance on ABC Radio in the early 1930s and by 1938 had become a fairly prominent personality, notably on
Wilfrid Thomas's show
Out of the Bag.
In that year he moved to London, and worked for the
BBC. Newly married to Petronella "Peta" Curra, with the war raging in England, he returned to Australia and spent the years of World War II entertaining the troops in the Pacific theatre.
Return to Britain
By 1946, he was one of Australia's highest-paid entertainers and returned to Britain to try to re-establish himself in a much larger market. He joined up with writer
Denis Norden and guested on many of the leading radio shows of the day. An appearance on
Navy Mixture teamed him successfully with
Jimmy Edwards, and indirectly led to the pairing of Denis Norden with
Frank Muir, who was Edwards' writer. Muir and Norden together wrote
Take It From Here (1948–60), with Edwards and Bentley as two of the three stars. The most memorable feature of
Take It From Here was
The Glums, with Edwards playing the slightly seedy Pa Glum and Bentley his terminally dim son, Ron. Bentley was thirteen years older than Edwards.
In 1951, during the run of Take It From Here, Bentley briefly returned to Australia to star in a ten-episode radio comedy series, Gently Bentley, commissioned to celebrate the silver jubilee of the ABC. In 1954, he starred in And So to Bentley, a sketch-format comedy show for the BBC, co-starring Peter Sellers. The show only lasted for one series, and the gently self-deprecating humour of Bentley was overshadowed by the charismatic Sellers. Both these shows were also written by Muir and Norden.
Films
After making his film debut in 1959, Bentley returned to Australia to play a sheep drover in
The Sundowners (1960), starring
Robert Mitchum and
Deborah Kerr. In the late 1960s, he was briefly back on BBC radio in the short-run comedy series
If You Had a Talking Picture of Me. Bentley was featured in the movies
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and
Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974), derived from the
Barry McKenzie comic strip in
Private Eye. By 1974, he had largely retired but briefly returned to the screen to appear in
Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em (1978) as Frank Spencer's grandad, fittingly since the hapless Spencer was in many ways a descendant of Bentley's Ron Glum character in
TIFH.
Death
His wife died in January 1991, and Bentley died from complications from Alzheimer's disease in 1995.
Filmography
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Frank Muir's autobiography.
