The Benny Hill Show

Benny Hill was fair game for people who wanted to take the moral high ground. These people brought the trumped up charge of being degrading to women against him but there were very few complaints about him being degrading to short bald-headed elderly men. British clean-up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse was always going on at him and I once heard his best-known critic after Mary Whitehouse, Ben Elton, practically accuse him of inciting violence against women. The truth is, Benny only wanted to make people laugh and brighten their lives up and I think he was definitely hurt by the criticism. As I said, you could say he was degrading to short bald headed elderly men like in a very funny sketch where he and the entire cast of his show were performing a musical number. Jackie Wright and Bob Todd are sitting together singing and Benny goes over with two xylophone sticks and plays a wooden xylophone tune on top of their heads! Benny had a knack for making the obvious funny, like in a short sketch where he's looking after his neighbour's cat and his neighbour tells him "don't put yourself out" or when he plays a man going out the door with a four foot high package and his wife tells him "don't forget to post it". He had tremendous international appeal and many celebrities in the states including Burt Reynolds and Walter Cronkite and Greta Garbo was rumoured to be a fan. When Benny took ill and was in hospital Michael Jackson visited him (wonder if Wacko Jacko promised him a trip to Disneyland). One thing Benny did on his show was parodies of TV commercials. He did a parody of the Sunlight Washing Up liquid commercial where he was dressed up as the woman in the commercial and says in response to the rather obvious questions from the voice-over "of course it gets my dishes clean, are you damn stupid or something?". I can remember wishing that the woman in the real commercial would say that. In the early 1970s there was a commercial for Fry's Chocolate Cream which showed a girl reclining on a couch enjoying a bar of the chocolate. Her cat walks along the shelf next to her and knocks a porcelain figurine off the shelf and she catches it. Benny parodied this commercial. He was dressed up as the girl and when the cat knocked the figurine off the shelf he failed to catch it and the figurine shattered on the floor. A guy ran on to the set and shouted "clumsy fool" at Benny. It was predictable but still very funny. One thing his critics chose to overlook was that he nearly always played the character who came off worst in his sketches. The crux of his humour was that he played a lecherous man chasing after young girls who got his come-uppance. He was a guy very good at taking a joke on himself but definitely stung by critics.

There was a time on Earth when all of the world stopped to watch The Benny Hill Show. Businesses would close, people stayed home and every tv in the world in every house tuned in to watch this man who just wanted to make us laugh. And laugh we did. The world died when his show stopped, and it cried when he left this mortal realm. Labeled a dirty old man for the content of the material in less than a quarter of his sketches, he was considered a genius by his fans and his peers for the other seventy-five percent. Even Thames Television admitted far too late that cancelling the show was the worst mistake they had ever made. Letting it go was a knife in Benny's side, a heartbreak that led to his death, but what a great legacy of humor !

Ladies and Gentlemen - The Benny Hill Show. You don't need much to be funny - just some jokes that are funny. Benny Hill is just like that. He makes it all look so easy, but is impossible to imitate because he's simply be the funniest man ever to have lived on Earth. Basically Benny has only few jokes that he repeats and makes it all again with little variation. That doesn't mean that he repeats himself, because he rather guarantees a good laugh when the audience exactly knows what is going to happen. And when it happens, they laugh.

The archetype jokes are a mistake, accidental insult and the chase. In a mistake Benny thinks something is something that really isn't it. For example something is heavier than it appears or Benny takes man for a woman. Accidental insult happens when Benny does something that causes harm for someone. For example he touches woman's breast when he's looking for some similar object. The chase is a cliché, but you'll always wait for it. You'll know the chase will soon be on, when the funny 'chase tune' starts to play.

The Show is however much more fun than my diagnosis of it. Go and see it!

I remember watching The Benny Hill show during the Seventies on London channel Thames TV, which also produced the show from their studios at Teddington Lock in west London. I remember just how popular this show was in England and as i found out later, the whole world. This man was a comedy genius ranked by many with the all time greats such as Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Lloyd. In France he is revered as a comedy auteur. His shows viewing figures were always in the top ten in the UK right up to his shows cancellation in 1989. Around the same time comedy in Britain was undergoing a revolution. The old-school traditional end-of-pier type of comedy that had become a mainstay in UK television (Are You Being Served) was now considered to be politically incorrect. In it's place came a new "style" of writing more influenced by correct non sexist/racist humour. This change was headlined by such shows as The Comic Strip Presents,The Young Ones,Friday night Live and a whole host of other programing that had first had exposure with the launch of channel 4 in 1982. By the late 80s Thames television were facing a barrage of anti Benny Hill sentiment driven by the UK press that was totally contradicted by his viewing figures that showed only a small decline in viewers. Thames decided to bite the political bullet and cancelled his show in 1989. Benny Hill was to experience the wilderness of change and he never worked again. Former members of the Hills Angels visited him on a regular basis, but a depression had started to eat away at him. He died on April 18, 1992.

Now in 2005 TV comedy in the UK is split into two halves. The commercial channels such as Channels 4 & 5 show predominantly US imports such as Friends, Joey etc. While the BBC still stick to homegrown comedy such as Little Britain, The Smoking Room, which are the direct descendants of the "Alternative Comedy" that changed British TV in the 1980s. The problem now is is that it's hard to find anything that can give you a real belly laugh because todays comedy is too obsessed with patting itself on the back in self congratulation at how smart it is.

I've laughed and enjoyed the Benny Hill shows ever since i was very young, and still do. Benny Hill is one of the comedians who are really able to be funny, without contrived situations and one-liners. And he manages to throw in some more serious acting too. There is a certain feeling of quality, of true artistry to every moment of the show which most of his followers lack. Many of the jokes are seen as off-color today and would probably never be aired if the show was new, a sign that things are changing in the other direction. Catch it now before it is forever buried and condemned by the politically correct!