Benny Hill was born in Southampton in the south of England in 1925. His family was lower-middle class; Hill's father was the manager of a medical appliance company. Hill was attracted early to the stage and saw many live stage shows at the two variety theaters in Southampton. Hill served in the army in the later years of World War II; it was there that he began to perform as a comedian. After demobilization, Hill began working in variety theater, where he slowly learned his craft. In 1956, Hill starred in the feature film comedy Who Done It? (Ealing Studios) as a hapless, bungling private detective. The film was only mildly funny, although Hill did display touches of the comic slapstick and characterization that were to become part of his genius. The film was moderately successful but did nothing to further Hill's career. Instead, it was in the new medium of television that he was to shine.

     Hill's career as a British comedian fits between that of earlier figures such as Tony Hancock and later performers such as Frankie Howerd. Whereas Hancock established his definitive comic persona in radio and then extended this to television, Hill was created by television. Yet Hill was also the most traditional of comedians and his programs had strong roots in variety theater, revolving around comic songs, routines, and sketches rather than an on-going comic characterization and situation. And although Hill had his own show on the BBC as early as 1955, his career was actually launched by the 1960s vogue for comedy on British television. Other British comedians such as Ken Dodd, Charlie Drake, and Frankie Howerd also gained their own shows around the same time, but none had the comic genius and stamina of Hill.

     Part of this genius Ia:y in his writing. Hill wrote all his own material, a grueling task that helps explain the relatively small number of programs produced. Under his later contract with Thames Television, Hill was given full control of his program, allowing him to delay making a program until, in his opinion, he had accumulated enough comic material. Hill also had a hand in producing some of the offshoots of The Benny Hill Show such as the 1970 half-hour silent film Eddie in August.

     Although all his material was original, Hill nevertheless owed a comic debt to U.S. entertainer Red Skelton. Like Skelton, Hill worked in broad strokes and sometimes in pantomime with a series of recurring comic personae. Hill even adopted Skelton's departing line from the latter's show that ran on network television from 1951 to 1971: "Good night, God bless." However, Hill was without Skelton's often-maudlin sentimentality, substituting instead a ribald energy and gusto. Hill's humor was very much in a broad English vaudeville and stage tradition. The Socialist writer George Orwell once drew attention to the kind of humor embodied in the English seaside postcard-hen­ pecked and shrunken older men and randy young men, both attracted to beautiful young women with large breasts, and an older, fatter, unattractive mother-and some of these archetypes also fed into Hill's television comedy, just as it was to feed into the Carry On feature films.

     While Hill's publicity often portrayed him as a kind of playboy who liked to surround himself with beautiful, leggy showgirls, this was an extension of his television persona and had nothing to do with his private life. In fact, Hill never married and lived alone in what would have been a lonely life had it not been for the heavy work demands imposed by the television show.

     Hill's humor, with its reliance upon vulgarity and double-entendres, was never entirely acceptable to the moral standards of some, and his sexism made him seem increasingly old-fashioned. The forces of political correctness finally had their way in 1989, when Thames Television canceled the program due not only to complaints about its smuttiness, but also because its old-fashioned sexism had become increasingly intolerable. In his last television appearance, in 1991, he appeared as himself, the subject of the BBC arts documentary series, Omnibus. Although over the last three years of his life, Hill talked in interviews about a comeback, it was the end of his career. He died in hospital, suffering from a chest complaint, in 1992. Benny Hill once told an interviewer that, like Van Gogh, he would be appreciated in 100 years' time. The statement implied that he was not recognized as a great comedian and was belied by the enormous international popularity of his program and by the fact that in the 1970s and 1980s he was several times voted the Funniest Man in the World by the British television audience.