History Trivia / TheBennyHillShow

* AuthorExistenceFailure: A few years after the show was cancelled, Central Independent Television offered Hill a contract for a new series of shows. Unfortunately, the contract arrived in the post on 20 April 1992 -- the day he died.

* DoingItForTheArt: 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.

* MissingEpisode: About half of the BBC episodes (1955-68) have gone through the notorious purges.

** Jane Leeves would rather forget about her stint as a "Hill's Angel".

* BigNameFan:
** Creator/JohnnyCarson and Ed [=McMahon=], big fans of Benny Hill, tried several times to get him on ''Series/TheTonightShow'', but Hill always declined as he didn't want to travel the large distance to Los Angeles.
** As related on Creator/TheBBC programme ''Living Famously'', Hill visited the home of Creator/CharlieChaplin after Chaplin's death. Chaplin's son Eugene took Hill into his father's private study and showed him several Benny Hill videotapes on a shelf. Eugene told Hill that his father was a great fan and used to watch the tapes with great enjoyment in his final years. Hill, a major fan of Chaplin, was reportedly moved to tears.
** Radio and TV host Adam Carolla claimed that he was a fan of Hill and that he considered Hill "as American as The Beatles". During an episode of ''Series/TheManShow'', Carolla performed in what was billed as a tribute to "our favourite Englishman, Sir Benny Hill" (Hill was never knighted) in more risqué versions of some of the sketches. Carolla played a rude and lecherous waiter, a typical Hill role, and the sketch featured many of the staples of Hill's shows, including a Jackie Wright-esque bald man, as well as the usual scantily clad women.
** Music/MichaelJackson was a Hill fan: "I just love your Benny Hill," the young Jackson told a bemused British music-press critic during a 1970s tour, "he's so funny!". He even visited Benny in England.
** Music/{{Genesis}} may have been fans of Hill. In 1987, they filmed a video for their song "Anything She Does", featuring Hill as his character Fred Scuttle, an incompetent security guard who lets a ridiculous number of fans backstage at a Genesis concert.
** Creator/AnthonyBurgess made no secret of his admiration for Hill. Burgess, whose novels were often comic, relished language, wordplay, and dialect, admired the verbal and comedic skill that underlay Hill's success. Reviewing a biography of Hill, ''Saucy Boy'', in the Guardian in 1990, Burgess described Hill as "a comic genius steeped in the British music-hall tradition" and "one of the great artists of our age". A meeting between the two men was described in a newspaper article by Burgess and recalled in the Telegraph newspaper by the satirist Craig Brown.
** In a June 2011 interview with The Observer, Music/SnoopDogg declared himself to be a fan of Hill.
** In ''Benny Hill: The World's Favourite Clown'', filmed shortly before his death, celebrities such as Creator/BurtReynolds, Creator/MichaelCaine, John Mortimer, Creator/MickeyRooney, and Creator/WalterCronkite, among others, expressed their appreciation of and admiration for Hill and his humour — and in Reynolds' case, the appreciation extended to the Hill's Angels, as well.

* RoleEndingMisdemeanor: Creator/BobTodd was fired by Hill himself 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 a few days later with no memory of how he had gotten there. The producer of the show persuaded Hill to rehire Todd, in part because of Todd's importance to the show and because his drunkenness rarely affected his work.

* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
** Johnny Carson and Ed [=McMahon=], big fans of Benny Hill, tried several times to get him on ''Series/TheTonightShow'', but Hill always declined as he didn't want to travel the large distance to Los Angeles.
** A few years after the show was cancelled, Central Independent Television offered Hill a contract for a new series of shows. Unfortunately, the contract arrived in the post on 20 April 1992 -- the day he died.

* RealSongThemeTune: The series used a fast version of Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax" as its closing theme. They also used an instrumental arrangement of "Mah Na Mah Na" as background music for fast-paced comedy sequences.

* RecycledScript: Several sketches from the three black and white episodes were later re-made in color.

* OldShame: 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.

* RecycledScript: Several sketches from the three black and white episodes were later re-made in colour.

* ActingForTwo: Several sketches have Benny Hill playing two or more roles. Notably the parodies of ''Series/CagneyAndLacey'', ''Film/MurderOnTheOrientExpress1974'', ''Series/TheATeam'' (where he plays both Hannibal and Baracus) or ''Theatre/WhosAfraidOfVirginiaWoolf'' (where he's reprising both the roles of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor).

* GroupieBrigade: Benny Hill loved to travel and made frequent trips to Italy, Spain, and France. He did this in relative anonymity at first. But once Benny's show became very popular, he could NOT go anywhere in those countries without being recognized and mobbed by fans.

* ActingForTwo: Several sketches have Benny Hill playing two or more roles. Notably the parodies of ''Series/CagneyAndLacey'', ''Film/MurderOnTheOrientExpress'', ''Series/TheATeam'' (where he plays both Hannibal and Baracus) or ''Theatre/WhosAfraidOfVirginiaWoolf'' (where he's reprising both the roles of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor).

* HeyItsThatGuy:
** Jane Leeves (Daphne Moon in ''Series/{{Frasier}}'') started her career as eye-candy in Benny Hill's sketches.
** In the "Ye Olde Wishing Well" sketch, the muscle man is played by none other than [[Franchise/StarWars Darth Vader]]!
** Benny Hill was one of many comedians to whom ''Radio/JustAMinute'' chairman and UK ''Sale of the Century'' host Nicholas Parsons played straight man at some point in his career; his appearances were mostly early in the run of ''The Benny Hill Show''. Even after he left, the jokes at his expense continued; in a "Wondergran Meets Dracula" sketch from 1979, Wondergran wards Dracula away by holding up a photo of a smiling Parsons.

** Benny Hill was one of many comedians to whom ''Radio/JustAMinute'' chairman and UK ''Sale of the Century'' host Nicholas Parsons played straight man at some point in his career; his appearances were mostly early in the run of ''The Benny Hill Show''. Even after he left, the jokes at his expense continued; in a "Wondergran vs. Dracula" sketch from a late series episode, Wondergran wards Dracula away by holding up a photo of a smiling Parsons.

* GroupieBrigade: Benny Hill loved to travel and made frequent trips to Italy, Spain, and France. He did this in relative anonymnity at first. But once Benny's show became very popular, he could NOT go anywhere in those countries without being recognized and mobbed by fans.

** Benny Hill was one of many comedians to whom ''Radio/JustAMinute'' chairman and UK ''Sale of the Century'' host Nicholas Parsons played straight man at some point in his career; his appearances were mostly early in the run of ''The Benny Hill Show''. Even after he left, the jokes at his expense continued; in one late episode, a vampire was repelled when his would-be victim held up a picture of a smiling Parsons.

* HeyItsThatGuy: Jane Leeves (Daphne Moon in ''Series/{{Frasier}}'') started her career as eye-candy in Benny Hill's sketches.

* HeyItsThatGuy
** Jane Leeves (Daphne Moon in ''Series/{{Frasier}}'') started her career as eye-candy in Benny Hill's sketches.

* GroupieBrigade: Benny Hill loved to travel and made frequent trips to Italy, Spain, and France. He did this in relative anonymnity at first. But once Benny's show became very popular, he could go anywhere in those countries without being recognized and mobbed by fans.

* HeyItsthatGuy

* [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff French Love Benny Hill]]: As well as Americans and Romanians, much to the British's puzzlement. The show has [[ValuesDissonance not aged well]] in its native Britain, but remains popular overseas.