The Benny Hill Show

Benny Hill was an amazing man. He could write some of the greatest comedy in the history of the English language. His work included wit, satire, low brow, and any other kind of humor that comes to mind. I remember watching this show on American TV in NJ, and it was a HUGE hit. I recall that a local Philadelphia station put this show on opposite the 11:00 pm local news, and for a few years it was the highest rated show in its time slot. Amazing. Along with Benny I'd like to point out the great work of Jackie Wright and Henry McGee. My grandfather had been briefly stationed in England during WW II, and he had seen Jackie Wright perform in London. He said that Jackie was the funniest man he had ever seen on a stage. My grandfather loved the episode when Jackie went on a cheap (and dangerous) vacation. Benny generally used Jackie in many ways, but usually as a PROP! Benny would smack Jackie's bald head over and over again. Henry McGee, on the other hand, was a brilliant straight man to Benny's funny side, and McGee excelled whenever he would interview Benny as "Fred Scuttle." This was brilliant humor and Benny deserves to be ranked with Chaplin, Keaton, Bob Hope, and Woody Allen as the 20th century's greatest funny men.

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 !

This is the show, which means more than just a few laughs to me. And not only to me actually. In our country "Benny Hill Show" was extremely popular and when it was shown on our TV millions of Russian people (little kids and mature adults) couldn't breathe - so funny it was. I'm not sure about the opposite sex but we were always blown away by this stuff.

Much time has passed since my school years and when I watch the show now the reaction from me is the same. It is a brilliant mixture of sketches, which are going one after another. You don't have much time to laugh at one joke while the others are coming in spades already. There are misses of course. There are some points at which Mr Benny Hill is almost "over the board" with some rather cheeky humour, but then he manages to get out of the mess with his chin up.

Great talent. Great British humour. Great British actors and actresses. Great show. Something I want to watch and re-watch from time to time.

Thank you, Mr Benny Hill, your show is one solid anti-depressant from bottom to the top. And you can easily wipe out the today's performances of frigging "comedians" with one single sketch of yours. Yours will remain the classics.

10 out of 10 - exceptional quality. Thank you for attention.

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!

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.