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.

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!

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.

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.

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.