David Lambert
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2001
- Messages
- 11,377
Chris, that's exactly what it is. I'll have news up this weekend sometime about it. I already have the materials; I simply ran out of time this morning.
it's very likely to be a compilation of sketches from different shows, rather than of his complete (remaining) BBC shows
D'oh! Thanks for sharing, though, William.
Do you all think that A&E will release any of the episodes from the Hill's Angels era? I'm a big fan of Benny's, but I'm a bigger fan of the Angels. Especially Sue!
Yeah! In fact it would be nice if they'd release a disc with just the Angels. I mean Benny was ok, but he surely wasn't why I watched the show.
In fact it would be nice if they'd release a disc with just the Angels.
I've been wishing for a single disc or maybe even a set that would be all Angels. Dance performances, appearances etc. And maybe some interviews.
As for the repetition: It was palpable during this period, because he had all the panache of someone showing it off for the first time.
Palpable and yet Benny still had a plethora of fresh(? wanna be careful suggesting that considering I haven't seen any of his early BBC programming) ideas. I think at this point in his career, 1972-74, he was still ascending whereas in the 80's he was on the decline in terms of his humor. He did the about face from featuring a lot of sketches with pretty scantily clad girls/risque humor to quite a few sketches with children/safe humor.
Speaking of the range of his career, I almost completely forgot to comment on the 3rd disc's bonus feature which is the documentary I believe is an A&E biography on Benny Hill.
I thought it was fantastic and I was quite moved by it. A wonderful inside look at the way he lived and died. Among other things I was very touched by the fact that Benny maintained relationships with handicapped women.
Now, is it my imagination, or on the last two shows with Nicholas Parsons was his involvement more and more marginal compared to his involvement in the show in Set 1? I detected Mr. Parsons on for all of nine minutes (out of a total c.50 minutes) of the Dec. 27, 1972 show (Ep. #15; numbered #4 on A&E Set 2) - eight of which were as Scuttle's straight man in the Fun Boy Club sketch, the other minute as the man in the bowler hat in the "Common Market Square Dance" number. His receding involvement, I know, dovetailed with his burgeoning run as host of the British version of the Sale of the Century game show, which commenced in 1971 and ran to the mid-'80's. Not to mention the fifteen months between his next-to-last show for Mr. Hill and his very last
From what I remember of Mark Lewisohn's fine Hill autobiography, McGee was intended to be Benny's "usual" straight man from the outset, and that when he was unavailable (he did quite a bit of work for "the other side" - BBC - in the early '70s), Hill found Parsons a fine replacement. This is no slight to Parsons. Indeed, I found him to be a refershing change of pace from just having McGee all the time, it's just that Benny's liked to have a core of "regular" performers, and when Henry couldn't make it, he arranged to have a really strong "regular substitute".
It was probably a combination of sorting out work schedules that kept Parsons' appearance in his last couple of shows to a minimum. Perhaps he was only available for one studio session per show, who knows? As Hill planned his shows in advance, perhaps he knew that McGee wasn't available and Parsons only had a small amount of time free, so he just planned those shows to be less reliant on straightmen?
As for the single episode with Paul Eddington playing the straightman rather than Henry or Nicholas: perhaps one of them was originally scheduled to be available but something came up, so Hill would then have had to get somebody to do the work, as the shows may have already been written at that point?
After that one, I guess McGee's "outside" commitment either slowed down, or he was better able to work them around Benny's schedule to avoid any conflicts, avoiding the need to employ another straightman.