Reviewed by Neil Davey
Featuring Benny Hill, Henry McGee, Jackie Wright, Bob Todd, Sue Upton, Hill's Angels, Ken Sedd,
Jenny Lee Wright, Bella Emberg, Lorraine Doyle, Pan's People | Directed by Dennis Kirkland
UK Certification 12 | Runtime 150 minutes each | UK recommended retail £14.99
Certain comedies improve with age and are always worth reconsidering, while some were never any good to begin with. Others, like Benny Hill, found themselves thrown out with the bathwater when the "alternative" comics — most of whom are now so mainstream they make Hill himself look like Lenny Bruce — came to power.
While it now seems harsh to have laid the blame for everything that the 80s generation was railing against at Hill's door, the rotund one's "ouevre" — if you can apply such a genre term to this sort of innuendo-laden, tits-and-bums stuff — has not aged terribly well. It's not that it's all that offensive: indeed, compared to the "take my wife ... please" routines of the frilly-shirted working men's club comics of the era, Hill's work seems surprisingly innocent. The problem is that, well, it's really not that funny.
I don't think the alternative comics' propaganda war got to me particularly, so the lack of laughs that greeted this retrospective / reissue wasn't because I'd been programmed not to snigger at Hill's alleged sexism. It's just that compared to, say, Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise, whose outputs were equally high around these times, Hill really does look like the poor cousin. It appears then that my fond memories of Hill were down to me being an apparently-not-as-discerning-as-I'd-
hoped teenager at his peak ... or, more likely, down to me being a hormonal slap-bang-in-the-middle-of-puberty-teen grateful for any glint of cleavage or stocking. There's a certain curiosity value to be found in these reissues but, if you have fond memories of Hill, I'd suggest that's how you leave them.
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