The Benny Hill Show
Published: Sunday 21st January 2024
Picture the scene - a man sits on a park bench feeding the ducks with bread from a brown paper bag. Along comes a litter collector, who spears the bread with his spike and indicates to the man to clear it up. A pretty girl walks by and the litter collector follows her. Two more men sit down and are approached by a busty young brunette dressed all in pink. She beckons to one of the men and he follows her into the bushes. We see just the bottom of his legs and feet shaking in the air with apparent glee. The lady in pink returns and fetches the second man and the same happens.
All the while, our hero is gasping in anticipation of the delights that await him with the beautiful girl in the shrubbery. She comes back a third time and collects him, takes him into the undergrowth and we see him lying on the grass, she bends as if to kiss him but instead bears vampire-like fangs and goes to bite his neck. The man jumps up and is chased around the park by the woman, assorted other scantily clad girls, the litter picker, a man walking his dog - you name it, they're chasing him. All to the tune of Yakety Sax.
You can see it, can't you? It's iconic. It may not be very PC, but it certainly belongs in the comedic greats.
Benny Hill would have been 100 years old today. But who was he? This shy man with the complexion of a cherub and twinkling blue eyes, who never married or had a family yet befriended two elderly disabled ladies whom he cleaned for. The man who bought cut-price food at the supermarket, despite being a millionaire, and only cashed the cheques for his TV shows when the post fell off the mantlepiece. He cadged lifts or walked rather than pay for a taxi, he watched two TV sets at the same time and, depending on who you believe, had an eye for the ladies or was a closet homosexual.
He was certainly eccentric, considered a genius by some, and undoubtedly became an international star.
Benny worked the theatres and variety halls, was a regular on the radio and acted in some big films, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Italian Job in the 1960s, but here we celebrate Benny Hill through the medium he felt most comfortable with, television, and his most famous work, The Benny Hill Show.
His self-titles sketch shows started life on the BBC in 1955, and ran for 8 series between then and 1968. Perhaps surprisingly, he took the same title with him for a couple of jaunts over to ITV during this period. Between 1957 and 1960 he made 8 specials for ATV under the banner of Val Parnell's Spectacular and then in 1967 delivered a Boxing Day sketch show special for ITV. But it was in 1969 that he made the switch to Thames Television, achieved his greatest success and made the shows he's most remembered for.
Benny loved the BBC and didn't imagine working for anyone else: after all, he'd been with them since a rather hit-and-miss radio performance on Variety Bandbox in 1947. The eventual move to Thames was prompted by several things, but mostly because he wanted to make a short film about unrequited love called Eddie In August. This was to be in the style of his hero Jacques Tati but no film company wanted it and the BBC had no filmmaking arm at the time. Benny's agent Richard Stone was keen for him to switch permanently to ITV so saw an opportunity to negotiate a deal to move Benny across, make the film and sign exclusively to Thames. The BBC was horrified to lose their star; they were so angry that they removed his picture from the gallery of famous names in Television Centre and, although contractually obliged to repeat the last three shows he made for them in 1968, they paid the repeat fees but never showed them. Indeed they actually wiped the tapes.
The Thames shows were the beginning of the glory years for Benny on TV. From 1969 to 1989 he was at his most successful both in the UK and, in the 1980s, in America too. The show started on 19th November 1969 and over the next 20 years there would 58 episodes in 19 "series" (often a series consisted of a couple of one-hour specials in the course of a year). This was event television before we even knew what that was. Everyone sat down to watch The Benny Hill Show and each episode was carefully crafted by Benny himself.
Benny acted as producer of the shows, knowing what he wanted and how he wanted them to look, even to the most minute detail, and he would draw sketches of the sets with instructions for accurate measurements for things like staircases. The closing credits would always say "written by Benny Hill" and, indeed, he did write a lot of the material, and all of the music and lyrics for the songs. But if someone else had submitted a script he liked he was not above paying them for it - but never crediting them. For example during the BBC years comedy writer Dave Freeman worked with Benny a lot but rarely received a public credit.
The shows at Thames were a huge success. With a familiar cast around him of Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Jenny Lee-Wright, Jackie Wright and Nicholas Parsons, Benny achieved ratings of 21 million in 1971, and in 1972 won BAFTAs for Best Script and Best Light Entertainment Programme. He was also nominated for a BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance, and won Top ITV Personality at the Variety Club Awards.
His style of comedy could also evolve at Thames, and as we moved into the 1970s the sketches and routines got saucier. At the BBC Benny had glamorous showgirls around him, but the levels of taste and decency were very much more in keeping with the Beeb and the 1950s. By the 70s, the skirts were shorter, the stockings lacier and suspenders were on show, reflecting a more liberated society happier to talk about sex and sexuality. Well, not everyone was, and Benny came up against notorious 'clean-up TV' campaigner Mary Whitehouse on more than one occasion, with her describing his show as having "degrading moral overtones".
But Benny was so much more than just sauce. He was massively influenced by silent comedians, like Chaplin and Tati. He was an old-school clown, the boy who never got the girl, and in the earlier shows, there was pathos and sadness to the humour. He wasn't necessarily known as an impressionist but certainly in sketches he would perform characters based on real people, like Barry Normal (Barry Norman) and Johnny and Cranny Fadock (Johnny and Fanny Cradock).
There were spoof advert sketches and many original characters were seen interviewed by straight man Henry McGee. Possibly his most famous creation is Fred Scuttle, with the catchphrase 'Evening sir, evening viewers'. Some haven't passed the test of time and changing bounds of acceptability, like his Chinese character, Chow Mein.
Every show would end with the infamous 'run-off' scene with the whole cast chasing each other around to Yakety Sax.
Benny was also a skilled songwriter. All the musical numbers - whether it was just him singing in front of The Ladybirds trio with a parody song, or big production numbers - were written by him. There was a great deal of physical comedy and slapstick too again harking back to the silent era that influenced him so much, and he was not opposed to recycling content, with much of what was in those early BBC shows finding its way, albeit slightly amended, into the Thames ones. No one seemed to mind though. Benny Hill was a true TV star and more was to come.
In his 20 years at Thames, Benny only committed to a contract on a show-by-show basis. Richard Stone, Benny's agent, would call the Thames Light Entertainment office each summer and confirm that Benny would be available for 2 or 3 one hour specials that year. Apart from working on those, Benny would then spend about 4 months of the year travelling, the only luxury his notoriously frugal nature would allow, as he enjoyed it so much. He adored France and spoke French along with busking several other languages like Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German to get by. On these trips, he would visit cabaret and comedy clubs, plundering them for ideas and material, which was probably why his comedy had such international appeal.
In the late 1970s, American television was looking for a British show they could use, but with most UK series only being 6 or 12 episodes, this wasn't enough. US seasons needed at least 22 shows to cover the way they put together their schedules.
By late 1977, Thames had 31 hours of The Benny Hill Show and Don Taffner, the executive charged with finding British shows, came up with the idea of cutting these into 62 half-hour episodes for the American market. They were a huge success and, by 1979, Benny was a star in America and a multi-millionaire, neither of which bothered him in the slightest. He had no interest in being successful across the pond and money meant nothing to him. The audience lapped up the international appeal of the slapstick and nod to silent comedy classics and were enticed by the more risqué content, something they weren't used to seeing in the US, although some of the more crude and sexual content was held back at first.
Another reason the shows translated so well was the high production values. Hill had always been fascinated with innovative camera techniques - like split screen, where he could play multiple characters - and unique cinematography. As the shows went on, he would add parodies of big American formats like Starsky & Hutch and impersonations of American stars like Orson Welles and Raymond Burr into the sketches. In 1980 and 1981 he was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Variety category and in 1984 he received the converted Rose d'Or (Golden Rose of Montreux) award, which recognises international success in television.
But the tide was turning. The sketches had become more and more reliant on sex, and criticism was mounting that The Benny Hill Show objectified women and was mostly sexist and even misogynistic in its content. What had started as 'slap and tickle' fun was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for family viewing, with jokes about rape and Hill's Angels dance routines that left little, or nothing, to the imagination.
The material was getting weaker too. We already know that Hill liked to recycle old gags and routines, but with a new wave of politically driven, more experimental 'alternative comedy' coming through in the 1980s, a 'quickie sketch' of a man sneezing causing a girl's knickers to fall down just wasn't going to cut it anymore.
Hill's health was taking a turn for the worse at this time as well. He had always had a sweet tooth and battled with his weight, but now he had started to drink heavily, and his heart and liver were suffering. There was a feeling that he was just giving up.
In 1989, Thames cancelled The Benny Hill Show. The once sky-high ratings were declining, and the public attitudes and tastes were changing. The shows were extortionately expensive to produce and Thames just couldn't afford these big extravaganza specials when they weren't seeing a return on their investment. Benny was devastated and never really recovered from the shock. His agent, Richard Stone, said that that blow, and the way it was all handled, was what ultimately led to his death. Certainly, without work, the star's drinking and health got worse.
In April 1992 he died from a heart attack, alone in his flat. He was found two days afterwards.
Benny will always be remembered for the years at Thames and The Benny Hill Show, for the saucy seaside comedy, for Hill's Angels and for smacking the little bald man rapidly on the head. He will also be remembered for being chased around a park, or along the street, with the film sped up and set to music that, in 2015, was voted The Nation's Favourite Theme Tune in a poll for ITV.
He was more than just the sauce and alleged sexism. He was a clown in the fine tradition of Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd, an innovator of television camera techniques, a writer of comedy material as well as the music and lyrics for comic songs. He was a pioneer, albeit unwillingly, of British comedy breaking America and one of the first true stars made by television in an era where it was becoming a leading force in the entertainment industry.
Happy 100th Birthday Benny and, as he used to say at the end of his shows, "Thank you for being with us, and we look forward to seeing you all again - very, very soon. Until then, bye-bye."
Where to start?
1971, Programme 3
His first programme made and broadcast in colour, this 1971 edition of the Thames series was watched by just over 21 million people and finds Benny at his most successful. It's a great mixture of his songs, spoof impressions and original characters, also exhibiting his physical comedy capability with a ballet in a supermarket. It also shows his work with camera angles and cinematography with the film pastiche Passengers Of Love.
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Love comedy? Find out moreThe Benny Hill Annuals - 1970-79
For nearly four decades Benny Hill reigned supreme as the king of bawdy humour on British television. Of his body of work, it is the shows that he did for Thames Television in the 1970s for which he is best remembered, with their combination of farce, risque jokes and beautiful ladies. It is these shows that made him a global superstar - topping the ratings in the US also. With his 'three stooges': Henry McGee, Bob Todd and Jack Wright, Benny Hill produced a handful of 'specials' every year - all of which were critically acclaimed ratings toppers.
Join Benny and the gang in this mega box set of 12 discs, covering every Thames programme from 1969 to 1979 - that's 35 x 50 minutes - and the 30 minute dialogue-free 'play', Eddie In August.
First released: Sunday 15th October 2006
DVD DVD DVD DVD- Released: Monday 1st July 2024
- Distributor: Old Gold Media
- Region: 2
- Discs: 12
- Minutes: 1,650
- Catalogue: OGM0025
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- Distributor: Network
- Discs: 12
- Catalogue: 7952541
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Search for this product on eBay
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- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 12
- Catalogue: 7952541
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Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Released: Saturday 1st November 2008
- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 12
- Catalogue: 7952888
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The Benny Hill Annuals - 1980-89
Join comedy superstar Benny Hill in all of the classic shows he made for Thames during the 1980s.
Known throughout the world for his combination of high-speed farce, risqué jokes and gorgeous ladies, it is these shows that turned him into a global household name. This set features some of Benny's most famous characters, including the unforgettable Fred Scuttle - who gets his very own TV Channel, 'Scuttlevision' - and Mr. Chow Mein, whose varied roles include butler and choreographer of the Chinese Opera Company. You can also experience investigative journalism at its best with 'The Crook Report', enjoy Benny's innovative production of Carmen and a very strange version of the Monte Carlo Show, and meet an entire Dynasty of characters oddly resembling The Lad Himself!
With every show a critically acclaimed ratings topper it's no surprise that The Benny Hill Show was one of the most successful programmes ever screened on British television. So join Benny, the ladies and his trio of hopeless helpers (including Henry McGee, Bob Todd and Jackie Wright) in an entire decade's worth of mirth from the 1980s. More than 19 hours of comedy are spread over 9 discs in this box set.
First released: Monday 1st November 2010
DVD DVD- Released: Monday 1st July 2024
- Distributor: Old Gold Media
- Region: 2
- Discs: 9
- Minutes: 1,150
- Catalogue: OGM0043
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- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 9
- Catalogue: 7953304
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The Best Of Benny Hill
This hilarious compilation celebrates the unique talents of comedy superstar Benny Hill with an uproarious collection of the characters and sketches that made him a household name the world over!
This classic mix of comedy and song features Benny's regular cohorts Henry McGee, Bob Todd, Jackie Wright, Patricia Hayes and Nicholas Parsons - alongside the usual bevy of lovely ladies!
Released theatrically in 1974, The Best Of Benny Hill is featured here in a brand-new transfer from the original film elements.
First released: Monday 8th February 2016
DVD- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 1
- Catalogue: 7954237
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