TV has mined a rich seam of golden-age comedian biopics – but Benny Hill has yet to be afforded the posthumous privilege. That’s partly the point of this stab in that direction by Mark Carey, which asks why Hill has been so thoroughly expunged from our comedy pantheon. The reasons are widely known, of course, and rehearsed again here: the former best-loved man on television traded in a humour many modern viewers find sexist, racist and sad. One might hope for greater insight from a 100-minute play on the subject but, for all the pleasures along the way, it doesn’t have a great deal to add.
Carey’s play with songs flashes back through Hill’s life from his last days as a “mad recluse” talking to a visiting solicitor about his will. With all other roles played with spirit by Georgie Taylor, we meet Hill’s dad “the Captain”, who sold “rubber johnnies” for a living, and find Benny writing letters to his auntie from the cafes he frequented in France. Between scenes, a babble of online voices debates his vexed legacy. Taylor takes on an occasional narrator role as a Ben Elton-alike 80s comic, whose generation here stands accused of cruelly – and hypocritically – casting Hill beyond the entertainment pale.
But in its closing moments, the play seems to concur with the idea that Hill’s comedy, of old men perving on buxom beauties, had had its day. There are gestures towards a vindication of his oeuvre, notably in one sketch teasing us with a racist east Asian caricature, and listing all the other now-heralded acts who performed this type of material too. But when they might mount a more substantial case for the comic’s defence, neither Hill nor the play get far beyond “a joke’s either funny or it’s not” and allegations of PC gone mad.
The play doesn’t dig deep into the personal life of this “saucy boy who never grew up”. What we do get is a vivid reminder of what millions once found hilarious, courtesy of a performance by Carey himself in which Hill remains elusive behind the winking, the smirking and the compulsive quips.
