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Having a strip based on a popular
comedian of the day was always a tradition in Look-in, and they went
through a few. The longest lasting of these was Benny Hill.
Already
hugely successful through his TV series which unusually wasn't shown on a
regular basis, but in hour long specials that appeared every now and
again.
The show was primarily sketch based, with Benny adopting an array of
disguises, in a similar fashion to Dick Emery. One of the most
memorable parts of the show was the sketches which involved Benny chasing
after women, and usually failing and having the tables turned on him in
some way, these sketches were filmed without dialogue, in a very 'Silent
Movie' type way, allowing the visual gags to speak for themselves, along
with crazy music, the most famous of which, called 'Yakety Sax' (you know
the one...!!!) is now synonymous with Benny.
Benny had an array of stalwarts, who he used to full effect in the
sketches, Henry McGee who was the perfect straight man, usually cast as an
interviewer, interviewing may of Benny's oddball creations, Nicholas
Parsons also did similar sketches. Bob Todd and Jack Wright who used
to be in a lot of the 'silent' sketches, and Bella Emberg, the token 'ugly
woman' who Benny used to end up with at the end of a sketch, she went on
to great success doing the same job for Russ Abbot.
Benny had a regular dance troupe called 'Hill's Angels' who also played
the chased girls in the sketches.
The strip took full advantage of the fact that Benny
did a lot of different characters on his show, each strip was a short self
contained story about a member of Benny's family, all of them looking
strikingly like Benny of course!
The artists on the strip did a great job, and it was
really enjoyable at first, but like one or two other strips, it outstayed
it's welcome and became a bit tiring and samey, but it must have been
doing well in the regular readers poll Look-in did. |
