Issue of the day

Benny Hill? It’s 1970s we should cancel

FOR the first time in almost three decades, episodes of The Benny Hill Show were aired last week on the channel That’s TV. Of course, since none of the sexism has gone away and Benny is still chasing round after women slapping them on the bottom, there has been plenty of dismay.

So, when’s Benny going to be on?

Re-runs of the once popular comedy sketch show are due to air on That’s TV Christmas for seven weeks.

What are people saying about it?

Actress Debbie Arnold, who had appeared to star in the show at the time, said: “I think all the camera angles were gynaecological, to be honest with you. It was ridiculous. As much as I love

Benny, he was a friend of my dad, he was a really nice man, I loved him very much. He was a very, very lovely person. But I just couldn’t bear the shows.

They were just awful and they were so sexist.”

It’s old telly. Why so upset?

Because the world hasn’t moved on quite enough for us all to see it as anything other than the roots of current sexism.

Why focus on Benny? Isn’t it the whole 1970s we need to cancel?

Yes, you’re probably right, so many of those seventies shows, viewed through contemporary eyes now seem excruciating – it seems unfair to pick so much on Benny. And not just for their sexism – also for their racism. Many shows we remember laughing at as a kid, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Fawlty Towers, seem so troubling they barely rouse a chuckle.

Even the mostly lovely Butterflies, written by Carla Lane, has Wendy Craig’s character say she wants to be “raped” by a man.

Just thinking. Was it really much better in the 1980s?

Fair point. You only just have a check through the John Hughes oeuvre of teen movies to witness the full panoply of rape, harassment, homophobia and racism. Watch The A-team and you find women being treated like irrelevant sidekicks or damsels in distress. Then there’s Miami Vice, with its bikini-clad female cast. Probably we need to cancel them too.

Or the 1990s?

You mean, like Chandler’s dad and Fat Monica in Friends? That cleavage episode of Seinfeld? Frasier mansplaining and dismissing his wife as drunk in Cheers? Yes. Wipe.

Last year?

Netflix’s You, with its glamorised stalker sociopath? Or Gossip Girl with its toxic Chuck and Blair relationship?

I mean, do we actually need to cancel the whole of television history and start again? And, given there’s so much telly around, would anyone notice? The Benny Hill fans would.