Terrible Comedians - Lennie Bennett

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A manufactured comedian is worse than a manufactured boy band, and Lennie Bennett often came across as terribly contrived during his TV appearances between 1973 and 1990. He rapidly rose to variety show entertainer and game show host, despite having little if any real individual charisma or personality. He always looked like someone had shoved a second hand car salesman into a game-show host’s jacket and forced him in front of the spotlights and cameras at gun-point. Bennett always came across as what he was - a desperate plug in a gap in the TV schedules. If Morecambe & Wise or The Two Ronnies were not available, Saturday night prime time was filled with either Jim Davidson or Lennie Bennett & Jerry Stevens. The latter pairing always looked as if they were using left over scripts dumped by other comedians, and this was comedy read from an autocue. After all, how hard could it be to tell a joke if the joke itself was funny? Answer – harder than you think, and half the time, even the writing was painfully lame. Bennett felt funnier alone and quickly dumped the easily forgotten Jerry Stevens. Bennett himself actually became a punchline in jokes told by other comedians, especially for the rising post-punk era Alternative comedy stars of the 1980’s who were keen to dismiss the old school comics as has-beens. Comics would control unruly audiences by threatening to bring Lenny Bennett on. Bennett disliked being portrayed as a bogeyman and took to turning up at alternative comedy clubs heckling back until he was sometimes ordered to leave. Such bitter outbursts made him unpopular and gained him a reputation for being difficult to work with. From running several daytime TV game-shows, Bennett’s career went down faster than the Lusitania. He was eventually discovered to be running a kebab shop in Blackpool, after a disastrous love affair stripped him of his impressive earnings. He was just beginning to make a comeback when he died in 2009. Arthur Chappell