What’s Wrong With Benny Hill? – White Bear Theatre

What’s Wrong With Benny Hill? continues at the White Bear Theatre, London until 24 January 2026.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

My memories of Benny Hill were the final chases from his TV series with buxom, scantily dressed females either being pursued by or in pursuit of Benny. And of course, Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West). Now we have You Tube to recap the sketches from his enormously successful shows, TV making him Britain’s top comedian at the time, though most of his humour – like that of so many others of those decades – would fail to pass current tests.

Mark Carey’s play with songs with Carey – who bears more than a passing resemblance to Hill – playing him, mixes sketches, biography and most successfully, dramatisation of the comedian’s final days. We witness his genuine dismay at how what had been found so funny by the nation was suddenly condemned for being sexist and even a danger to women.

We learn about Alfred Hawthorne Hill and his parents, brother and sister, and his father’s involvement in the first sales of condoms (‘johnnies’ as they were then known), his early non-descript jobs including a stint in Woolworths, and his recruitment into the army where he found a taste for performing.

Spectacularly unsuccessful, he was even booed off the stage in Sunderland. He enjoys France, develops an obsession with toilet humour and a penchant for peeing in the open air from his father, and struggles with mediocre gigs, a dislike of live audiences. And then came television. Television was the making of Hill, even doubters astonished at his meteoric rise to fame.

Carey impersonates Hill with uncanny precision, the hats with the brow flipped upwards, the gurning faces, the voice, the walk. The songs, by Kevin Oliver Jones, untitled, narrative rather than memorable, cover the decades, the early 1960s permissive society taking to his brand of comic lasciviousness, despite being condemned for bringing ‘filth’ into people’s homes by campaigners like Mary Whitehouse.

While the first half is essentially biography, the second half digs deep, and Carey goes beyond re-creating the acts and persona of Hill and explores his genuine confusion as to why he fell so quickly. The scenes with the young solicitor who comes to make his will, astonished at his frugal lifestyle, piles of uncashed cheques, and the unlikely heirs to his £6 million fortune, are gripping.

Hill has a reclusive existence, despite reporters spying on him, hoping to find a juicy bit of gossip about his private life. Unaware of his fame and performances, he gives the solicitor a video to watch, which on a second visit she informs him she didn’t find funny, though her boyfriend did.

Many of Hill’s skits would undoubtedly be considered racist, and Carey doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable truths, most chilling in his sketch as a stereotype of a Chinese man, who challenges us as to why we found such figures funny. It’s a moment of real frisson and drama.

Georgie Taylor plays multiple different characters and is a real find. Playing everything from characters referred to as ‘blonde bimbos’, to Hill’s elderly father, brash Americans (who loved Hill’s brand of humour), the editor of the The Sun newspaper, Mary Whitehouse, the will-making solicitor and a brash feminist comedian who regularly attacks Hill’s brand of humour.

The scenes with Hill at the end of his life, eating out of tins in his rented flat, surrounded by squalor and debris, are extraordinarily poignant. Taylor is a versatile actress, switching accents and characters in seconds, a mimic, comedian and actress capable of real depth in this two-hander.

As one of the characters says, “what people find funny is a reflection of the society of the time”. Yes, Hill’s humour may not have aged well when viewed through a contemporary lens, but he is still watched in many countries around the world. One may cringe at moments watching the unsubtle humour, of an ilk with that of Stanley Baxter, Frankie Howerd and others, but Carey’s play reminds us that to lump Hill m together with the likes of Jimmy Savile and Gary Glitter does him a disservice.

One measure of the success of Carey’s drama is that I and my partner continued to debate it on the way home. How seaside postcard and Carry On humour is now condemned, how comedians that came later like Joan Rivers were developing the innuendoes of Hill’s humour into something more observational. How ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ is now seen as something sinister.

In 2026, debates about permissible humour continue, with social media channels allowing comedians with far greater sexual explicitness a platform. This play is a timely reminder of how easily tastes can change, and how Hill’s cartoonish humour, which was merely intended to make people laugh, came so easily to be considered dangerous and inappropriate and led to his fall from grace. Something we see all too often in literature, cinema, theatre, art, musical theatre and even opera. And must guard against. What was not permissible is now permissible and vice versa. This play is a reminder that there are no absolutes.

Leon Ferguson