Our guest this week is podcaster and producer Tilt Araiza, who joins Tyler to talk about Michael Bentine and his ground-breaking television series It’s A Square World.

Written by Bentine and John Law, It’s A Square World ran on the BBC from 1960-64 totalling 57 episodes and was a clear influence on later comedy series, notably Monty Python’s Flying Circus. As well as Bentine the programme featured the likes of Clive Dunn, Frank Thornton, Deryck Guyler, John Bluthal, Benny Lee, Dick Emery, Ronnie Barker and Sherie Winton. It won the Press Prize at the Rose d’Or Festival in Montreux in 1963 and scooped a Light Entertainment BAFTA award the year before.

This week’s show is roughly divided into two parts: the second half mainly focuses on It's A Square World but firstly Tilt & Tyler talk more generally about Bentine’s extraordinary life. 

Having grown up enjoying many of the trappings of privilege his early years were marked by an inability to communicate properly, thanks to some avoidable home-surgery on his tonsils. Later he faced innumerable barriers to entry into the Second World War due to his Peruvian roots and when he finally did enter the services he was almost killed due to a mistake during a routine typhoid vaccination and was in a coma for several weeks. He later recovered and joined Military Intelligence and was among those who helped liberate Bergen-Belsen. 

Despite all this he retained an optimistic, positive disposition and swept away on the currents of his imagination and facility for invention he found success as a comedian and performer in the late nineteen-forties. He met Harry Secombe who in turn introduced him to some friends of his, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, and the seeds of The Goon Show were planted.

Bentine would later go on to find fame on television with shows like It’s A Square World and also his childrens’ series such as the much-loved Potty Time in the seventies.

A committed believer in the paranormal he became President of the Association For the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena and somehow found time to sail yachts, shoot, practise archery and go on hovercraft expeditions up the Amazon.

As for It’s A Square World, producer Barry Lupino told the Radio Times in 1961: “It has been called a diversion for the low in brow – but I wonder? The topics are lofty enough. What could be more uplifting than the opening of the Royal Academy?... Nor of course shall we overlook the situation in Volcania, of the effects of children’s television on the adult viewer, and the arrival and departure of distinguished personages in the great metropolis.”

The series also has the distinction of likely producing the first Dr Who parody – with Clive Dunn turning up barely a month after DW began dressed in an unmistakably Hartnellesque fashion.

All this and more is up for discussion in what is likely to be the first of a two part Bentine retrospective (Tilt will return next year).