Why Does Britain Now Hate Benny Hill?

Benny Hill remains one of British television’s most successful ever exports. His insanely long-running ‘The Benny Hill Show’ was shown in over 140 countries between 1955 and 1991, a staggering achievement. For context, even with today’s savvy sales team and hundreds more territories to target, the BBC sold 'Top Gear’ to 214 countries. More, yes, but not substantially so given the vastly smaller worldwide landscape at the time. It was no more loved than in the USA, where, despite some of the more risqué material being edited out, it was watched by audiences in their tens of millions, where he became an unexpected household name.

Yet in the UK, he’s slowly but surely been forgotten. The show has scarcely been repeated at all since the early 90s, but still gets aired all around the world today, in Italy, Canada, Finland and Australia, to name just a few.

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And yet, his famous fans were legion. Charlie Chaplin owned a whole collection of his TV shows. Talk show host Johnny Carson frequently asked him to be on his show, the biggest in the world at the time, but Hill refused to travel to California. Michael Jackson loved him too, first telling journalists as much during a tour of the UK in the 1970s, before meeting him in person in 1992.

A tribute show, made just before his death, featured contributions from legends like Burt Reynolds, Michael Caine and Mickey Rooney, while TV critic Garry Bushell campaigned to have a statue of him erected in his hometown of Southampton. In a 2011 interview, Snoop Dogg also proclaimed himself a fan.

But eventually, even the US was deprived of Hill. In 2007, when BBC America finally dropped repeats of the show, a spokesperson for the cable channel said: “I am afraid Benny Hill reflects older Britain and our job is to reflect contemporary Britain and all the cool shows coming out.”

And therein lay the nub of the problem. Whether audiences moved away from his style of bawdy, end-of-the-pier humour seems immaterial; the industry most certainly did. Like many comedians and comedy shows that were popular in the 70s and 80s, the movement of the alternative comedy scene was brutal in its sacking of the established order, and its exponents soon found themselves in positions of power in broadcasting, notably on Channel 4 and the BBC. In no time at all, the likes of Benny Hill were ousted.

Ben Elton, one of the foremost members of the alternative scene (but now, interestingly, regarded as doggedly middle of the road), was particularly scathing in his views on Hill. In one interview, he implied that Hill’s schtick mitigated incidences of sexual assault against women. He called him a 'dirty old man, tearing the clothes off nubile girls while chasing them round a park’. As descriptions go, it wasn’t massively inaccurate.

But such was the invective, Hill’s currency waned and he was eventually dropped by ITV in 1989. His show was also massively expensive to make, said to be in the region of £450,000 per episode. John Howard Davies, the head of light entertainment at Thames, was the one who finally wielded the axe. “The audiences were going down, the programme was costing a vast amount of money, and he (Hill) was looking a little tired,” he was quoted saying in a TV documentary. Indeed, critics saw his show as outdated and not reflecting the mood of society.

When Hill’s show was dropped from BBC America in 2007, David Croft, who wrote shows like 'Dad’s Army’ and 'Are You Being Served?’ said: “As for Benny Hill not reflecting modern Britain that is just rubbish. It never reflected anything. It is just a funny show. This is a case of taking these things far to too seriously.”

Without his show, Hill, who had never married and had no children, declined in health, and suffered a mild heart attack in February, 1992. He died alone at his flat in Teddington just weeks later, found by his long-time friend and producer Dennis Kirkland after not responding to calls for several days.

There were two notably tragic twists in the tale.

Thames Television, which had been receiving requests in increasing number for the show to be repeated, was planning to air some re-edited shows, and was hoping to have Hill make some new specials. On the day he died, April 20, 1992, he had received a contract in the post from Central Independent Television to make a series of new specials, after turning down competing deals between Thames and Carlton.

But it was never to be.

Image credits: Rex Features