Customer Reviews

Long Banana Skin

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It's a very funny book about Michael's life a and close encounter with his Peruvian family

Bentine was a brilliant but limited funny man. Given that he was a script-writer, it is astonishing that this poor autobiography - just a stringing together of life episodes really, when he was about 50 - is so badly written. "I would like to thank Harry Watt for turning me from a scriptwriter into an author" he writes at the beginning. (Harry Watt, Wikipedia tells me, was a film director.) Oh well.
Bentine does not come over as particularly likeable or intelligent. Perhaps that's why he and the rest of the Goons parted company after just two years.
Name-drops (everyone is his good friend), and fails to give any idea of how much time has passed between episodes.
The only redeeming feature is that for those of a certain age, like me, there is some nostalgic value.
As for the title, he explains it as based in his philosophy that tripping over banana skins doesn't matter, it's how you pick yourself up from them that counts. Which he singularly fails to illustrate.

Book purchased for others, I have only read the title, but the title was good.