Benny Hill; TV Comic Was ‘King Leer’ of Sexual Farce

Benny Hill, the bawdy but beloved king of TV comedy whose knockabout skits and bevies of scantily clad beauties made him a favorite on both sides of the Atlantic, was found dead Monday night at his London home.

Police said the pudgy comedian with the bug eyes had been under treatment for a heart ailment, but there was no immediate word on the cause or time of his death. A Scotland Yard spokesman said police had been summoned by a neighbor and found the 240-pound Hill dead. He was 67 and had not been seen over the Easter weekend.

“The Benny Hill Show” first went on British TV in 1969 as an hourlong madhouse of mimicry and sight gags, most of which centered on a lecherous Hill goggling at the ample apparatus of the women he called his “helpers.”

He featured himself in most of those skits, posing as an astronaut, a passenger liner captain, a shepherd herding his “shepherdesses,” a bespectacled misfit or as a woman.

Despite the British nature of the comedy, the sexual innuendoes were well understood in more than 80 countries, from Angola and China to the Soviet Union.

The shows seen in those distant lands (and in the United States as well) were 30-minute edited distillations of the English versions.

Known at home as “King Leer,” Hill featured a cast of home-grown characters headed by Jackie Wright, the diminutive bald man who was always being flattened by some brute or thrashed by one of the Amazon-like women he pursued. Henry McGee was the announcer/straight man. The cast also included Bob Todd and Nicholas Parsons.

Hill was addicted to puns and double-entendre limericks, targeting the authoritative and the pompous with his barbs.

The women in the show had little to say, if anything, and were cast for their physical attributes. Toward the end of a typical skit, however, they would band together by cracking the impertinent Hill on the head with a blunt object and then chase him down the road.

However, Hill’s dedication to sexual farce gradually brought him to grief in his native land, where he was accused of vulgarity.

Thames Television dropped the show in 1989 but episodes continued to be produced in Britain for overseas consumption.

Hill had important fans at home, among them John Mortimer, creator of “Rumpole of the Bailey,” who said Hill’s critics were guilty of “political feminist nonsense.”

Author Anthony Burgess found Hill’s lascivious antics “the comedy of sexual regret.”

In a review of Hill’s biography, written by the comedian’s brother Leonard, Burgess called on the critics to “quell their superior disgust at bosoms and lavatories, and celebrate one of the great artists of our age.”

Burgess also admired the linguistic gift that enabled Hill to portray a cast of characters ranging from a Japanese warrior to a French waiter at the “Hotel Sordide.”

Philip Oakes in the Sunday Times of London in 1980 said the Rabelaisian comic with the look of a choirboy let loose in a nudist colony was “a soiled cherub, the angel with the dirty face. He is anathema to Women’s Lib, this porky apostle of male chauvinism. Yet when he lusts it is with a heart that miraculously remains pure. His naughtiness is without a stain. He is greedy, vulnerable, vulgar and invigorating. He is also very funny.”

Hill came naturally to his knockabout style. His father was a druggist who had run off to join the circus as a boy; his grandfather early on took him to musical revues. There the young Alfred Hawthorn Hill first saw the salacious comedians surrounded by the bosomy women who were to be the genesis of his shows.

As a young man he worked as a milkman (and later portrayed a milkman-voyeur on the show) and as a department store clerk, developing his comedy craft at British army camps during World War II.

He went on television when it was in its infancy, and by 1955 he had his own show.

Although he seemed an extroverted farceur , his personal life was deeply private.

Despite his wealth, he was known to ride buses and quietly arrange to take disabled people on outings.

He was a lifelong bachelor; his biography says two women rejected his marriage proposals many years ago. In a rare personal comment he recently said, “To be in love with someone who doesn’t love back gives you a pain in the chest at night.”

There are no known survivors.