Benny Hill
Fan Reviews

Benny Hill Show 8-DVD Box Set Review
by Andreas Millinger

Here is a fan review of an 8-DVD Box Set released for the german market. Andreas Millinger was kind enough to pass this along for me to post. I apologize to Andreas for not having posted it sooner, but I recently upgraded to Windows 7 and this takes time. Look further down the page for some scans of the DVD Digipak Andeas sent along so we could get a better gander at this DVD. So, a special thanks to Andreas for this review. Enjoy!

Review by Andreas Millinger

Let's go back to 1990... or was it 1991? Anyway, it was a long time ago, when I was a teenager and just got home from hospital where my appendix had had to be removed. The first thing I did was pop the tape with that episode of the Benny Hill Show into the VCR which my parents had kindly recorded for me. That was a bad idea. After a few seconds, I was laughing so hard that I almost had to go back to hospital... ouch... thanks a lot, Benny!

It was a time - in the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's - where commercial TV stations were slowly surfacing here in middle Europe and started to get annoying for the old state-operated channels, when we had only a fracture of the channels we get today, but the quality was so much better even if things were generally done in a cheaper and simpler way. TV was exciting, and from time to time they showed a programme unlike anything we had seen before. In that time the Benny Hill Show surfaced on German-language channels, and I got my first chance to see it. I wouldn't be here if I hadn't absolutely loved it.

Now, true Benny fans and aficionados might think the way the German episodes were assembled didn't do justice to the original shows or was even disrespectful, as lots of sketches from different years were mixed together and lots of material omitted. But the market was a different one. Benny Hill was more or less completely unknown in continental Europe, and the networks wanted a cheap show with (approximately) 30-minute episodes, where more episodes could be easily assembled if it were some kind of a success.

To give you an idea of how the shows are compiled, I just took episode 1 from DVD 1 and tried to find the origins of the sketches. Here are the ones I could identify:
"Hotel Sordide" from May 1978
"Casanova" from March 1977
"Match of the Week" from March 1974
"Safari Park" from September 1975

As you can see, it's all quite topsy-turvy, plus let's not forget that sketches from the mid-seventies debuted here around 1990, so the show was quite obviously appearing pretty dated - which may have been a reason why it wasn't a huge success over here. Because lots of puns and song lyrics were virtually impossible to translate (and German viewers are used to dubbing instead of subtitles), quite a lot of material wasn't included in the German episodes and songs usually weren't translated at all, creating new problems with the average Joe watching it.

Since the show didn't get much air time after the early nineties (well, not all that much before as well), I was delighted that a box set was announced (and postponed a few times) for 2007, which (finally!!) brings us to the DVD box from Kinowelt I want to discuss here. Naturally, I had to give it to myself as a Christmas present and watched those 8 DVDs in a few days. Did it meet my expectations? Yes, because they were not very high...

Packaging

Let's start with the packaging - it's not too shabby - the 8 discs are presented nicely in a big glossy "Digipak" and while I don't like the front cover all that much, the design in general is nice with many pictures of Benny in different costumes, a short biography and a big Union Jack behind the DVDs. At least not something you have to hide from your friends. There is no booklet, though.

Andreas was kind enough to pass along these images he made of the packaging for this 8-DVD Box Set. Simply hover your mouse over each image and click for a larger view. Hit The Back button when you're done to come back here. Thanks Andreas!

What you get content-wise are 38 episodes (each approx. Half an hour long) and the documentary "Benny Hill - The World's Favourite Clown" (subtitled) which had been previously unreleased here. That's it, there were no further extras. No interviews, no other documentaries, no photo gallery, no music videos, nothing. After all these decades, there had to be a ton of possible bonus stuff if somebody had actually searched for it, right?

The audio is in German only, they probably only had the audio track from the old German broadcastings and didn't want to puzzle the English audio together from all the different shows. That's slightly irritating, but also understandable, since as far as I know that DVD box was no big success - after all the target audience was rather small. I could probably find some flaws with the picture and sound quality if I had some decent home cinema equipment, but all I can say is the quality is okay, surely a lot better than video recordings from the time. Now, customers wrote on www.amazon.de that some episodes were missing although the text on the DVD box clearly states that it includes "all episodes ever shown on German television!" - I can't confirm nor deny that, I have a few episodes from back then on video, but unfortunately it's the Video 2000 format, which was of course far superior to that crappy VHS stuff everyone else bought, but I still don't have a machine that plays those tapes because they ended manufacturing them over 20 years ago. Oh well.

I think I have to address the overall quality of the German translation, too. As I mentioned before, a lot of things are just impossible to translate. So the translators had to come up with new jokes, and, well, some are good, some are bad. Sometimes you hear some dialogue in German and just know without ever having seen the original that the text must have been completely different. All in all, the translation is far from perfect, but still okay and ocasionally really good. The songs are neither dubbed nor subtitled and therefore the humour was lost upon most viewers - even when your English is decent, pun-filled songs in British English are hard to fully understand. The voices are notably different from the original, but I really like them. I believe Benny and John Candy had the same German dubbing actor. I find Jackie's "new" voice hysterical, generally speaking all the voices seem to fit the personalities really well, even if a viewer who is used to the comedians' real vioces would surely be puzzled and amused about the choice of voice actors.

There's one more thing I should mention: as we all know, Mr. Hill re-used quite a lot of gags over the years - while that's not a problem when there are a few shows a year, this becomes quite noticeable when you have material collected from many years on one DVD. But honestly, even when gags were "recycled", I still found them just as funny!

Summary

So, to reach a conclusion... if you're a German native speaker and know the Benny Hill Show from back then, and you really liked it, then you probably ask yourself why the hell I write this in English... oh yes, and you don't make a big mistake when you pick up that box set. If you speak German and like some of Mr Hill's work, this box might be for you, but don't get your expectations too high. If, however, you don't speak German, it's not much more than a curiosity you may pick up for a good price (some of the "silent" skits are still silent, after all), provided you can watch Region 2 DVDs, of course. If you're the die-hard collector, you probably don't care for what I write here anyway, go ahead and order it!

Webmaster: threerandot
Contributing Editor:
William Brown
Associate Editor:
David Hawkins