Benny Hill

0:00In May 1989, a giant of British entertainment went for a meeting with his boss at Thames Television. He was surprised to be fired. The Benny Hill Show had made over£100 million for ITV, largely thanks to its success in the US. Here in Britain, the audience had peaked, but the numbers were still good. So had Benny been cancelled, as we now say, or had his seaside humour simply run out of steam? And if you're wondering, then yes, Benny Hill really is today's selection for great lives.

0:40Here he is on Desert Island Discs back in 1959. Is there any particular occasion that you can look back on as your big opportunity? No, I think there has been no big opportunity. It's been, you know, very slowly going up, and I hope it'll be just as slow coming down. The fastest award winner in the West, Benny Hill. Thank you ladies and gentlemen very, very much indeed. Benny Hill was, and remains, Britain's most successful comedian ever. His TV show was exported to over 90 markets worldwide, one of his songs won an Ivor Novello, and the Yakety Sax theme tune that accompanied those speeded-up chase scenes was played outside the Houses of Parliament when it was announced that Boris Johnson was resigning as Prime Minister in 2022, To my generation, Benny feels like a key part of our culture, and yet there were voices in the 80s keen to see him removed from our screens.

1:39I mean, you know, like when a comedian can end every single programme tearing off a woman's clothes and then chasing her around a park in her underwear, like that for me, in a world where women can't even walk safe in the parks, is pretty, pretty worrying. Joining me here is the playwright Jonathan Maitland, Benny's nominator, plus the comedian and writer Helen Lederer, who says she's going to bring a little nuance to our show. Jonathan first. He's a former journalist and broadcaster. His shows include ITV's Tonight, while he's written plays about Boris Johnson and the deliciously entitled How to Survive Your Mother.

2:15Tell me, Jonathan, why have you picked Benny today? When I was ten at boarding school in the middle of nowhere, we used to sing ourselves to sleep, singing Ernie, the fastest milkman in the West. I was absolutely captivated because he was very, very funny. And I liked him. And I, yes, we know there was racism and sexism, and obviously we'll come to that later. But he made me laugh and he was brilliant. And I kind of want to restore his reputation because, you know, the word genius is overused, but I think he is a bit of a genius because he was so prolific with his gift. As a youth, did you notice that some of the camera work was a bit gynecological?

2:58You have stolen my adjective. I've got it written down here. I mean, some of the shots in the 80s when he was trying to be satirical, but it wasn't satirical. He was trying to take the mickey out of hot gossip and the sexy pans people troop. Yes, the shots were gynecological. If the camera had gone any further up the woman's crotches, it would have been an internal examination. But, you know, he was reflecting the mores of the time. We lived in a racist, sexist, homophobic culture, and he wasn't a politician, he wasn't Ben Elton. He reflected the culture. He didn't want to or know how to lead it.

3:33Let me read the words of the TV executive who ended Benny Hill's career, John Howard Davis. The audiences were going down, the programme cost a vast amount of money, and he was looking a little tired. Well, it's true. I mean, Benny was at the top for 35 years, but it was a big cultural shift. I mean, I'm writing a play about Benny and Ben Elton because I think the moment that Benny Hill got fired by a mainstream channel, that is a fantastic tectonic shift. You think he was cancelled, basically? Pretty much. I mean, obviously, John Howard Davis had other reasons because it was very expensive, but it was looking a bit tired.

4:13And actually, there was, I mean, really interestingly, in Mark Lewison's brilliant biography of Benny, which is called Funny Peculiar, there was a commercial side to it, which is very relevant, that young women, Helen will talk about this, they were buying stuff from ITV. They're the most important customers. And they didn't like him. My wife just goes, ooh, he's creepy. And she refused to watch them. So it was a big moment when, you know, the political pendulum swung. Benny was all right when he was young. But when you're in your 60s, it's a slightly different matter to leer at a pretty girl.

4:48That's also from John Howard Davies. But are we invited to admire an unattractive older man obsessing about a pretty young woman? Or are we meant to laugh at him? Well, he never caught them for a kickoff. Number two, he was reflecting real life because a lot of old men chase young women. It still happens today. Number three, sometimes the music would stop and the ladies would chase Benny. So I would argue that makes him rather feminist and gives them agency. Helen's shaking her head. But, you know, the fact is, yes, it did look a little. I mean, he wasn't a predator. He wasn't nasty. I mean, people like.

5:23Yeah. But Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson were doing pretty unpleasant stuff. But the fact that that she slaps him doesn't necessarily make this a subject for comedy, does it? Well, you're judging then by the standards of now. And it depends how you do it. you don't have to watch and people didn't have to watch and in the end, you know, it did for him. Perhaps it's notable that Benny was replaced by Mr Bean. And this is probably a good point to bring in you, Helen Ledgerer, into this discussion about Benny Hill. What do you remember from the time? Did you ever watch him on TV? I would have had to because it was like family viewing, wasn't it?

6:03Along with Harry Worth. My dad used to like Harry Worth, Dick Emery. I mean, it was just the wallpaper of family viewing. so I wouldn't have assessed it in the way, I mean, Jonathan's talking about it. I mean, obviously you can appreciate, he was a guy, a lot of them went through the army, didn't they? He did his training. He was very good at accents, obsessed. Bella Enberg, the woman he worked with, you know, said he didn't have a wife. You know, he was obviously obsessed and copied lots of other people, as all comics do. There's nothing original about comedy. But, I mean, obviously he was there at the right time and we went big on it.

6:38But I think I would have felt a bit disinterested and sad. You go, oh, this is the parents viewing. That's what I was going to ask you about next. Jonathan says, yes, but things were different then. It was a different time. At the time, did you see the humour? Did you laugh? Did you find it funny? As a child in the 70s, no. I can see other people and his colleagues rating him. But what is more alarming is the assumptions, Even when people talk about it, the slap and tickle, the burlesque, it's dodgy. It's everything about it is sort of dodgy. And I think of one sketch where he, you know, he's all these amazingly beautiful women and he's doing athletic things.

7:24We think it's kind of humorous, maybe surreal a bit and mocking and parody. But how come a woman is kind of lingering? Her bottom half is lingering over his face for a very long time. I mean, the sketches went on forever. They weren't edited. And you just go, where's the punchline, please? There's just a lot of scantily cad women doing things on sunbeds for a very long time for no good reason. I need it to explain to me where is the humour embedded in that. I couldn't agree with you more, Helen. But the point is you're both being a bit unfair because you're characterising him just by the sexist bits.

8:01There was so much more to him than that, particularly in the 70s. I mean, I've been watching kind of box sets of the 70s and the 80s. his character Fred Scuttle is a comedic archetype he's brilliant he was a west country chubby bloke with a beret and glasses catchphrase good evening viewers he was a moron with no self-knowledge like Alan Partridge David Brent Chansey Gardner in the Peter Sellers film being there or Diary of a Nobody there's nothing sexist about him he was a moron who thought he knew everything there are these great sketches where he's building a channel tunnel or he's a French film director the butt of the joke is him and the pompous interviewer.

8:38Benny did an amazing Mickey take of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf where he played Richard Burton brilliantly. That was brilliant and so you know don't It's all in there. His parodies it's a lot of content there but the women are too present it's not just kind of slightly odd and sleazy. I mean he looks why does he look like that like he's always longing for a woman somebody said oh comedy is failure but I just don't think I don't buy any of those assumptions now about why he's funny and condoning the use of his women. He relies on them too much. He does protest too much, that's what I'm thinking.

9:16I should add that there have been accusations against Benny himself, including from a singer who said she went for an audition before she was famous and he tried to kiss her. Not a kiss, she said, like they do in France. It was a gobby kiss, she said. So I think we need to tread carefully in this episode. but Benny Hill has some unexpected fans. Take a listen to this. It's Ruth Jones on Radio 4 just a year ago. There were two records I remember distinctly, and this will show my age. One was Lily the Pink by The Scaffold, and the other was Ernie the Fastest Milkman in the West by Benny Hill. It's gloriously un-PC and daft, and Steve is going to read the lyrics for us now.

10:04Ruth Jones on With Great Pleasure over Christmas 2023, and there'll be more Ernie content later on in the show. Let's now go back to the beginning. Benny Hill was born Alfred Hawthorne Hill in Southampton in 1924. Both his father and his grandfather had worked as clowns. He worked as a milkman, a driver, a drummer. He both served and later entertained in the war. He was an assistant in a stage review. Here's Benny on Desert Island Discs again. I was in a touring show, and because my performance was not suitable, shall we say, it was lousy, you know. And I don't blame the proprietors at all. They asked me to leave, you know.

10:48And I left the show, and I had nine weeks out of work, but during that nine weeks, I spent all day writing television material. I had a feeling then that television was going to be the thing that would do more for me than anything else. Well, here you are at last There's that me with me, I'm parted in the middle So that people can drink in me natural beauty from both sides He sounds a bit like Kenneth Williams there What did he look like? Moon face He looked very friendly and chubby Made for TV because you liked the look of him He didn't look threatening, did he? He didn't mind looking ugly either He sort of thrived almost in gurning somewhat I mean, you'd assume that he didn't think he was a looker.

11:31He looked like a loser. He knew he was a loser. He did look like a loser and played that up. So he embraced it, didn't he? And also he had this wonderful comic look to camera. He realised right from the way going TV that what didn't work for him in theatres, because he couldn't go beyond row three, until, you know, the sly look to the side worked really well for him. And also he was, you see, this keys into the thing about was he threatening or wasn't he? he was, you got the feeling that if he ever did catch up with those women round the tree, he would know what to do with them. Well, I don't know, because where you take that in a benign way, I choose to take it in a more ominous way, because as I've said, it's such a sort of through theme that it's a bit, ooh, icky.

12:14Yeah, sure. But the name of this programme is Great Lives, right, Matthew? And the thing is, we are obsessed with the culture wars at the moment, and all we can think of is, is it racist, is it sexist? And quite right, too, because there were so many decades of appalling sexism. But in 200 years time, OK, I think Benny will be considered the Mozart of comedy, depending on which bits of him. That's a great dream. Well, no, depending on which bits of him, the comedy archaeologists dig up. But Charlie Chaplin, OK, Benny was given the award, the Charlie Chaplin Award for comedy. And Charlie Chaplin's son took Benny to Charlie's study.

12:47And there were loads of Benny Hill videos. And Charlie Chaplin's son said he adored you. He thought you were the best. Now, in 200 years' time, they probably won't care about sexism because it would have gone full circle. Well, we're being selective, and I wouldn't dispute the quality, the precision, you know, how good he was at setting up sketches and filming them and pioneering it. Totally with that, but we can't ignore that kind of unease that you have when observing it now, and it's worth noting. But they will, in 200 years' time, they won't care. They'll just be looking at the skill level.

13:22Will they? Will they, though? tune in in 200 years and find out Did you notice Helen from that little interview that he wrote his own material that's important isn't it and it's not the norm Well I'm always quite keen to know which comedians have writers doing the gags for them Do you? When I started I wrote all my own material because I didn't know how else to start so it makes me feel I know Benny because he was obsessed and to do stand up You have to be driven. I tell you what, Matthew, actually, he was famous for being a comedy kleptomaniac. He nicked everybody's material. He had a very bad name for it.

14:03I mean, I don't know what the attitude is now when it comes to nicking other people's gags. Well, it's best not, really. Once they're out there. And so he used to travel around Europe on his holidays, which weren't really holidays. They were working holidays, seeing what was on stage, what was funny and nicking it. But it goes back to that theme where nothing is original and nobody really has a monopoly on it. And his delivery was superb. His timing was superb. So I am heralding your chosen person that you are advocating so well. But I just think it's with my nuance role, we can't ignore the other elements of it.

14:38Well, he was big. Sorry, he was very big in France. And if only the French had a word for nuance. Me none.

14:47Maintaining our nuanced role, here's Barry Cryer in the programme from 2000 called There'll Never Be Another Benny Hill. You know, he's got this image of up the skirt and down the cleavage and rushing about, but in those days he was doing clever things like a film with bad continuity, badly shot, and the hat disappears off the head as you walk through the door and suddenly he's sitting on the other side of the room. I loved all that stuff he did. and he did a very funny I Claudius. And then, of course, it became a stereotype. Benny was the man who rushed about to yakety-yak music and everything.

15:20You know, it's... But some of the... I was a great fan of his earlier stuff. And here he is, when he was still on BBC Radio in the 60s, doing one of his more famous creations, Fred Scuttle. Mr Scuttle? Mr Frederick Scuttle III, if you don't mind, sir. Do sit down. Thank you. You're not too cold, are you, sir? No. And let me know if you are. I will throw some more money on the fire.

15:44Would you like a grape, sir? The butler has just finished peeling them. He made a name for himself in theatre and film too, didn't he? You suggested, Jonathan, that he wasn't very good at theatre. He did a few shows and he was OK at it, but I think he was trading on his TV reputation. And film? I mean, those magnificent men in their flying machines. The Italian Job, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His role in The Italian Job was really funny. Interestingly, that's what cemented his reputation for wanting complete control because he played Professor Peach, I think, and he wanted to do it as a deaf Yorkshireman and did.

16:19But the producers made him re-dub it in Received Pronunciation. And after that, he was so upset he vowed never to lose control. You're listening to Great Lives. With me in the studio are Jonathan Maitland and Helen Ledgerer. Either of you. What do you know of Benny's private life? Did he marry? We know that he didn't marry. And I think I heard that he did have a girlfriend, but he preferred to live on his own. And yeah, just be a bit of a player, but a solitary loner. But since you're writing a play about it, Jonathan, I guess you know a little bit more. Well, I think he had a slightly... And you're nosy as well, aren't you?

16:54I am. Well, I think he had a slightly infantilised, over-romanticised view of sex. He liked the idea of it, but he didn't like the actual mechanics of it. He proposed to a woman called Annette Andre, who was the wife in Randall and Hopkirk, deceased. She wasn't really taking him seriously and kind of turned him down. But then he would kind of go off and tell that story and say, oh, there was someone once. He was very close to his mother. I'm glad you said that, Matthew. I was just about to bring that up. She used to make him fish fingers. When she died, he went to live in her flat for about four weeks and didn't even turn on the heating.

17:31She used to make him evaporated milk and caster sugar sandwiches or white bread that he would take to work. Really? You're from Derbyshire, aren't you? Yes. That Bakewell tart thing, maybe. But, I mean, he was clearly eccentric and a bit of a mummy's boy and didn't really get on that well with his dad. Interestingly, I wonder if the roots of his funar, funar humour came from the fact that his father, who was initially in the circus, ran a shop in Southampton selling surgical appliances and sold condoms under the counter. So there's that kind of illicit... Gosh, the things you learn on this programme.

18:07Naughty, naughty... And I think, maybe imagining this, but I think it's true, Benny used to kind of test the condoms to see if they'd split on a big wooden mushroom device. I saw that. I saw an image of it. And that would be a kind of strange sort of phallic image to grow up with in your father's workplace where you go, this is the norm. So, yeah, there are some extremities there, shall we say, or otherworldliness that would have informed his attitude to women, sex, humour, normality, possibly. And he didn't live extravagantly, stayed in his flat and he liked foreign travel and that was about it.

18:46I tell you what, I mean, he had drawfuls of cheques uncashed, some for as much as£30 ,000. He didn't care about money. He wouldn't buy himself a nice sofa. He'd wait until he did an advert for someone like MFI and then they'd give him a horrible crap Drelon sofa and he'd keep that for 10 years. In 1969, his show moved from the BBC to Thames TV, where it stayed until it was cancelled. Helen, why do you think people turned against the show? Had they changed or did he change? Comedy is about recognition. If we can't recognise the landscape that he repeated because he was so dependent on women being central, there was no appetite.

19:31People wouldn't respond. And the battle of the sexes is no longer a driver in terms of narrative content, I don't think. We heard earlier from Ben Elton on Terry Wogan's chat show talking about what he thought was wrong politically about Benny Hill. But there were worse comedians, surely. Let's hear from Ben Elton again here in 2000 on a BBC radio looking back on Benny's life and times. I think what's wobbly about it, let me put this, you see, I'm a big Carry On fan. I mean, not always. I mean, some of it was rubbish. But, I mean, a lot of it was fabulous, life-enhancing stuff, really great exuberant comedy.

20:09As on occasion Benny Hill was. But the difference was that in Carry On, the women are funny too. Brilliant comedians. Joan Sims, Barbara Windsor, Hattie Jakes. Great, wonderful, exuberant characters. Every bit as sexually interesting. Every bit as predatory. Every bit as pompous. and indeed every bit as sad. I mean, Sid trying to get off with Joan Sims, Charles Hortree wondering what his sexuality was. We never really worked out. A great mishmash of ill-shapen bodies and ill-shapen paranoias and egos. That was the wonderful mix of Carry On. Whereas in Benny Hill, the women tended to be entirely decorative, entirely the butt of the comedy.

20:48And I think in the long run, it's pointless to analyse these things overmuch. You sound pompous when you do. But when asked, I've made that simple point. Well, listening to that Ben Elton clip, I think he was absolutely spot on. I mean, yes, Carry On did propagate a much more intelligent version of females than Benny's ever did. I have to jump in because I think one of the significant changes, you know, aside from classes, that Victoria Wood won a talent competition around this in the 70s, 80s, and she was an original driver of content. Emma Thompson, who's from a very different background, also got her own show.

21:27So it was the beginning of women driving or being encouraged and allowed to drive your own content as well. And as I say, all the boundaries are merging. We have different boundaries now. I said that we'd talk a little bit more about Ernie. Can either of you do a West Country accent? Because I can't. Well, go on. Promise me that you'll... Matthew's trying to hand me the lyrics. I know them. Oh, my Lord. So I'll have a go and if it's embarrassing please edit it out. But it was something like You could hear the youth beats pound as they raced across the ground and the clatter of the wheels as they spun round and round.

22:03As he galloped into Market Street, hand upon his vest, his name was Ernie and he drove the fastest milk car in the West. Oh we've got a clap. A minor clap for that. That was good. That was good. I got a couple of words wrong didn't I Matthew? It's not exactly Tennyson or Marlow. two previous lives on this show. But for a certain generation, these lines are, and for you too, Jonathan, unforgettable. Take a listen to this, Desert Island Discs from 2006. Well, this would really just remind me of my childhood. This is Ernie, The Fastest Milkman in the West by Benny Hill. And when you're asked to sing a song, this is, I'm afraid, about the only song to which the words I can always remember all of them.

22:44So give us a quick blast before Benny Hill does. Go on. How does it begin? Just quote it. You can hear the hoofbeats pound as they race across the ground. The clatter of the wheels as they span round and round. It's wonderful stuff. Great. You can hear the hoofbeats pound as they raced across the ground. Gosh, David Cameron of all people. That was the Christmas number one for five weeks back in 1971. And for those who don't know the story, perhaps you, Jonathan, can fill us in. What actually happens in this? Oh, my goodness, it's wonderful. Well, Ernie is a libidinous milkman and was having an affair with Sue, who lived at Linley Lane in number 22.

23:2422. And then he had a rival, an evil-looking man, Two-Ton Ted from Teddington, who drove the baker's van. They had a big fight. Ted threw rock cakes at Ernie. Ernie tried to fight back. Ernie died with rock cake-related injuries. Went to heaven. And then Two-Ton Ted is having his end away with Sue, and they hear Ernie in heaven. Is it the windows rattling or Ernie's ghostly gold tops are rattling in their crate? They won't forget Ernie. It's silly fun, isn't it? Very eerie ending. And then the lovely female chorus goes, Ernie, slightly castrated. But you know, there was so much more to him than silly songs and chasing ladies around a tree.

24:12That's the thing. There's enough brilliant Benny Hill content, Helen. to non-sexist and non-racist to fill a decades full of brilliantly funny, politically correct comedy series. And it adds up for you to a great life? Well, obviously it does, isn't it? I mean, he was a great success and he made millions laugh and we've covered comedians on this show before and we've covered people with less than alluring private lives too. Like who? Mussolini, for instance. He wasn't very funny. No, no, no, no. He was not one of the comedians. Which comedians of you? Oh, Andy Kaufman. I heard that one the other day.

24:49Yes, yeah. Before summing up Benny, I should say that he died over Easter in 1992. So just three years after he was sacked by Thames TV, he was found slumped on the sofa in his Teddington flat by long-time producer Dennis Kirkland. His great collaborator, Nicholas Parsons, suggested that Benny died of a broken heart. Michael Grade was chief executive at Channel 4 at the time of his sacking, but had been at both the BBC and LWT. First of all, Benny never saw it coming, that the show was ever going to come to an end. Could it have been handled better? Probably, in retrospect, it could have been.