Review: What’s Wrong With Benny Hill?
January 21st would have been Benny Hill’s birthday: a fitting ceremonial to go and see this play about his life and times. Born in 1924, he would have been 102 on the day I saw this production, but he died alone sitting in front of his television 32 years earlier. He was just 68 years old.
This is an occasionally barbed tribute to his work, his celebrity and more importantly his controversial status in the pantheon of great British comedians. Indeed, he was rated as one of the most successful comedians of his day, one of the first to gain fame through the growing spotlight of television.
His first appearance was in 1949 when only one percent of the population owned a television, but by the mid-1950s – after Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation encouraged one-third of the population to buy a TV – he became a regular household favourite. A guaranteed crowd-pleaser beamed into working class living rooms up and down the country.
Since then, his 40-year career in bawdy, saucy, visual humour has been broadcast on 130 television channels in 100 countries throughout the world. So greatly had his star risen, that the Benny Hill Show in 1969 was watched by millions more people than saw Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 moon landing earlier in the day. By 1971, he was ITV Personality of the Year.
This shoestring Fringe show charts the rise and fall of the man – rated in the Independent (as recently as 2019) – as the third greatest British comedian after Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. While he often occupied a similar world of silent film, albeit with a yakety-sax accompaniment, his was a world of larger-than-life caricatures: short bald submissive men; tall buxom blondes; sexually-frustrated grandads; and humourless upper-class twits (none of whom appear on stage here). The question for the audience is posed’ “Was he a dirty old man, or a comedy genius?”
This play, staged at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington in south London, is a two-hander, with writer Mark Carey in the title role, and Georgie Taylor taking all other characters, including his father, a tabloid journalist, a dancer, Mary Whitehouse, and several others. The songs are simple rhyming ditties, complete with racy punchlines, sung with shameless aplomb.
The stage is set permanently in Benny’s spartan flat, with 70s wallpaper, rudimentary furniture and the all-important TV. A single man, he was famously spendthrift and died with around £7 million in the bank and uncashed cheques in the drawer. He died one day after his friend, Frankie Howard, but Hill’s lonely body lay undiscovered for days.
This could have been a very sad production about a tragically upended life, but the first act was a rather jolly affair with Fred Scuttle-esque characterisations, bittersweet reminiscences and snappy banter. Carney’s tongue hung out, he smirked at his asides and offered the audience sly sideways glances in classic cheeky Benny fashion. However, the story-telling turned darker in the second act, which catalogues Hill’s fall from grace, but becomes too preachy for comfort.
Appearing on stage as the Chinaman (“Herro, every-bloody”) the audience’s discomfort is manufactured by awkward stared silence from the character. “Is this racist?” Carney asks, half-in and half-out of character. “Of course it’s racist”, he shouts. “Are you feeling uncomfortable?” Well, I wasn’t until you yelled at me.
Suddenly we were in the serious business of the play’s title. Had Benny out-lived his sell-by date? Had society moved on? Was he simply not funny anymore? Was he everything that we were now supposed not to like? Indeed, why did Benny Hill, (Benny asks) come to represent dated, common vulgarity when comedians from Spike Milligan to Monty Python had used blackface too, they too had featured topless women, and yet survived in the court of public opinion. Was it that they were appealing to the educated sense of irony of the middle-classes? After all, Benny Hill was just a working class, ex-milkman who lived in Teddington.
Shortly before Hill’s death, Anthony Bugess, the author of The Clockwork Orange described him as “a comic genius steeped in the British music hall tradition” – a tradition, of course, that was fading from memory. But Benny Hill represented something altogether more unacceptable and unpalatable. Here was a bawdy, working class comic who couldn’t change his act. His “confirmed bachelor” status – a euphemism for homosexuality, which he always denied – added to his downfall by not responding to the social pressure to come out. But of course, he also portrayed women as fantasy sex-objects. And that was no longer permissible .
Ultimately, the accepted narrative is that his career was ended by changing fashion – like the sea-side postcard – becoming unacceptably out-of-touch. Working men’s clubs were closing and new Alternative Comedians were emerging to bury what remained of their predecessors. While attacking Thatcher, they were equally contemptuous of unenlightened working class “ignorance” of the social mores of the time.
Georgie Taylor’s narrator-slash-“alternative” comedian parody is an interesting turn. A thick Liverpudlian accent adds to the unrelenting accusatory comedy of Alexi Sayle et al, stomping all over old comics in their workerist hobnail boots. “Is that meant to be funny?” asks Benny after a particularly savage verbal assault, “Actually, it’s just cruel”.
The play goes some way to demonstrating a moralistic continuum between Mary Whitehouse’s condemnation of sexual liberation in the 60s, and the culture war illiberalism of feminists in the 90s. Ironically, today’s linguistic cultural revolutionaries would have little time for gender-critical gags, so humour seems to becoming even more pigeon-holed and with an ever-shorter shelf-life. This production was a thoughtful reminder, at least, that Hill’s comedy, for all its burlesque, tits and racial piss-takes, was not meant to be vindictive.
++++++++++++
What’s Wrong With Benny Hill, by Mark Carney. GSP Theatre Productions
Showing at the White Bear Theatre, Kennington. London SE11 4DJ
Closes 24 January. Catch it here: https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/what’s-wrong-with-benny-hill%3F
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