Trivia / The Benny Hill Show

• Acting for Two: Several sketches have Benny Hill playing two or more roles. Notably the parodies of Cagney & Lacey, Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The A-Team (where he plays both Hannibal and Baracus) or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (where he's reprising both the roles of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor).
• Creator Backlash:
  • In the 1980s, as public opinion in Britain was systematically being turned against Hill and his show, two former guest stars, Paula Wilcox and Paul Eddington, successfully lobbied to have the respective programs on which they appeared (23 February 1972 and 21 April 1976) pulled from repeat airings in England.
  • Jane Leeves would rather forget about her stint as a "Hill's Angel".
• Doing It for the Art: After Hill's death, the numerous awards he won for the show were found stuffed in a box in his basement, clearly unimportant to him. Similarly, regular cast member Jackie Wright had a bunch of uncashed royalties cheques from reruns found hidden in a drawer by his sister after his death.
• Edited for Syndication: The late-1970s U.S. broadcasts were edited down to 30 minutes and cut out a lot of the risqué material to avoid the wrath of the Moral Guardians.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The 1977 special produced for Channel 10 in Australia, Benny Hill Down Under, has yet to be released on home video.
• Missing Episode: Of the 32 BBC episodes that aired from 1955-68, only fourteen are known to survive in their entirety, while only fragments exist of another two. The first eleven episodes from 1955-58 aired live and were never recorded to begin with, while three episodes from 1961 and two from 1968 either were never recorded or were recorded but later wiped.^note One version of events claims that the 1968 episodes were junked out of spite after Hill jumped ship to Thames Television; at the very least, he was paid re-run royalties but the episodes were never actually re-run, as the Beeb didn't want to advertise for their commercial rival.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The series used a fast version of Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax" as its closing theme. The Undercranked sequences often featured an instrumental medley of Piero Umiliani's "Mah Nà Mah Nà", Giorgio Moroder's "Doo-Bee-Doo-Bee-Doo", The Pipkins' "Gimme Dat Ding" and Ludwig van Beethoven's "Für Elise". Some other pop songs can be occasionally spotted as background music, such as the String-a-Longs' "Wheels".
• Recycled Script: Various gags were reused from one episode from the next. Several sketches from the three episodes Thames had to produce in black and white due to the 1970-71 "Colour Strike" were later remade in colour.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Bob Todd, a frequent regular on the show, was fired by Hill himself in 1976 after Todd failed to show up for a concert at the London Palladium due to a "drinking episode" so bad that Todd woke up in a Dublin hospital five days later. It wasn't until four years later that Dennis Kirkland convinced Hill to rehire Todd, in part because of Todd's importance to the show and because his drunkenness rarely affected his work.
• Uncredited Role:
  • Candy Davis as a Hill's Angel in "Holiday".
  • Derek Royle as a vagrant in "Carmen".
  • Rikki Howard as a blonde girl at the beach in "Show 3".
  • Penny Irving as an extra in "Show 14".
• What Could Have Been: The show was almost Un-Cancelled, but Hill died on the day the letter was successfully delivered.

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