The Benny Hill Show - Show Format

Show Format

The Benny Hill Show features Benny Hill in various short comedy sketches. The show also features 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 hallmark. A group of critics accused the show of sexism, but Hill said that female characters kept their dignity while the men chasing 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 speeded-up chase scene involving himself 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 American celebrities, such as W. C. Fields, Orson Welles (renamed "Orson Buggy"), Kenny Rogers, Marlon Brando and Raymond Burr and fictional characters, ranging from The Six Million Dollar Man and Starsky and Hutch to The A-Team and Cagney & Lacey. He also impersonated international celebrities including Nana Mouskouri. His own country's celebrities did not escape his comedic eye either: 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.