Retro Database: Benny Hill Best Of..

As stated in Wikipedia and its relative article: «The Benny Hill Show is a British comedy television show that starred Benny Hill and aired in various forms between 15 January 1955 and 30 May 1991 in over 140 countries. The show focused on sketches that were full of slapstick, mime, parody, and double-entendre. Thames Television cancelled production of the show in 1989 due to declining ratings and large production costs at £450,000 per show.

The Benny Hill Show features Benny Hill in various short comedy sketches and occasional, extravagant musical performances by artists of the time. Hill appears in many different costumes and portrays a vast array of characters.

Slapstick, burlesque and double entendres are his hallmarks. A group of critics accused the show of sexism, but Hill said that female characters kept their dignity while the men who chase them were portrayed as buffoons.

The show often uses undercranking and sight gags to create what he called "live animation", and he employs techniques like mime and parody. The show typically closes with a sped-up chase scene involving him and often a crew of scantily-clad women (usually with Hill being the one chased, due to silly predicaments that he himself caused), a takeoff on the stereotypical Keystone Kops chase scenes. Hill also composed and sang patter songs and often entertained his audience with lengthy high-speed double-entendre rhymes and songs, which he recited or sang in a single take.

Hill also used the television camera to create comedic illusions. For example, in a murder mystery farce entitled "Murder on the Oregon Express" from 1976 (a parody of Murder on the Orient Express) Hill used editing, camera angles, and impersonations to depict a Quinn Martin–like TV "mystery" featuring Hill in the roles of 1970s American television detectives Ironside, McCloud, Kojak, Cannon and Hercule Poirot.
During his television career, Hill performed impersonations or parodies of such American celebrities as W. C. Fields, Orson Welles (renamed "Orson Buggy"), Kenny Rogers, Marlon Brando, Raymond Burr, and fictional characters that range from The Six Million Dollar Man and Starsky and Hutch to The A-Team and Cagney & Lacey.

He also impersonated such international celebrities as Nana Mouskouri and Miriam Makeba. He also impersonated celebrities from his own country: Hill delivered impersonations of British stars such as Shirley Bassey, Michael Caine (in his Alfie role), newscasters Reginald Bosanquet, Alan Whicker and Cliff Michelmore, pop-music show hosts Jimmy Savile and Tony Blackburn, musician Roger Whittaker, his former 1960s record producer Tony Hatch, political figures Lord Boothby and Denis Healey, and Irish comedian Dave Allen. On a few occasions, he even impersonated his former straight man,  Nicholas Parsons. A spoof of who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? saw him playing both Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.»

Enjoy....

Always subtle...