Benny Hill - more than just the fastest milkman in the west

Nearly three decades after his death, Benny Hill still arouses conflicting opinions. Was he just a dinosaur of sexist comedy or the last in the line of legendary music-hall entertainers? Actually I think he was a bit of both and a lot more besides. Throughout the Seventies he was a perennial ratings winner for ITV but in our household he held a special place in our affections thanks to some shared roots.

Like Dad, Benny – or Alfred, as he was christened - attended Taunton’s School, Southampton. Indeed, they must have overlapped by at least one academic year. Dad may have lost his childhood accent before I knew him but Hill must be the only TV personality who right to the end spoke with an unmistakably Southampton burr. Indeed it was very much part of his persona. I don’t know whether he supported the Saints or Hampshire’s cricket team like Dad but Benny and he seemed to share more than just an educational alma mater. Dad was quite a highbrow opera and book-loving soul but I never forget the sound of him chuckling to Hill’s humour, and it was contagious.

One of Hill’s most appealing traits was a reluctance to follow the celebrity trail, sticking resolutely to his Hampshire heritage and maintaining an air of mystery. Even his scheduling didn’t conform to the light entertainment stereotype. For starters, his shows weren’t broadcast as a series. Each one was An Event. I recall once reading that the reason for the intervals between programmes was the star ‘travelling around Europe in search of ideas’. Whether he nicked those ideas from foreign TV or dreamed them up while sunning himself on the Cote D’Azur, it didn’t seem to matter. Apparently he was a fluent French speaker so wouldn’t have needed subtitles.

Benny Hill also succeeded where many shows in the Seventies failed in that he enticed us to pressing the ‘3’ button. We didn’t watch much ITV but Hill, despite leaving the Beeb in 1969, played a major role in our television repertoire. He wasn’t a ‘Mr Saturday Night’ like a Forsyth, Barrymore, Davidson or Yarwood; The Benny Hill Show was, from memory, a fixture of Wednesday evenings.  So what, apart from the Southampton connection, was the attraction?

Firstly, like all the greatest clowns, he simply looked funny. His features seem lost in that shining moon-face, his cheeky expressions suggestive of a class clown testing his teacher’s patience to the limit, and getting away with it through sheer charisma. He was also quite unusual because his shows mixed visual gags with verbal jokes or musical setpieces, and without an army of gag-writers. Like much sketch comedy, it could be a bit hit-and-miss. After all, when you’ve seen one lot of slapping Jackie Wright’s bald head or saucy chambermaid chasing, you’ve seen ‘em all.

And yet we persevered, because they were the silent equivalent of contemporary catchphrases like ‘Stupid boy’, ‘I’m free!’ or ‘And now for something completely different….’  The extended filmed sequences must have taken a lot of work, setting up the camera angles to conceal the inevitable dribbling hosepipe or the signpost behind the semi-naked woman, etc, etc. There was always something to make you smile. And if it was approaching the end of the hour, you knew it would be rounded off with a sped-up chase to the chirpy staccato tune of ‘Yakety Sax’. They weren’t exactly the epitome of sophistication but appealed to all ages, just as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had done fifty years earlier.

For anyone of a certain age, that piece of music evokes not only Benny Hill but my whole childhood, and it is still parodied today. Perhaps the funniest instance was broadcast in 1994, not long after the star died, his career end having been hastened by ‘alternative’ comedians such as Ben Elton, who had publicly condemned the casual sexism of Hill and his ilk.  This made the Harry Enfield’s show’s filmed skit of the politically-correct comic as ‘Benny Elton’ even wittier. Some accused the sequence as being disrespectful of Benny Hill, but I disagree.  It not only paid homage to Hill’s memory but also demonstrated that Elton could indulge in self-mockery as much as the next Guardian-reading, right-on leftie.

Unlike Harry Enfield, Benny Hill totally dominated his shows. While he surrounded himself with a supporting cast of comely wenches, Jackie Wright, Bob Todd and the perfectly polished straight man, Henry McGee, Hill filled the screen virtually throughout. He’d play a range of characters but his most recognisable recurring creation was Fred Scuttle.  Anyone aged fifty or above must at some point in their lives have flicked a cap off-centre, placed their tongue behind their lower lip, blinked furiously and given a clumsy-open-palmed salute. Haven’t they? Come on, admit it!

Personally, my Benny Hill highlight has to be his chart-topping single ‘Ernie’ which cheered up our cold December nights in 1971. Accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek promo film, it was a near-faultless novelty song. It related a story, a lively tune building to a crescendo for the dramatic Ernie vs Two-Ton Ted fight to the death and a delightful pay-off at the end. The song contained genuinely amusing lyrics with only a modicum of harmless innuendo so that Catherine and I could gleefully repeat without embarrassment - for either ourselves or Mum and Dad. That Christmas I harboured hopes of seeing Benny Hill perform ‘Ernie’ on his show but in fact he had already done so the previous year. However, it’s not the same without seeing Hill holding Trigger’s reins or exchanging strawberry-flavoured yogurts and rock cakes with moustache-twirling McGee in their bid to win the heart of the widowed Sue.

So was Benny Hill’s humour really sexist? In part, yes. But so was most comedy of the era, from Python to The Two Ronnies, the Carry Ons to the ‘Confessions…’, Jim Davidson to On The Buses. Yet even in these more enlightened times, there is a mitigating factor for Hill. Almost invariably he failed to ‘get the girl’. For all the lascivious grins and bawdy stereotypes, the joke tended to be on him. Even in ‘Ernie’, whilst the stereotypical milkman undoubtedly supplied Sue with more than just a pinta-milka-day, it was he who ultimately bit the dust.

In reality, Benny Hill wasn’t, as far as I’m aware, victim of a stale pork pie catching him in the eye. Apparently he fell victim to a coronary thrombosis at the age of 68. Curiously, whilst the recorded version of ‘Ernie’ had the eponymous dairyman dying at only 52, the original TV song stated his age as ….68. Spooky, or what? Cue Twilight Zone music…..  

As a millionaire TV superstar, Benny Hill spent much of his professional life living in swish Kensington or close to the Teddington Studios where his TV show was filmed. However, with no wife or children to consider, he was buried back in Southampton just a mile or so from Taunton’s School. So is that the end of Benny Hill? I do wonder if late-night visitors to Hollybrook cemetery experience a frisson of fear. Was that the trees a-rustling or the hinges on the gate? Nah. I reckon it’s the late milkman’s ghostly gold-tops a-rattling in their crate.