Why saucy Benny Hill was kept off our stamps
| Mail Online: "He famously ended his shows chasing after scantily-clad women.
But that running gag has cost Benny Hill his place in history.
Documents yesterday revealed how the comic was dumped from appearing on a set of stamps to commemorate 50 years of ITV because of concerns about his saucy style.
Royal Mail deemed that his jokes were 'in direct opposition to the company's policies on harassment in the work place'."
4 comments:
Booooooooo !
I won't be heartbroken. I still remember the "critical" assessment, perhaps by Micheal Arlen but I hope not for his sake, that made much of how much more tv-savvy Benny Hill was than the Monty Python troupe, the latter being very dull boys in comparison.
Though it is a typically bureaucratic misreading of his Geist in some ways, not so much in others.
But Henry VIII has been on plenty of British stamps--and he chased more women than Benny Hill (and, I suspect, with more purpose).
Oh, will this classist double standard in stamping never end?
I love Benny Hill, but I've been told that he never caught on in Britain in the same way that he did in North America. Most of the shows that we remember him for were in fact done for a North American audience. He was apparently regarded in Britain as an "end of pier" comedian lacking in the sophistication that the British claim to embrace. Saucy is at the heart of that sort of humour, much as it was in the grand old days of North American burlesque, before it became all about strippers.
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